The outsourcing of huge sectors of the Australian workforce has becoming an increasingly difficult problem to tackle as companies look to cut costs and maximize profits. Read more

Some 750,000 jobs in IT, finance, and other business services will be offshored from the U.S. and Western Europe to developing nations between now and 2016, according to a study released this week by the Hackett Group. Among the positions going overseas will be 270,000 IT jobs. Read more

In an essay, entitled “Making It in America,” in the latest issue of The Atlantic, the author Adam Davidson relates a joke from cotton country about just how much a modern textile mill has been automated: The average mill has only two employees today, “a man and a dog. The man is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to keep the man away from the machines.”

Davidson’s article is one of a number of pieces that have recently appeared making the point that the reason we have such stubbornly high unemployment and sagging middle-class incomes today is largely because of the big drop in demand because of the Great Recession, but it is also because of the quantum advances in both globalization and the information technology revolution, which are more rapidly than ever replacing labor with machines or foreign workers. Read More

CHARLES DUHIGG and KEITH BRADSHER NYT

When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president. But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas. Read More

The goal of these guest worker programs is to bring in foreign workers who complement the American workforce. Indeed, many highly skilled and highly paid workers are brought in by employers to do so. However, loopholes have made it too easy to bring in cheaper foreign workers, with ordinary skills, who directly substitute for rather than complement American workers. The use of the programs for cheaper labor is substantial and growing, and they are clearly displacing and denying opportunities to American workers.Read More

Well, the rest of the world has caught up to America. Understand that there is a world price for everything including labor and American workers want about $25 an hour that hundreds of millions in the world would be willing to do for $2. Businesses are not leaving America because of greed but because it is the only way they can survive. They cannot compete against $2 an hour labor. To regain the middle class, we have to become a knowledge based society. That will require a lot of time, years in fact, and education. We have to be able to provide to the rest of the world products and services they can’t get from other countries. And workers have to accept the fact that selling their labor and working hard just ain’t gonna cut it. They need to have unique skills and knowledge. Read More

The economy must grow at 2.5 to 3 percent—long term—to keep unemployment steady, because new technology and better methods permit labor productivity to increase 2 percent each year and natural population increases pushes up the labor force about 1 percent.

Source:FoxNews.com

Outsourcing

Foxconn is one of the primary subcontractors for Apple. It is the world’s largest maker of electronic products, including the iPhone, iPod and iPad. Foxconn employs from 300,000 to 450,000 workers in Shenzhen, China at the Longhua Science & Technology Park, a cramped, walled campus sometimes known as “Foxconn City” or “iPod City.” Covering more than one square mile, its enclave includes 15 factories, worker dormitories and a shopping area complete with a grocery store, bank, restaurants, bookstore, and a hospital. Workers never have to leave the campus, and rarely do. Read More

Information technology is reducing the need for certain jobs faster than new ones are being created.

The United States faces a protracted unemployment crisis: 6.3 million fewer Americans have jobs than was true at the end of 2007. And yet the country’s economic output is higher today than it was before the financial crisis. Where did the jobs go? Several factors, including outsourcing, help explain the state of the labor market, but fast-advancing, IT-driven automation might be playing the biggest role.  Read More