Research finds the domestic outsourcing of jobs leads to declining U.S. job quality and lower wages — Kate Bahn

The domestic outsourcing of jobs in the United States is fast becoming a dominant explanation for the destruction of the social contract of work, a historic concept in which norms of fairness and solidarity between firms and their employees played a major role in wage setting and workplace standards for some U.S. workers—though of course many others such as African American workers were consistently more marginalized. The destruction of this social contract, detailed in Brandeis University economist David Weil’s book The Fissured Workplace, describes a labor market structure in which workers are employed at firms with core competencies and then those firms subcontract out all other duties or specific functions in the production process.

Within daily work activities, U.S. workers may directly interact with other workers across a variety of firms with different levels of job quality. One prototypical example is janitorial work, where most office cleaners today are employed by a janitorial services company that is contracted by the building owner where individual office places lease their space. These kinds of fissured employment patterns have led economists and other social science researchers to examine a variety of empirical research questions about what has caused domestic outsourcing, what the impacts have been and for whom, and what the future of the firm will be.

This body of research lays the groundwork for U.S. policymakers to understand the impact of this domestic outsourcing phenomenon and what sort of policy solutions can ensure that economic prosperity is broadly shared as workers and firms alike consider “the future of work” in the United States....

The bottom line is that "the American dream" was based on a significant portion of the population being employed in relatively secure and well-compensated in manufacturing. Foreign outsourcing changed that and the US economy has been in flux ever since. The trend is toward concentration at and near the top, that is, the upper quintile, while the rest of the population available for work either stagnates or sinks. Another trend is domestic outsourcing, which has disrupted the previous concept of a secure job, essentially for life.

These are obvious trends in a liberal economic model ("capitalism") since they reduce costs and increase efficiency. However, they are also having a profound social impact, and therefore a political one as well, as life for many becomes more precarious. 

WCEG — The Equitablog
Research finds the domestic outsourcing of jobs leads to declining U.S. job quality and lower wages
Kate Bahn

How NeoCon Billionaire Paul Singer Is Driving the Outsourcing of US Tech Jobs to Israel — Whitney Webb

These are not the low-skilled jobs outsourced to China and soon to be transferred to Vietnam, Indonesia, etc., as wages rise in China and China becomes a pariah in the US owing to the media campaign. Add to that DJT's twist on immigration to expand HB-1 visas by offering a path to citizenship, basically poaching on other countries.

Mint Press News
How NeoCon Billionaire Paul Singer Is Driving the Outsourcing of US Tech Jobs to Israel

Whitney Webb

Yahoo Finance outsourcing financial reporting to India

I was reading a story on Yahoo Finance and at the end of the story I saw this:

(Reporting by Esha Dey in Bangalore, additional reporting by Natalie Grover; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty)

So that means Yahoo Finance is outsourcing financial reporting to India now. Great job Marissa Mayer. What corporate leadership and creative thinking! Way to create "value!"

Maybe instead you should look for people who actually know what the f**k they're talking about and replace those talking head clowns that host Breakout and The Daily Ticker.

Robert Oak — Obamacare Outsourced

And progressives thought Obama was one of them? This is a real scandal they way Oak lays it out, but the Democrats don't have to be concerned about the GOP calling them out, since it's GOP SOP.

This is actually a weakness in the MMT argument that imports are a benefit in real terms. As Marshall Auerback observed, that only holds at full employment. The MMT answer is to run a large enough deficit to produce full employment. But unless the government were to become a major employer, the deficit would not peak until the rest of the world was hired up. I just don't see this working as planned.

The Economic Populist
Obamacare Outsourced
Robert Oak

Politics as an Automatic Stabilizer App?

Commentary by Roger Erickson

News Reporter = Worst Job in 2013? 

Time to Outsource, Then Automate? :(

So, the Koch bros are buying newspapers?

Their assumed arbitrage op is that labor will get tight enough that starving journalists will soon PAY to have their articles published.
(News as an automated lottery? with "winners" rewarded by elites?)
(Does that sound vaguely familiar?)

Once labor rates follow interest rates into negative territory ... cannibalism could soon follow? That can be automated too. By drones, no less.

Note Michael Frayn’s 1965 comic The Tin Men:

It is set at an Institute for the Automation of Human Life and the characters are constantly conjecturing the possibilities

“When you come to think about it, you could programme a computer to appreciate the cricket results for you — or even to appreciate the actual automated game as the playing computer played it. … . So far as I can see, appreciation is a finite activity, which means it’s a programmable one. The spectator is eminently replaceable.”

“But ... the spectator enjoys watching.”
“He may I suppose, but that’s rather beside the point. The hydraulic press operator who is replaced by a computer when his factory is automated may enjoy operating a hydraulic press. But that doesn’t save him from being replaced. A human being, my dear Rowe, is far too complex and expensive an instrument to be wasted on simple finite tasks like operating presses, filling up football pools and watching cricket. The whole world of sport, I believe, will gradually become an entirely enclosed one, unvisited by any human being except the maintenance engineers. Computers will play. Computers will watch. Computers will comment. Computers will store results, and pit their memories against other computers in sports quiz programmes on the television organised by computers and watched by computers.”


Why not turn Politics into an Automatic Stabilizer App? Now THAT would make sense. The lobbyists too.  Then we complex & expensive humans could get back to exploring our options and SELECTING from them 100% of the time.

Robert Oak — China's Indigenous Innovation Policy Bigger Threat to the U.S.. Economy Than Offshore Outsourcing

Is the US getting the short end of the stick in the Chimerica relationship through shortsightedness? Robert Oak says yes, and finds it alarming.

Read it at The Economic Populist

China's Indigenous Innovation Policy Bigger Threat to the U.S.. Economy Than Offshore Outsourcing
by Robert Oak

Double-speak in name change

In business news, the private security company once known as Blackwater has changed its name for the second time in less than three years. The company is officially changing its name from Xe to Academi.

At Democracy Now
Blackwater Private Security Company Changes Name For Second Time in Under Three Years

Entities like this hire out and train guns will always be "blackwater," with all that implies. The history exposes the dark underside of the security industry. You can call them what you want, but you can't glorify what amounts to mercenaries.

When so-called democracies hire mercenaries to replace a civilian-based military, they can no longer call themselves liberal democracies.

There are somethings that democracies should not privatize or outsource. Military is one of them, and domestic security is another.

"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance."
(Often attributed to Jefferson, no original source for this has been found in his writings) It's a good quote anyway.