Labor & Employment Law

Lee on C-SPAN: Stop Outsourcing and Rebuild Middle Class

By James Parks

If the U.S. economy is going to recover from the recession, we must stop exporting U.S. jobs and figure out a way to produce more products here to compete successfully in the global economy. In the past decade alone, more than 5 million manufacturing jobs and 850,000 information sector jobs have disappeared?many of which have been shipped overseas.

Appearing this morning on C-SPAN?s ?Washington Journal,? AFL-CIO Deputy Chief of Staff Thea Lee said we need a combination of new policies to create jobs and prevent the flood of jobs moving offshore. We need to change our trade policy, eliminate tax policies that give breaks to companies that move jobs offshore, act to force China?s government and others to halt manipulating their currencies and invest in our own infrastructure and education among other things, she said.

Citing statistics from the AFL-CIO-Working America white paper, ?Outsourced?Sending Jobs Overseas: The Cost to America?s Economy and Working Families, Lee pointed out that in the past decade, we have dramatically increased the import of products in high-tech industries where we have a technological edge and we should have a competitive advantage. That creates even larger problems because when we outsource the production of a computer, we also outsource the production of its various parts and the technology that goes into it, resulting in the loss of more jobs and our technological edge. Read the entire report here. Find out what companies in your area are sending jobs offshore with the AFL-CIO?s Job Tracker here.

On trade, Lee said she hopes when President Obama returns from his Asian trip, he will ?lay down a new marker that he?s going to do trade policy differently.?

We can?t stop trade…but we could trade on a different basis, one more attuned to the impact on American jobs. We want to make sure President Obama is not just putting in place more of the same of the old trade policies but has really turned the corner for the 21st century and is putting American jobs first.

 Responding to a question from a viewer on how we keep unions relevant in this century, Lee said:

 We have to figure out how to reach out to [new groups of] people, whether they?re young people or women or immigrants. We have to figure out new ways of organizing because as the workplace changes we don?t have the old-fashioned [situation] where people line up at the factory gate and you hand them a union leaflet. People are spread out all over and some folks are working for themselves.     

She praised the AFL-CIO community affiliate Working America for reaching out to people in their homes to engage them in discussions about economic issues.

The bottom line, Lee said, is that we must rebuild the middle class in this country. Economic policies in several past administrations have made the richest Americans richer and left the rest of us behind, she said.

What?s going to make the economic recovery strong is that ordinary working people have good jobs. One of the tensions we have is to figure out how to make every job a good job. Every job should have union protection. If a worker wants a union, he or she ought to be able to join a union without any interference from the government or management.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on November 10, 2010 (boomark / email).