The outsourcing of jobs is not about efficiency or free trade.  It's about leverage, power, secrecy and money.

NAFTA is also designed for free flow of capital.

So, NAFTA helps Capital move wherever and whenever big business wants, while labor is trapped by national borders.

NAFTA supposedly lowered tariffs on goods, but then you notice certain tariffs are retained to protect powerful interests, and certain industries.

And also lawyers . ..

http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=10 98907069708

chapter 11 of nafta ought to be enough to convince anyone that the only thing nafta had to do with free trade was that the words were in the name.

http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/tradingd emocracy.html

matt is spot on.

if we live in the real world emperical data and experience ought to trump any ideology or theory.

If NAFTA genuinely were about free trade, it would have created a free flow of goods and a free flow of labor.  It did neither.

A free flow of labor is not implicit in free trade. Only a free flow of goods in both directions is. And, indeed, under the classical argument for free trade ... that is, the Ricardian Comparative Advantage argument{Note} ... balanced trade is presumed, so there is not even any requirement for convertability of currency in support of an actual, bona fide free trade agreement.

{Note: Rather than the neoclassical Heckscher-Ohlin model which suffers the fatal flaws of any general equilibrium model with respect to stability and uniqueness of general equilibria.}

Its happening already. Our company is already doing much of its accounting work in India. Despite uneven results, the program is expanding because its so cheap.

Blinder was taken aback when, sitting in at the business summit in Davos, Switzerland, he heard U.S. executives talk enthusiastically about all the professional jobs they could outsource to lower-wage countries.

Where the hell has this guy been? Each of my former employers would happily crawl naked through burning glass if they could outsource the entire labor force to Mexico, Thailand, China, Else Where. I used to wonder why the hell some of these guys were still even in business in America when they so clearly saw the workforce as a necessary, inconvenient and expensive evil. One of my former colleagues and I used to joke that our employer would've gladly charged us for working at the company if they could've figured out how to snooker the payroll folks into doing it for them.

Traditional American business practice is like an irradiated bacterium that doesn't realize its dead yet - the end is nigh, it's simply a matter of time.

I don't know whether to mock Blinder or just feel sorry for him for missing the bloody obvious.

-GFO

When you outsource an american job, you commit economic treason.  These jobs are at the center of American life.

We need to begin to find a way to document and make these people pay for the economic treason that they are engaged in.

It's great to see people talking about trade in the blogs and great comment above catching the investor rights portion of NAFTA.

One thing that's important to remember is that corporate managed trade agreements like NAFTA are about much more than cheap labor and outsourced jobs. Here are just two:

Investor Rights:
 On of the major problems with these agreements are provisions that seek to give corporations the ability to ignore and even attack (through trade tribunals) the progressive regulatory system that we have all fought to create and preserve.
An example:
Environmental regulations are threatened by investor rights provisions (Read more about NAFTA Chapter 11 at http://www.citizen.org/trade/nafta/CH__1 1/) that can be used to challenge already enacted or future environmental laws.

IP and Trade:
A number of these trade agreements also include protections for big pharma that make medicine unafforable for those who need it most.
An example:
The Korea FTA goes as far to include language that Democrats explicitely voted down for their own nation - disallowing the Korean government to negotiate drug prices directly with pharma companies. Read more about this at http://citizen.typepad.com/eyesontrade/2 007/04/because_drug_pr.html.

Anyone who perpetuates the lose of American jobs being for unfettered "free-trade" is guilty of treason.  And the ones who smile about it and declare that it's somehow good for the economy (what they really mean is that it's good for THEM personally) rae traitorous bastards who hate America.

It's just evil greed.  Nothing makes me wish America had lost the cold war more than seeing these assholes talk like that.  Sometimes I wish this country would have gone socialist when we had the chance.  

McCain told me to my face in 1994 during the NAFTA debate that he thought it was "good" that low-skilled jobs are shed.  And what's really macabre is that they are now using the same old free-trade arguments even though now it is HIGH PAYING jobs being shed.

That's roughly what I've thought about it as well, and so someone please set me straight on where this leads.  It seems to me that the next step in the thought process is that high-skill/high-education jobs like the above are easier to get rid of because they don't generally have the strong unions of more low-income, blue collar jobs.  In which case, is this country, for various reasons, overly tied to its lower-income, lower-innovation, lower-tech jobs?

I'm not saying I agree necessarily with what I just said, but it's where my thinking led me. Feel free to educate me.

What's really interesting to me about this is how these "Trade agreements" which are negotiated via non-democratic and opaque organizations with no public accountability end up trumping local and even national government.

It's a disturbing trend.

As for the outsourcing of my job, while I think it's correct to spotlight the intentions here, I also know from experience that people who are big proponents of outsourcing often vastly over-state the potential value and scale.

It's difficult to break a big chunk of your business off and send it 1/2 way around the world. People have been working this w/manufacturing for a long time and it's still glitchy. Trying to do the same with information is even harder: information-driven work operates on a much tighter cycle than manufacturing, and cultural/language/timezone barriers are harder to overcome.

However, the next century will be largely about tackling these problems, and headway will be made. That could still be good for us, but not if these jokers are running the show.

While 40,000,000 jobs is perhaps an over-statement, the point really is to get some critical sub-set of those out and use that to keep wages down, to turn service economy will become the servitude economy.

I did watch the debate between Perot, and Gore.  Honestly, I worked for the Perot campaign in 92.

Canadien economic philosopher John Ralston Saul studied history, and found that global trade between nations almost always eventually results in one nation dominating the other, which often leads to hostilities.

For instance the scenario works like this
-my company sends my job overseas to India
-for a while, everyone is happy...my company, india..(except me)
-after some time, perhaps 10, 20 or 50 years, then the folks in India feel that this job is "theirs"...heck my company does not even know how to do this job.  The folks in India with my job start to assert this reality, and my company respods...instant hostilities.

This scenario has been repeated over and over throughout history with sugar, slavery, and now oil.

If you run the numbers, globalization fosters a kind of interdependancy that is ripe for manipulating your trade partners, and a struggle for power ensues.

Interesting reading..and he probably describes it much better than I do.

If your work involves looking at a computer all day, your job can and will eventually be outsourced.

It is about what kind of world we will live in.  Which side you are on.

Free trade is a rigged game in favor of big capital that harms workers.  That is it.  Yes, there are a lot of complexities, but at bottom, that is it.

George Stiglitz wrote a great book called Globalization and its Discontents.  If you have not yet read it, I think you would like it.  

Easy solution: increase DISC taxes on revenue generated from locations outside the US. Increase taxes on revenue generated domestically by corporations (like Halliburton) who expatriate.

Ooops, sorry. Forgot about the WTO.

Nevermind.

I remember hearing a lot about this when I was majoring in computer science.  

The problem is that the opposite has generally occurred and thus the general view is that globalization suppresses unskilled wages and increases skilled wages.

There is also the wrinkle of capital, but thats the general idea.