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Technology Stocks : Cisco Systems, Inc. (CSCO) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neil H who wrote (65385)	4/3/2004 12:13:51 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Respond to of 77400

I am waiting for the politician who will stand up and finger the real culprit for the loss of manufacturing jobs: worker productivity. He is making the same mistake that theoretical economists make wrt productivity. There are a number of areas but for technology specifically, the workforce (or former workforce) knows that these "productivity claims" about unemployment are false. One huge problem with the productivity numbers is with all the labor intensive jobs offshored, and management reaping the benefits here, it looks like we have a hyperproductive workforce, when in fact the management roles are more administrative and not indicative of higher productivity. Sure we have less workers in the US for the same GDP, but so what? This is only appealing to those that really believe trickle down economics works. Anyway I found an article from Roach who has written pretty extensively about this productivity miracle, fwiw. That underscores another aspect of America's recent productivity miracle: the growing use of overseas labor. While this may increase the profits of American business — help-desk employees or customer-service representatives in India earn a fraction of what their counterparts in the United States do — the American worker does not directly share the benefits. The result is a clash between the owners of capital and the providers of labor — a clash that has resulted in heightened trade frictions and growing protectionist risks. There's nothing sustainable about this plan for productivity enhancement, either. groups.msn.com The bottom line in this discussion about trade is that the corporate elite and CEOs are trying to spin it as a sortof childish me-ism on the part of the people against these policies, assuming they have lost their jobs or something. And on the other side the people who are questioning this kind of trade are watching the middle class move offshore, leaving the US workers with too little and no vehicle for future innovation.