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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MSI who wrote (505719)	12/8/2003 1:31:35 AM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769669

re: Unit labor costs: yeah a derivative of that statistic is on the BLS website and they discussed it on capitol report one night. I believe it is the employment cost index? (can't recall exactly and I'm not going to bother to look it up now)- anyway at that time capitol report said it was tracking late 80s levels. No surprise to me, half of my acquaintances are unemployed and considering work in some low pay service job. This means these profits are coming from people getting hammered, more layoffs, less pay, more hours. Employment isn't really up since new jobs aren't being created fast enough to absorb new jobseekers. This is true, for all "desk jobs". US taxpayer subsidized IP is walking out the door, and US labor rates are competing with developing countries. This is NOT the way free trade is supposed to work, in fact the only people who think the economy is working are people in concentrated industries like construction who are one step removed from global trade, and a few of Bush's well placed friends (but they are whining about why the stock market is undervalued). The economy can't absorb this, and we are going to go back down economically in a few months unless something really changes imho. With things so bad now, what is employment going to be like when we ONLY have 4% GDP? Either way Bush is out, the white house is counting on jobs returning and anyone in the trenches can see that won't happen. U.S. Programmers at Overseas Salaries Rather than send IT work to India, a Boston startup sought locals at the same money. The result: plenty of applicants -- and a lot of questions The main answer that the so-called experts put forth, without a lot of conviction, is that we'll create new "high-value" jobs to replace those leaving the U.S. What are those jobs? No one seems to know. And then Jon had a brainstorm. What if he offered Americans the jobs at the same rate he would be paying for Indian programmers? It seemed like a long shot. But it also seemed worth the gamble. So Jon placed some ads in The Boston Globe, offering full-time contract programming work for $45,000 annually. (He had decided that it was worth adding a $5,000 premium to what he'd pay the Indian workers in exchange for having the programmers on site.) The result? "We got flooded" with resumes, about 90 in total, many from highly qualified programmers having trouble finding work in the down economy, Jon says. His decision: "For $5,000 it was no contest." Jon went American. And the outcome? "I think I got the best of both worlds. I got local people who came in for 10% more (than Indians). And I found really good ones." businessweek.com