Letters to the Editor
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Globalization has only 1 purpose
and it is not to bring up the standards of workers in other countries, but to increase the profits of the corporations that used to employ us.
How do you like all the dead pets from poisoned Chinese imports? Didn't this country once have laws protecting our food and drink? Yes, but globalization did an end-run around our laws and now the laws, and the concept of sovereignty, have been neutralized by the corporations that have forced globalization down our throats. Look to be poisoned by more garbage from countries that don't have the controls we once had. You ain't seen nothing yet.
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What is 'sending labor overseas'
You can't track job cuts here correlated with creating a foreign subsidiary the goes out and employs their own people and then make an assumption about the direction of capital. All your tax would is cause me to rollup the revenues a different way. I would put overseas incorporation at or near the top of the list as well. And even if it weren't the same corporate entity all you'd manage to do to is create a retaliatory duty or cost addr. I wonder how many people would pay twice as much for an orange or a fish?
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Signs of an Empire's End
As Manufacturing Engineer here in the Bankrupt Capital of the World formnally known as the United States I've observed the same decline of my career as you Dave. One aspect that you failed to acknowledge is that along with the incrreasng difference between the poor and (the disapearing middle class that Dobbs laments) rich is the cultural and societal changes Globalization is bringing to the US. I have no answers, except to note that as India's workforce grows we can look forward to US cities to start looking more like Bombay (think New Orleans). So let's all help the rich get richer while the American ex-workers walks on dirt floors and pisses out back. Read the news, forecloses up, unemployment starting to rize, wars for corporate profits, advertizing budjets rise chasing fewer consumer dollars. Empires end, others begin, where are we?
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Outsourcing and globalization aren't the major problems
As another veteran of founding and winding down a technology company, I have come to believe that the problem with our economy today is the total elimination of competition. The business world is so enamored of the "category killer" business that every conceivable niche of every market capable of producing profits has been consolidated down from a wide number of players to just a handful. Notice how Silverman's troubles began when the number of customers was reduced by the consolidation among textbook publishers. Of course, the poster examples of this are the loss of mom and pop stores to WalMart and local hardware stores to Lowe's and Home Depot.
The driving force behind this, in my mind, is the mindset in the major financial markets that capital should be concentrated in the fewest possible hands. I realize that this can be seen as a simple playing out of capitalism, but somehow the American ideal of fair play has completely disappeared from the scene. I worry that the next generation of potential entrepreneurs will decode this quickly and realize the futility of expecting to break into the ranks of Michael Dell or Larry Page and Sergey Brin, because the odds are astronomically stacked against them, regardless of the merit of their technology or business plan.
I don't have any real proposals on how the venture capital and investment banking industries can recover their souls. Unfortunately, I fear it will take another Depression before any real introspection occurs. I still believe in capitalism, it's just that the current version in the US is totally corrupt and soulless.
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I work in an industry with tons of competition
Cost driven competition and all the players, where it is legal to do so, are in the same boat as it were, offshoring-wise. The fact is that job for job if my skills are the same or more or less the same as Rajiv in Bangalore then I really don't offer up any advantage. If you had two people of equal skill and ability, one in NYC and one in Sioux Falls which would you go with? Ergo a job in Winston Salem or a job in Malaysia, skill for skill job for job is a no brainer.
Detroit faced the same problem. Know what they did? Automated. The jobs went to robots. So today labor is only 8-9% of the total cost of production. Otherwise you'd be forced to buy either a $300,000 handmade car or a $4,500 Chinese death box.
The reason that jobs go away is because they are the wrong jobs to have here. You need to find a different job not another job. That's about skills and education. If you are a business owner then you really need to figure out how being here is a worthwhile proposition.
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Uh-uh
Your company wasn't pushed out by companies in India. It was pushed out by consolidation in your industry...at home.
The U.S. has anti-trust laws, but they are not enforced. When one or two or three companies own enough of an industry that all by themselves they can change the rules of the game -- and especially when those changes put people in the unemployment line -- they should be broken up. Yes, there are efficiencies of scale, but they're not worth the price. If there had still been a lot of publishers, some would have gone to India and had less expensive books to sell; others would have stayed in the States and had higher-quality books to sell.
Maybe I'm wrong, but this is what I believe.
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Re: RealName
If I program a robot to post cryptolibertarian drivel to Salon's letters section in your place, will you go away?
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Every industry I've worked in
...has suffered by the acquisition fever, companies buying each other up, carrying too much debt, decreasing their inventories, so they didn't have what the customers wanted on-hand, etc., etc., a formula for eventual failure. Too much focus on short-term gains without any appreciation for a particular industry's natural business cycle. Businesses used to be run by people who had some affinity for, or love of, a particular industry. Now they're mostly run by people with an eye for the bottom line. Another formula for failure.
When I worked in a family business, I learned from the owner that no one wins in a price war, because you just can't run a profitable business that way. Cutting prices does not bring you customers who will keep coming back. Eventually someone goes out of business. I think that's what we're seeing on a global scale now... a great big price war. And we're all paying the price.
[A week or two ago, in one of Glenn Greenwald's comment threads, there was a discussion of the state of the textbook publishing industry. Sounds like another potential scandal to me. When so few people are deciding (and using their own biases/political/religious leanings) what "our children is learning," it can't be a good thing. Perhaps David Silverman might take up that cause.]
I loved this story, though, in spite of its bad news because I have a good friend who used to be a typesetter. She has some of the best and most interesting work-related stories anyone could ever hope to hear. And now typesetting is a dying art...
As I commented in another thread, I hope Joan will ask David Silverman to contribute additional stories.