Going back to the days of NAFTA in the mid nineties, American businesses have increasingly outsourced jobs to foreign countries under the pretext that this would very shortly lead to a growth in high paying jobs for Americans more than replacing those that were lost due to the outsourcing.
Well we now have 15 years of history and guess what?
Real wages continue to stagnate.
And the number of jobs is barely 3% higher than it was a decade ago while the size of the work force has increased nearly 11% over the same span
And coming out of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, these same companies that promised millions of high paying jobs if we would only let them exploit the labor in third world countries the same way they exploited our great grand fathers and mothers when they were children, have nearly two trillion dollars of unused cash sitting idle on their balance sheets and they won’t make a move to hire anyone who isn’t an illegal immigrant.
It is time to hold these businesses accountable and here is how to do that.
We simply need our elected Liberal Kongress ( K as in K Street ) to pass a law mandating two things -
- A 32 hour work week ( with no reduction in pay ) for all companies that have outsourced jobs in the past 15 years.
- That all future outsourcing by any business will result in a further reduction in the work week for that business unless it can demonstrate that the outsourcing actually did produce new high paying jobs in America.
This simple act will do several things
- Instantly create 25 million new jobs in America to produce the goods and services that used to be produced by the existing workforce in 40 hours
- Immediately suck one trillion dollars of unused cash off corporate balance sheets and into the economy ( to pay the new workers ).
- The 25 million new workers coupled with the one trillion in fresh capital will of course then cause a spike in demand for additional products and services that will require new hiring and new cash infusions and begin what we call a virtuous cycle of increasing employment and spending and GDP expansion
One can argue that this will make some American industries uncompetitive with other countries also engaging in outsourcing and that may be true.
But the fact is that if they were uncompetitive without the need to outsource jobs, they should have been merged into oblivion or bankruptcy a long time ago anyway.
We call that the Free Market remember, and they all swear allegiance to it – except when it hits them instead of the workers.
This is the second consecutive jobless recovery since NAFTA was signed and outsourcing jobs really took off and it should be clear there will be more to follow if we don’t take steps to reverse the actions that have caused them both.
Tying the length of the work week to the number of jobs outsourced but not replaced will accomplish just that.
And it will sweep the Democrats into a 50 year electoral majority come November and we can then start doing some of the other things that need doing in this country like improving education, and really fixing Health Care ( i.e as in Single Payer )