Product Description

Carrier, maker of air-conditioning and heating units, closes its New York plants and most of its 1,200 jobs go to Singapore and Malaysia. Maytag shuts its factory in Illinois and moves 1,600 jobs to Reynosa, Mexico. IBM announces growth and new jobs and then outsources 90 percent of them, 15,000 in all...while competitor Microsoft contributes USD2 billion to India's economy with jobs. With the pay of corporate CEOs at historical highs and American job creation at the lowest level since the Depression, corporations are laying off blue-collar factory workers and white-collar professionals alike purely to cut costs. Thousands of quality jobs are lost every month, jobs that will be performed by people in China, India, Eastern Europe and elsewhere at a fraction of what American workers earn. For covering this devastating, unprecedented trend, Lou Dobbs has come under attack by both Democrats and Republicans. He has refused to be intimidated, and now he tells the full story, naming names and providing shocking statistics.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #499395 in Books
• Published on: 2004-08-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 208 pages

From Booklist
"How can our politicians call trade 'free' when year after year we sustain runaway trade deficits and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs?" Is that pro-worker, left-wing moviemaker Michael Moore speaking? Hardly. Try Lou Dobbs, host of the Lou Dobbs Tonight show on CNN and self-proclaimed "lifelong Republican" on the soapbox against the whole notion of free trade. The issue of American corporations moving overseas in pursuit of cheap labor has become a rallying cry for the otherwise conservative business journalist, and through his national TV show, he has become a lightning rod of controversy for speaking out against it, having been called everything from a protectionist to a communist. True, the book's publication coincides with a hot presidential race, yet Dobbs doesn't see either side as having the answer (Clinton, after all, signed NAFTA into law). Instead, after deftly laying out the problems, Dobbs thankfully offers sound ideas for reversing the course that he thinks will lead to losing another 14 million jobs to outsourcing. A tightly written account of an important economic issue. Mary Frances Wilkens
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
Lou Dobbs is the anchor and managing editor of CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, a columnist for Money magazine, a contributing editor to US News and World Report and a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist. The winner of nearly every major award for television journalism, Dobbs received a Peabody for his coverage of the 1987 stock market crash.

Customer Reviews

It Makes You Think
Lou Dobbs goes on the attack against corporate America. In this book, he outlines the dangers of the rampant outsourcing that American corporations are doing. By exporting white collar jobs to countries such as India and China, these corporations are undermining American society. In fact, it's a betrayal of the American worker. When manufacturing jobs went overseas, corporate America promised their workers that they would have more opportunities to get higher paying white collar jobs. Well, now those white collar jobs are disappearing, and there aren't any other jobs to turn to other than low paying jobs such as waiter, janitor, and sales clerk at Walmart. If the American worker is forced to compete with the low wages of third world nations, the standard of living in America will be pushed closer to a third world level due to this competition. Only the corporate elite will prosper in this new world order of wage slavery. These corpoate elites don't pay into the tax base, and neither to their foreign workers. With the declining tax base, the American government goes further into debt. All it would take is for a country like Saudi Arabia to dump it's reserves in dollars to destroy the American economy. It's a very precarious situation. This book does a good job of presenting this issue. The reason I give this book four stars instead of five is that it is a little short. It's doesn't give enough case studies to illustrate it's points, and even though it's short, it tends to repeat itself sometimes. However, I do believe this is a good introduction to the issue. Check it out.

About Time, Mr. Dobbs
About 15 years ago I wrote to several of my representatives in Washington concerning the issue of outsourcing jobs overseas. Regardless of the politician's party, the response was unanimously in favor of this trend. The mantra in the 90s was that outsourcing allowed Americans to specialize in the high tech jobs, while leaving heavy industry and low skilled work to the third world nations. Some predicted we would all eventually be doing each others' laundry and buying each others hamburgers, which is gradually becoming reality. However, until Lou Dobbs came out with this book, I counted him and his network among the elites supporting outsourcing. I am happy to now read that Dobbs is advocating some type of restraint in the outsourcing of jobs, although I am a bit suspicious that his current diatribe on the subject may be related to presidential politics

Regardless of politics, Dobbs is right. Why do we allow unfinished timber to be shipped out of Coos Bay, Oregon by the bargeload for finishing in Japan, when an entire milling industry in the U.S. was gutted to make it happen? Why do we create customer service call centers in Asia, when there are thousands of English speaking people right here that could do the job better? And, why do we continue to perpetuate the myth that outsourcing is good for trade? Ask yourself this: What can a consumer in China, who earns a few bucks a day, lives in a hut or government housing project, and lives off a handful of rice a day buy from America, a Hummer? Dobbs is right. Outsourcing is not so good for trade and the U.S. as once believed, and the hemorrhaging of our economy needs to stop.

People talk about how America needs to learn how to compete on the global market. This means reducing our standard of living to offer products at competitive prices. Labor is just a portion of this cost. Most of the manufacturing powerhouses today, China, India, and the garment producers of Sri Lanka, the Middle East, and S. America do not have the labor laws or product liability concerns we have. Should we compromise our standards in hiring, pay, and liability to compete?

Honest Polemic
A market loving Republican has written a powerful indictment of the outsourcing of jobs that is hurting the middle class. As a business journalist & news anchor he fully understands the machinations of the business world. Ex: Free trade is not always fair trade. Note our trade deficit has been growing for thirty years. Some reforms & tasks can't be left to the market alone. The Federal & state governments have a duty to the citizenry. The latter with the peoples consent can stop corporate greed & corruption by preventing the constant outsourcing of middle class jobs to third world countries. If nothing is done to stop the jobs from leaving. We could become in the not to distant future a two tier society. Pharoahs at the top & a poorly paid majority of drones at the bottom.