Americans worry about outsourcing of jobs

Top United States Democratic Presidential contenders, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, have acknowledged that outsourcing was an issue for Americans and favoured measures to retain jobs, including ending tax breaks for outsourcing.

They took questions from anxious voters who faced the party contenders for the Presidential ticket in 2008 at a debate at Howard University in Washington.

Even if this is considered as political protectionist rhetoric, it also underlines growing unease of the middle class workers who are losing their jobs to more cheaper destinations.

This is the reality of the globalised economy of free trade where nations and corporations trade without barriers and tariffs. This is a fundamental shift in thinking from the old concept of providing jobs to communities on the basis of locations.

Voters are angry today that in the past decades US manufacturing jobs left America for cheaper shores.

Blue-collar workers, long wary of outsourcing, have now been joined by programmers, engineers and office workers — a group with much greater political clout. And the media is covering the story more than ever before. The media also has begun campaigning against companies that it accuses of ‘exporting America’ by ‘either sending American jobs overseas, or choosing to employ cheap overseas labour, instead of American workers.’

During the campaign season the voices of the dissatisfied workers who lost their jobs to destinations with cheaper cost advantages are growing louder.