Check, Please!

$1.589

I was listening to NPR this evening on the way home, and heard about a new consortium of businesses called the Coalition for Economic Growth and American Jobs. [Google It!] This sounds good, right?

Well, if you’re supportive of freeing Corporate America to send jobs overseas, then this is the group for you! From what I gather, they are high powered, well funded, and totally opposed to any legislation that would hinder US companies from sending our economy’s most precious commodity — US jobs — to overseas markets.

If I understand their spin on this correctly, their belief is that keeping US jobs in the US puts US companies at a competitive disadvantage. No one can argue that sending US jobs overseas, and paying someone half or less what a US worker would get, helps the corporate bottom line and increases profits, thus helping… whom? Shareholders… probably. Corporate officers… definitely. The economy? Well, in the short term, perhaps.

While Corporate America takes their turn at the latest get-rich-quick scheme at the money trough, and sends jobs, and, in turn, knowledge, overseas, the US worker finds it tough to find a job. Today, the time on the jobless rolls is about 20 months. Admittedly, those workers are probably trying to find a job in their career field — the field they schooled for, worked hard to be best at, and in which used their skills to make their company a leader. This appears to be a bad thing for the American economy, too.

So much so, in fact, that the Coalition is asking the US government for more money to retrain workers into other jobs. Of course, if you’re sending tech jobs overseas, and blue collar help desk jobs overseas, there’s not much left here to retrain into. There’s factory work, but that’s not lucrative, and takes a while to retrain into. There’s service work — tourism, food service and the like — that doesn’t take much training by comparison, but often can’t supply a living wage.

Let’s see if I get this.

To make our economy better, we must have Corporate America sending jobs overseas, so that US companies can better compete.

By sending jobs overseas, US workers are forced into joblessness and retraining into lower-tier employment.

Therefore, US families having less money to spend on goods and services helps the US economy.

I had no idea I was hurting the US economy so much by keeping my tech job tied down to a crummy US worker. How anti-American of me!

Sheesh.

So, one day, it’ll be “Check, please!” for me, as I check out of Corporate America, and do my own bit for King and Country by self-employing into something different that I thoroughly enjoy.