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Banned
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Originally Posted by Cynthetiq
.....As far as the CEO stuff that pan mentions, if the CEO doesn't have the vision to create something so different and radical, then the worker has no work, ala Iacoca and the minivan, Eisner and the new animated princesses Little Mermaid et. al., Jobs and Mac and iPod.
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The CEO is no more than a criminal, parasite who carves out obscene profits by exploiting the labor of workers who he pays the lowest possible wage...then he pulls up stakes, leaving them to live unemployed, in a local environment polluted with industrial wastes generated by his corporation. The CEO is off to the next obscure corner of the world where he can operate unfettered by environmental or labor protection regulation....where he can pay wages of 60 cents per hour, or less....
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http://www.progress.org/corpw30.htm
The Export-Import Bank: Corporate Welfare At Its Worst
by Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)
....One of the most egregious forms of corporate welfare can be found at a little known federal agency called the Export-Import Bank, an institution that has a budget of about $1 billion a year and the capability of putting at risk some $15.5 billion in loan guarantees annually. At a time when the government is under-funding veterans' needs, education, health care, housing and many other vital services, over 80% of the subsidies distributed by the Export-Import Bank goes to Fortune 500 corporations. Among the companies that receive taxpayer support from the Ex-Im are Enron, Boeing, Halliburton, Mobil Oil, IBM, General Electric, AT&T, Motorola, Lucent Technologies, FedEx, General Motors, Raytheon, and United Technologies.
The great irony of Ex-Im policy is not just that taxpayer support goes to wealthy and profitable corporations that don't need it, but that in the name of "job creation" a substantial amount of federal funding goes to precisely those corporations that are eliminating hundreds of thousands of American jobs. In other words, American workers are providing funding to companies that are shutting down the plants in which they work, and are moving them to China, Mexico, Vietnam and wherever else they can find cheap labor. What a deal!
For example, General Electric has received over $2.5 billion in direct loans and loan guarantees from the Ex-Im Bank. And what was the result? From 1975-1995 GE reduced its workforce from 667,000 to 398,000, a decline of 269,000 jobs. In fact, while taking the Ex-Im Bank subsidies, GE was extremely public about it's "globalization" plans to lay off American workers and move jobs to Third World countries. Jack Welch, the longtime CEO of GE stated, "Ideally, you'd have every plant you own on a barge.".....
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http://www.industryweek.com/ReadArti...rticleID=12125
Outsourcing: Hedge The Low-Wage Wager
Manufacturers are still chasing cheap labor around the world. But they'd be well advised not to place all their outsourcing bet on it.
By John S. McClenahen
July 1, 2006 -- Low wage rates, particularly in such highly publicized places as China and India, continue to drive decisions about where U.S.-based manufacturers locate their production facilities.....
.....By one estimate, even after doubling between 2002 and 2005, the average manufacturing wage in China was only 60 U.S. cents an hour, compared with $2.46 an hour in Mexico. Ask companies what's the greatest pressure they're under and they "always tell us" cost reduction, states Robert Trent, an associate professor of management at Lehigh.
Yet, U.S. manufacturers -- large, small and in-between -- that let labor costs alone drive their production location decisions could be headed down the wrong road, perhaps even toward a dead end.....
....The theory of comparative advantage, one of the classic principles of economics, suggests somewhere there'll always be a low-cost location for manufacturing. If it's not China or India, it could be Thailand, Vietnam or Bangladesh. Eventually, it could be somewhere in Africa, ventures one analyst. Actually, it's already Vietnam, where Intel Corp. is building a $300 million semiconductor assembly and test facility in Ho Chi Minh City, notes Lehigh's Trent.
"Nike originally offshored manufacture of athletic shoes to Japan," says Ig Horstmann, a professor of business economics at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. "When labor costs rose there, it moved to [South] Korea and Taiwan. When labor costs rose in Korea and Taiwan, Nike moved to China," he observes. "Being flexible and prepared to move to other regions and countries is part of the strategy for successful offshoring in industries that are largely cost driven."........
......."A good number of U.S. companies who five years ago set up operations and manufacturing in Shanghai or in Shenzhen or Guangzhou are actually contemplating moving to the interior, moving to what are called second- or third-tier cities where there's less competition for these individuals [and] where there isn't the churn that occurs because so many companies are chasing a limited number of qualified individuals,"....
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http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/time/...p.welfare.html
Corporate welfare
A TIME investigation uncovers how hundreds of companies get on the dole--and why it costs every working American the equivalent of two weeks' pay every year
By Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele
TIME magazine
(TIME, Nov. 9)[1998]
.....The rationale to curtail traditional welfare programs, such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children and food stamps, and to impose a lifetime limit on the amount of aid received, was compelling: the old system didn't work. It was unfair, destroyed incentive, perpetuated dependence and distorted the economy. An 18-month TIME investigation has found that the same indictment, almost to the word, applies to corporate welfare. In some ways, it represents pork-barrel legislation of the worst order. The difference, of course, is that instead of rewarding the poor, it rewards the powerful.
And it rewards them handsomely. The Federal Government alone shells out $125 billion a year in corporate welfare, this in the midst of one of the more robust economic periods in the nation's history. Indeed, thus far in the 1990s, corporate profits have totaled $4.5 trillion--a sum equal to the cumulative paychecks of 50 million working Americans who earned less than $25,000 a year, for those eight years.
That makes the Federal Government America's biggest sugar daddy, dispensing a range of giveaways from tax abatements to price supports for sugar itself. Companies get government money to advertise their products; to help build new plants, offices and stores; and to train their workers. They sell their goods to foreign buyers that make the acquisitions with tax dollars supplied by the U.S. government; engage in foreign transactions that are insured by the government; and are excused from paying a portion of their income tax if they sell products overseas. They pocket lucrative government contracts to carry out ordinary business operations, and government grants to conduct research that will improve their profit margins. They are extended partial tax immunity if they locate in certain geographical areas, and they may write off as business expenses some of the perks enjoyed by their top executives.
The justification for much of this welfare is that the U.S. government is creating jobs. Over the past six years, Congress appropriated $5 billion to run the Export-Import Bank of the United States, which subsidizes companies that sell goods abroad. James A. Harmon, president and chairman, puts it this way: "American workers...have higher-quality, better-paying jobs, thanks to Eximbank's financing." But the numbers at the bank's five biggest beneficiaries--AT&T, Bechtel, Boeing, General Electric and McDonnell Douglas (now a part of Boeing)--tell another story. At these companies, which have accounted for about 40% of all loans, grants and long-term guarantees in this decade, overall employment has fallen 38%, as more than a third of a million jobs have disappeared......
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http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstra...DAB0894D940448
Chasing Mexico's Dream Into Squalor
New York Times, The (NY)
February 11, 2001
Author: GINGER THOMPSON
Estimated printed pages: 11
Abstract: Special report The Dividing Line: Misery on the Border describes hardship, squalor and poverty afflicting Mexicans living near United States border, Mexicans who are part of tidal wave of workers lured to border by increased trade between United States and Mexico; in last five years, more than one million Mexicans have moved to border; many come not to cross border, but to work in thousands of mostly foreign-owned manufacturing plants, known as maquiladoras; scene in shantytowns such as Ciudad Juarez described; photos; map (L)
Often looking as if he had slept in his clothes, Salvador Durón does not cut the most distinguished figure. But even with his gray stubble and grease-stained fingers, he is welcomed like a king into the shantytowns at the edge of this teeming city on the border with the United States.
Mr. Durón is the water man.
Maneuvering his 15-ton tanker up jagged mesas and down narrow ravines, he delivers water to people the city cannot afford to supply. He is an everyday hero to those who live in the cardboard shacks beneath the broiling border sun.
To the local government, he is a crucial part of the struggle to absorb the tidal wave of workers drawn here each week by increased trade between the United States and Mexico. In the last five years more than one million Mexicans have moved to the border. Many come not to cross the border but to work in thousands of mostly foreign-owned manufacturing plants, known as maquiladoras.
The factories sprouted in the mid-1960's, when Mexico and the United States began an industrialization program along their border to ease chronic unemployment in Mexico. Then with the North American Free Trade Agreement came even more jobs, more shantytowns -- and more demand for Mr. Durón.
Most days, he feels as if he cannot keep up. Parking his truck atop a ridge that a year ago was the end of his route, Mr. Durón pointed to hundreds of new shacks reaching out toward the horizon. A mother and three small children emerged from one of the hovels and waved desperately for him to bring water their way.
"The city keeps getting bigger and bigger," he said. "There's no way to get water to everyone who needs it."
Ciudad Juárez, whose people he tries to supply, is only one dot in a rash of overflowing cities and towns from Tijuana to Matamoros. Hundreds of the world's wealthiest companies -- Alcoa, Delphi Automotive Systems, General Electric and others -- have set up manufacturing plants south of the border, drawn by lucrative tax breaks and cheap labor. While factories pay nearly triple the Mexican minimum wage -- about $4 a day -- workers here make in a day less than their American counterparts earn in an hour.
The explosion has created one of the most dynamic industrial zones in the Americas -- and all of the problems associated with explosive growth. The overwhelmed Mexican border cities lack the means to provide the most basic services. One of the country's powerful drug cartels holds sway here in Juárez and drug-related crime is common. Dozens of women who have come to work in the maquiladoras have been abducted, tortured, raped and murdered, their bodies tossed like garbage in the desert.
All along the border, the land, the water and the air are thick with industrial and human waste. The National Water Commission reports that the towns and cities, strapped for funds, can adequately treat less than 35 percent of the sewage generated daily. About 12 percent of the people living on the border have no reliable access to clean water. Nearly a third live in homes that are not connected to sewage systems. Only about half the streets are paved.
Mirror images of these communities dot parts of the Texas side of the line. Last year the third world conditions became an issue in the presidential race between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Democrats accused the Texas governor of ignoring 400,000 people who live in more than 1,400 unincorporated encampments, or colonias. Mr. Bush lashed back, saying that he and his supporters had done more to bring water, sewage and sanitation services to people than any previous administration.
The new Mexican president, Vicente Fox, has pledged to pump more money into the border region and to lure more workers to Mexico's south. A range of border issues are likely to be raised on Feb. 16 when President Bush visits Mr. Fox's ranch. One of the most pressing crises, officials on both sides agree, is water.
Mexican officials worry that American proposals to send more water to California from the Colorado River could create even more severe water shortages for farms on the Mexican side of the border.
Ciudad Juárez, which grows by about 50,000 people a year, is running out of water. The underground aquifer the city relies on has declined by about five feet a year. At that rate, officials estimate, there will be no usable water left in 20 years. Levels in many of the city's wells are so low that they have collapsed.
"The reality of Juárez is the reality of the whole border," said Gustavo Elizondo, the mayor of Juárez. "You have a city that produces great wealth, but that sits in the eye of a storm. In one way it is a place of opportunity for the international community. But we have no way to provide water, sewage and sanitation for all the people who come to work.
"Every year we get poorer and poorer," he added, "even though we create more and more wealth."..
....Tens of thousands of workers who come to the border each year cling to the same hope. They spend their days working at some of the most advanced factories in the country, churning out products for dozens of Fortune 500 companies.
And at night, often with only the mildest complaints, they live in squalor. According to a national survey, more than half of the families in Tijuana live below the poverty line, and only 5 percent of all families are able to meet their basic needs without difficulty.
Some of the workers' hideous settlements are in the shadow of the modern factories. Less than a few miles away from a maquiladora park that towers over the east side of Juárez, children attend classes in old school buses that feel like ovens under the desert sun. The community was connected to the city water system last year but residents still had no plumbing. City officials say that a school will be completed sometime this year.
On the west side of Juárez, in a workers' settlement called Anapra that was established almost 20 years ago, residents still do not have running water and indoor plumbing. They wait for the water man.....
......All Those Jobs Can Be Deceptive
With 1.3 million residents, Ciudad Juárez stands like Goliath next to its American neighbor, El Paso, which has a population of a little more than 700,000. Set on the Rio Grande at the point where Mexico touches Texas and New Mexico, Juárez is a metropolis racked by drug-related crime. And the increased presence of the United States Border Patrol often makes the bridges that connect the two cities feel like hostile militarized zones.
Juárez is also an economic powerhouse, the seventh largest city in Mexico with one of the strongest local economies. There are nearly 300 maquiladoras here. Mayor Elizondo said that last year an average of two new plants opened each month, generating 40,000 new jobs. The term maquiladora comes from the Mexican colonial term maquila, which was the fee millers charged to grind corn into meal. The modern version allowed manufacturers to import raw materials duty free, process them into fully or partially assembled goods and ship them back to the United States.
As Juárez helps drive an economic boom in northern Mexico, El Paso lags as an emblem of the persistent poverty that has dogged American cities across the divide. El Paso has lost more than 10,000 manufacturing jobs since Nafta took effect on Jan. 1, 1994. Some were lost when several apparel factories closed because of declining profits, said Thomas M. Fullerton, a border scholar at the University of Texas at El Paso. Others were relocated to Mexico, he said.
Professor Fullerton said that per capita income in El Paso, about $17,000, is only 60 percent of the average income in the United States. And, he said, the 9 percent unemployment rate is about twice the average unemployment rate in Texas.
It is a similar story in most of the major twin cities that straddle the border. Six of the 15 poorest metropolitan areas in the United States -- El Paso, McAllen, Laredo, Brownsville, all in Texas, as well as Las Cruces, N.M., and Yuma, Ariz. -- are on the border with Mexico.
"They are regions that have been poor for decades," said James T. Peach, an economist at New Mexico State University. "The expectations were that Nafta would change all of that due to increased trade opportunities. That turned out to be a false hope."
Juárez's robust economic indicators are deceiving, said Mayor Elizondo, who considers his city more of a poor country cousin to El Paso.
In 1999, he said, Juárez generated $1.4 billion in direct federal taxes, but its $120 million budget last year was about a quarter of El Paso's operating budget. And Juárez's population is almost twice that of El Paso. In fact, according to city officials, Juárez's budget last year was only slightly larger than the budget for the El Paso Police Department.
Like other mayors of Mexican border cities, Juárez's mayor complained that his city did not get a fair share of the wealth it generated. The mayors are urging President Fox to pursue fiscal reforms so that they will get more money for the infrastructure demands of their growing populations. And quietly, they are discussing ways to get maquiladora operators to cover the costs of roads, water and sewage treatment.
Humberto Inzunza, former president of a maquiladora owners' association, said that last year maquiladora revenues were about $16 billion. The companies, he said, paid an estimated $400 million in corporate income taxes to Mexico, an amount equal to about 2.5 percent of their revenues. They paid another $1.3 billion in social security taxes last year, for some 1.3 million workers. The factories did not have to pay duty on the raw materials they brought into Mexico, nor on the finished products they shipped back to the United States.
That has slowly begun to change, said John Christman, an economic consultant in Mexico City at Maquiladora Industries Service of Ciemex-Wefa. Under a Nafta provision that took effect last month, maquiladora operators are required to pay taxes on machines and equipment that they import for their Mexican plants. And, he said, companies that use raw materials from non-Nafta nations would be charged duties when they export their products back to the United States.
Many of the maquiladoras make annual "contributions" to their local governments to help pay for important projects. In Juárez, maquiladora operators contribute an average of $15 per employee, almost $1.5 million a year.
"It's better than nothing, but really what they give is a minuscule part of all the money they are able to make by having their factories in Mexico," Mr. Elizondo said. "What the maquilas provide to Mexico are jobs. And that is good. It is very good. But it is not enough."
Maquiladora managers disagree. Michael Hissam, the spokesman for Delphi Automotive Systems in Mexico, said the company, the world's largest auto parts maker, operates about 18 plants in Juárez alone and dozens of other plants from Querétaro to Matamoros. Last year, he said, the company paid $37 million in income and payroll taxes. And in Juárez, Delphi gave a $300,000 contribution to the local maquiladora association for infrastructure improvements.
All of the company's plants have full medical facilities, recycling programs and rigorous safety programs, Mr. Hissam said. And many of the plants provide transportation for their workers. Four years ago Delphi began a cooperative program with the Mexican government, and a private home building company to help assembly-line workers with at least one year of seniority buy homes. The program, Mr. Hissam said, has not only helped the company lower turnover rates -- which can exceed more than 100 percent a year -- it also allowed Delphi to assist almost 3,000 of its 18,000 workers in Juárez move into decent homes.
The dwellings are typically 1,000-square-feet units with one to two bedrooms.
"We feel we have been paying our fair share for a long time," Mr. Hissam said. Referring to Juárez, he added, "This is our city, too, and we want to do for our city the best we can."
Mixed Results, Unmet Promises
Experts estimate that it will take nearly $20 billion to meet the infrastructure needs of the border population. Under intense pressure from environmental groups, the United States and Mexican governments agreed to provide a small chunk of those funds through a development bank that was established in a side accord to Nafta. The North American Development Bank was set up to lend to local border agencies for water-related projects, including treatment plants and sewer systems.
Without doubt, the bank projects have made a difference. Earlier this year, Juárez opened its first waste water treatment plant to help decontaminate 75 million gallons of sewage dumped daily into the Rio Grande. In Reynosa, the bank is helping finance a sewage system, because most of the old one had worn away, leaving muddy veins instead of pipes. And it helped pay for workshops for Mexican utility managers, whose overburdened agencies often use outdated systems and have no reliable ways to deliver services nor to collect fees from consumers.
In all, the agency, which is jointly financed by the Mexican and United States governments, has provided about $277 million for 32 projects along the border over the last four years. But it had promised much more. The goal was to make almost $3 billion in loans to pay for water projects on the border. But so far, it has operated more like a philanthropic organization than a bank. Less than 5 percent of the bank's loan money has been used.
Suzanne Gallagher, the director of project administration at the bank, said that many municipal agencies along the border are not able to obtain the kinds of loans they need to fix their enormous infrastructure problems. So most of the bank's participation in projects has come in the form of grants from the United States Environmental Protection Agency.
Leaders of environmental groups who had warily supported Nafta because they believed in the promises of the bank have been disappointed.
"The challenges are still there," said Jake Caldwell, a policy specialist at the National Wildlife Federation. "The results have been mixed.".....
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Mexico does not have to concern itself with the disruption caused by the rush of foreign factory owners to it's exploit the cheap labor of it's youthful workforce. The factories have moved on to cheaper labor markets, leaving the newly unemployed to live in the industrial waste that is left behind.
In the following article, it seems that it was not enough for the local gas utility to reap the savings of hiring only a part time, lower compensated workforce to staff it's call center..... the point of all of this, folks, is that no amount of concessions or cooperation with today's employers will be enough to encourage them to provide fair pay and benefits, obey labor and environmental laws, or to show any allegiance to employees, community or country. They will do nothing voluntarily that does not directly, quickly, and obviously benefit their own economic interests. Only populist legislative intiatives, backed by the threat of legal and economic penalties, and the threat of force to encourage compliance will slow the shift back to the pre-1930's employment environment that most Americans are swiftly and dramatically headed toward working in..... Government support for the right of labor to organize and bargain, along with legislation that protected workers and limited shift lengths and mandated overtime pay.....backed by strict enforcement, is the solution now, as it was 75 years ago. In the future, the only domestic jobs will be those that cannot be relocated or outsourced outside of the U.S., and it is in our interest to influence them to be well paying, if only because employers have no choice but to hire workers who live here, to do them. We already know from experience that no amount of wage and benefit concessions will stabalize or restore the numbers of jobs transferred out of the country. Populist activism will build on reaction to economic perceptions. High gasoline prices are a good start, and declining wages will push lobbyists aside and replace their influence with the political pressure of the sheer numbers of the newly and recently economically disaffected!
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http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2006/06/03/1668127.htm
[June 03, 2006]
Atlanta Gas Light to outsource call center to Bangalore, India
(Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Jun. 3--Next year, when Atlanta Gas Light customers call the company to argue about the "DDDC factor" or any other of a host of mystery acronyms that show up on their gas bill, the answer will come in a foreign accent.....
....The move will cost about 140 jobs in Georgia, although most of the call center jobs have been handled by temporary workers who turn over quickly in any case, spokeswoman Martha Monfried said.
She said AGL made most temporary workers permanent, in anticipation of the India move, to give them better severance benefits next year.
The outsourcing will allow AGL to pay less for full-time employees to handle calls and cut down on turnover, Monfried said.......
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Cynthetiq, in the face of a recent history of CEOs such as GE's Jack Welch, who was regarded in the business community, as "America's most admired CEO", after he took every penny of U.S. taxpayer money he could con from the U.S. government, layed off nearly half of GE's U.S. manufacturing workforce, required all GE suppliers to move their manufacturing from the U.S. to Mexico, resisted all demands to conduct operations anywhere in an environmentally responsible and accountable manner, and authored the "factory on a barge", concept of harvesting the cheapest labor in the world with the least environmental and worker welfare regulation, I see no justification for your comments.
The CEOs of the worlds largest companies have left nothing but poverty, pollution, unemployed workers and ripped-off taxpayers in every locale that they have since abandoned in pursuit of still lower labor cost and less regulated manufacturing "opportunities".
You seem to advocate kissing their asses in the hope that they will provide some of us a few fleeting "crumbs", even as they loot our national treasury, lobby against the interests of the rest of us, and pollute the few prisitine places that their factories have not already contaminated. Can't an equally persuasive case be made for reacting to them the way Italian partisans did to Mussolini and his mistress?
Last edited by host; 06-25-2006 at 01:42 AM..
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