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Feeds for The SOHO Quest [Online Reviews & Resources for Small Office + Home Office ]
1. Freelance writing jobs » The Ruggedized Laptop Computer Value Proposition
Good news for those who work and travel with computers.
Freelance writing jobs » The Ruggedized Laptop Computer Value Proposition
This includes free lancers and telecommuters.
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2. Tips for Business Success in Today's Tough Market Place
The following six tips are ways your company can not only survive, but thrive during tough economic times. Increasing your marketing budget, using the power of leverage, focusing your efforts where they will be most effective, properly training your employees, providing excellent customer service and keeping a positive attitude are all ways to keep your business profitable in difficult economic times.
The first way for increasing profits during a recession may sound backwards, but increasing the amount of money you spend on marketing your business instead of reducing it is one thing that can help your business make a profit during a recession. Countless businesses make the mistake of considering their marketing an expense instead of an investment and wind up destroying their businesses by cutting back in this area.
The second tip is to use the power of leverage by hiring a business to business prospecting company to do outbound telemarketing for your business. This helps your team use their time more wisely.
The next tip is to focus your efforts where they will be most effective, which is spending time closing sales. When the telemarketing programs do their job effectively your team can spend the majority of their time making sales which means increased profits for you.
The fourth tip involves properly training your employees to work with the highly qualified leads they receive from these lead generation companies. Proper training will help them make the most of these leads and sales will go through the roof regardless of what is happening in the economy.
The fifth tip for business success in tough economic times is to provide excellent customer service. Getting repeat business is much more cost effective and profitable than having to constantly prospect for new business so it is vital to keep your current customers happy.
The sixth and final tip for business success in tough economic times is keeping a positive attitude. People have a tendency to create the exact amount of success they believe they will and your positive attitude will be reflected in your employees' attitudes and achievements as well as your own.
Implementing the six ways listed above can help your business to increase profits during a recession. Business to business prospecting is one area to concentrate your marketing efforts in since this will make four of the six ways happen. Then all you have to worry about are the last two ways including treating your clients to outstanding service and maintaining an optimistic outlook.
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3. 4/15 Yahoo! News: Work from Home
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4. Secret Exposed: How the Google Search Engine Really Works
There are three main parts to Google: Googlebot, The Indexer, and the Query Processor. Each of these three parts is crucial to online businesses, believe it or not. Let's take a deep look at each of these Google elements to see how they work.
Googlebot is the search engine spider that comes to your website and spiders your pages. It isn't an actual spider, of course.
It actually works more like a web browser by calling a server and requesting pages, and downloading them - just as you do when you open your browser, type in an URI, and then the web page loads.
Googlebot, however, is run by big number of computers and performs this task much faster than one user could on their home or work personal computer. And Googlebot doesn't know if a website exists until a URL is put into their Add URL form, or until they find a link point to that site on another web page.
When Googlebot comes to a page, they take all the links from that page, and put them in a queue for crawling, and repeat this process over and over again. Once Googlebot has found a link, and downloaded the page, it hands that page off to the Indexer.
The Indexer stores the pages in Google's Index Data base. The Index then sorts all of the pages in its data base, alphabetically, by looking at all of the keywords on the pages. The Indexer does not pay any attention to what Google calls stop words, such as is, on, or, why, how, etc. It just pays attention to more important keyword type words.
The Indexer, after Indexing pages, waits for the Google Query Processor to ask it for a list of documents. A keyword is given to the Query Processor, which in turn asks the Indexer for a list of stored websites contain that keyword.
The Indexer then supplies the Query processor with a list of the documents, and the Query processor presents the documents to the user who requested the keyphrase.
You see, each element is important to the others. It all starts with the Googlebot finding your web page link on another site, or by you going to Google and using the Add form to submit your site.
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5. Google Voice Application will soon arrive in iPhone and iPod Touch
In addition, Google will also provide a voice mail features automatic text copying, as well as send and receive text messages, Google voice communications will also be recorded with the Gmail integration implementation. Users can make free calls to any number in the United States.
Like Gizmodo, according to reports, Google Voice will soon appear in the form of application at the iPhone and iPod Touch. The application will include a dial-up, and it can be set aside (from Google Voice your number), and the iPhone will make its own bilateral linking.
It can also dial-up and cell phone, and contact list to work, while sending SMS. Google Voice also includes standard features such as phone logs, voice mail and so on.
The latest model stars Netbook - X-Slim and really drive map Wind U123 has just emerged, both CULV notebook using Intel's ultra-low voltage processor, running Windows Vista Home Premium system, only 0.7 inches thick, 2.8 pounds, is the MSI Dell used to combat the Adamo's flagship product, version with high prices also reached a level of more than 1000 U.S. dollars, the minimum should have 700 U.S. dollars, this series of products will also have 11.6, 14 and 15.6-inch version, let us Figure it together!
GIGABYTE is expected at the end of the second quarter with the cottage Internet Protocol of the Company products will be delivered, and the deal will allow Gigabyte notebook sales doubled compared to 3 last year! Last year, the Gigabyte notebook sales are only 15 million units, while in 2009 this figure grew to around 50 million units.
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6. 4/10 Yahoo! News: Home Biz SEO
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7. 4/9 Yahoo! News: Technology and Telecommuting
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8. Adelaide Small Business Need SEO
Search engines are into providing their users with the most relevant and up-to-date information to match the search term that was used. They are sophisticated pieces of technology which allow users to quickly find relevant websites by searching for a word or a phrase. Search engine results are useless to users if the information doesn't relate to the search term, or if the results are old. People expect the most up-to-date and fresh information that is useful to them.
Updating your website everyday and adding some materials will help you get noticed by the search engines. So, if you are going to sell any type of product or service online, you have to optimize your website for the search engines, in order to boost traffic and sales. It is because over 90% of your business will likely come directly from search engine results. And for that reason, it is absolutely important to optimize your site for search engines for you to have the greatest deals in the entire world.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process by which webmasters or online business owners utilize strategic copy to augment their website's status. It is certain that the internet has grown so fast over the years and the competition for the best search engine position has created an enormous market. Therefore, better understanding the fundamental elements of Search Engine Optimization is vital for an online business' success.
Making use of effective search engine optimization techniques will improve the page rank of your website. There are many tricks that can be used to increase page rank; the most effective method is to provide high quality content consistently. This seems like a simple concept but there are many websites that fails to provide content that visitors find interesting. Sites which provide content that are interesting, well-written and regularly updated create highly engaged visitors who are more likely to return to the website in the coming days. So, if you can set your website apart from those boring, lifeless sites then do it. You'll surely have a step closer to achieving high page rank through search engine optimization.
The next significant factor for an effective search engine optimization is to include keywords and phrases within your content. To make sure that you are properly targeting your market, you have to make sure that the keywords and phrases you have on your site are the keywords and phrase that your site is actually optimized for. The more keywords you use in your content, the more likely it is that online visitors will find your site when they do some research with those words. If you are unfailing with these techniques, then your overall search engine optimization will increase, boosting your page rank.
You should also have to develop a linking strategy as a part of your search engine optimization. Not only does this provide free advertising for your site, but it makes the impression that your site is imperative because of its affiliated links. For each link that you have pointing back to you, that is another chance for your potential customer to find you. The more inbound links that you have pointing to your site, the higher you will be ranked in the search engines.
Another is to develop a content stratagem. People who get to search from the internet are looking for information. The more information you provide for them and the more helpful it is, the more likely you will make the sale. Writing articles is the most effective way to build up content for your site. When writing articles to post on your site, make sure that you develop a clear means of arranging their content. You can do this by simply adding a new page to your site. This will allow room for extra articles to be added as you write them, and will allow you to build up an archive of articles which will maintain to draw online visitors. Make sure also that you have included your archived articles in a directory that is next to the root web of your site so that the search engines will catalog your online articles.
Always keep in mind that search engine optimization methods are important in developing your site's status. With that thing in mind, make sure that you write high-quality, keyword rich content and link your site to and from a deliberate family of other sites. These things will help improve your site's popularity and coerce increased business through your online business.
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9. 4/6 Yahoo! News: Mobile Internet
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10. Get More Business with Autoresponders
An autoresponder can help your list of clients grow, even send each one of them their own personalized email message. If you choose, you can also follow up each individual email with repeated emails, varying the content whenever you wish. These programs will also allow you to keep track of conversations, and send out broadcast email messages whenever you have news or new products to offer your clients.
As research in the past has shown, personalized email from autoresponders is a great way to boost your business. When you send a personalized email to one of your clients, the autoresponder by can address him or her by their name - which always makes a customer take notice. While you could do this yourself using traditional email, it could take you a few hours if you have a long list of customers.
Autoresponders make sending personalized email a snap. All you need to do is set up your email template, then select where you like the name to go. You can add everyone in your customer list to the autoresponder, which makes sending emails a snap. Once you have everything ready to go, all you need to do is send out the emails with one simple click. Best of all, you don't have to set it up again when you need to send out broadcast messages.
Although there are some people who will buy products after one or two emails, most people require about seven or eight emails before they will purchase anything. Autoresponders can really help you there, as they will do all of the emailing for you. You dont have to keep sending manual emails or anything like that. All you need to do is set up the email address, type in your preset message, and then feel free to send it as many times as you like.
Through the use of an autoresponder you can really boost your business. If you run an Internet marketing business, this tool will prove to be invaluable. You can spend less time sending messages and more time doing what you enjoy. If you've never tried an autoresponder before, you owe it yourself to check out everything they will do for you and your business. Online businesses can get a lot of emails on a daily basis, which is where the autoresponder will really start to shine and show you just how great of an asset it really is.
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11. Work at Home News Front
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12. Adwords Management - 7 Keys to Success: Part 1
Optimize Your Campaign For Google Are all of your keywords stuffed into one or just a few adgroups? Google hates it when campaigns are like this and determines that your campaign has 0 Relevancy! I know this strategy works, so for all of my clients I make their campaigns Super Relevant by taking each individual keyword and putting it in ad adgroup all on it's own! I know, it's days worth of work, but it reduces their click cost by an incredible amount! If you don't follow crucial step #1 you're going to be slapped! This means that Google will charge you insane amounts of money for your clicks and give your ads horrible placement.
Optimize your ads for Google The structure of your ads play a huge role in determining how much you pay per click. Just like in step #1 Google is obsessed with "Relevancy". Google's idea of a perfect ad actually has the keyword that was searched on show up twice in the ad; Once in the ad title, and once in the ad text. If Google see's that your ad displaying for the keyword, "injury attorney" actually has the keyword "injury attorney" appearing in your ad title and inyour ad text then Google is going to reward your ad for being perfectly relevant to the keyword that was searched on.
Google is going to reward you in two ways, 1) by charging you less per click and 2) by giving your ad a higher ad placement! But that's not all! Who searches on the keyword "injury attorney" will be more inclined to click on your ad because the actual keyword they searched on shows up twice in your ad! That means that by optimizing your ads you get more clicks, you spend less, AND you get higher ad placement! It's a win win situation!
You might ask, "Well how will I ever have time to write a super targeted ad like that for every keyword I have? That seems impossible!" Well, if you don't have time you should make time. My company write a super targeted ad for EVERY keyword that you have! It's a huge load of work, but we've found it's definitely worth it for our clients. Stay tuned for part 2 of this article series, on "Optimizing your site for Google and Keyword Swiping".
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13. Privacy Policy - The SOHO Quest Blog
Our Commitment To Your Privacy
To better protect your privacy we have provided this notice explaining our online information practices, and the choices you may make about the way your information is collected and used. Here is information on what types of personal information we receive and collect when you use and visit this website, and how we safeguard your information. The SOHO Quest Blog will never sell your or trade your personal information to third parties.
Log Files
As with most other websites, we collect and use the data contained in log files.The information in the log files include your IP (internet protocol) address, your ISP (internet service provider), the browser you used to visit our site, and the time you visited our site and which pages you visited throughout our site.
Cookies and Web Beacons
We do use cookies to store information, such as your personal preferences when you visit our site.This could include only showing you a popup once in your visit, or the ability to login to use features, such as a forum. We also use third party advertisements in support of this website. Some of these advertisers may use technology such as cookies and web beacons when they advertise on our site, which will also send these advertisers (such as the Google AdSense program) information including your IP address, your ISP, the browser you used to visit the website, and in some cases, whether you have Flash installed. This is generally used for geotargeting purposes (showing local ads to someone in a particular geographic area) or showing certain ads based on specific sites visited (based the content of the types of websites frequented). You can choose to disable or selectively turn off our cookies or third-party cookies in your browser settings, or by managing preferences in programs such as Norton Internet Security. However, this can affect how you are able to interact with this website, as well as other websites. This could include the inability to login to services or programs, such as logging into forums or accounts.
Our Commitment To Data Security
To prevent unauthorized access, maintain data accuracy, and ensure the correct use of information, we have put in place appropriate physical, electronic, and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure the information we collect online.
Our Commitment To Child Privacy
Protecting the privacy of the very young is especially important. For that reason, we never collect or maintain information at our website from those we actually know are under 18, and no part of our website is structured to attract anyone under 18. Under our Terms of Service, children under 18 are not allowed to access our service.
Collection of Personal Information
This information is purely used to analyze trends, administer the site, track user’s movement, and gather broad demographic information for aggregate use. Importantly, IP addresses are not linked to personally identifiable information.
Links to Third Party Websites
We have included links on this site for your reference. We are not responsible for the privacy policies on these websites.
lterations to this Privacy Statement
The content of this statement may be altered at any time.
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14. SOHO Quest - New Contact Information
This post provides updated contact information for this blog. If you have any questions regarding the content of The SOHO Quest Blog, about the products mentioned, or questions of any nature at all, do not hesitate to contact us at the following address.
Your feedback about this website is helpful, appreciated, and welcome.
Please contact us at: soho.quest@gmail.com
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15. Updated About for The SOHO Quest
The SOHO Quest is a blog dedicated to providing up-to-date information on the subject Small Office and Home Office.
This blog publishes reviews, informative content, tips and more with regard to working in an small office-home office environment. Navigate this blog by using the side bar links. Follow highlighted links you see throughout posts to learn about the products and services being mentioned.
This blog is intended to provide worthwhile information for those interested in working in a small office-home office.
Direct all questions to: soho.quest@gmail.com
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16. Google Gets Voice
Google GrandCentral has grown all up is being relaunched as Google Voice. This service will continue in beta testing with many new features. Grand Central was a start up "one-number access" telephone service that was purchased by Google soon after its debut.
This service will be styled similar to the Skype telephony business model, in that some of the calls are free, and international long distance will be offered at attractive rates way below what normal phone charges would be. As an example, calls to Canada reportedly will be one cent per minute.
This will be a great service for entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, and small office/home office workers, which now includes distance workers, telecommuters and digital nomads. Get in line and queue up for a free Google Voice number.
From The Blogosphere:
Google Voice Blog: Moving to Google Voice!
We are happy to announce that we have made a number of improvements to GrandCentral and are relaunching the service as Google Voice.Google Voice Speaks of World Domination
Google Voice is a free service that offers "one number for life," so I recently came across your blog and have been reading along.Get Ready For Google Voice
The folks over at Google are working on a new project called Google Voice. According to the Google Blog site the first beta testing will be for GrandCentral [...]<$BlogFeedsVertical$>
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17. Depression Cooking Teaches
Check out Google Trends this morning, and you will see that Great Depression Cooking tops the charts. The television news anchors are starting to own up to the fact that we are in a depression, and not just your ordinary run of the mill recession.
Imports are down 24% and the economy in the US alone shrank over 6% in just one month. If you think there is any good news in this, it probably is only the fact we need to learn to individually become self reliant again. We can't sustain an economy where the only growth is in government.
If you have already lost your job, and are scratching your head as to what you will do when the unemployment insurance runs out, you may have figured out that it probably won't be a job like you had before. We are headed back to a more mercantile style society, where we each make and trade goods and services. Do you believe you can now start your own small office-home office based on new skills found learned and linked on the Internet?
If you are on your own SOHO quest, you may want to consider investing in and learning about working online. In many ways it is a quite separate and parallel economy. Almost unrelated to what is happening in the real world sector.
An alternative avocation is taking up the art of Depression Style Cooking.
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18. SpiderWeb Will Rock the Web
Whoa Baby! This blog is getting whiskers. Anyone that has followed my path will know that I now have been heavy into educating myself about Internet marketing. Thus, the reason for no posts.
But I have been busy investigating. One of the schemes is a beta program known as The SpideWeb Marketing System. If you have seen it in passing, but did not consider it...keep looking. This had the potential to be the next big monetizing scheme for the web.
Many have tried to create a self-sustained or auto-pilot system. This supposedly started out with 12 streams of income, but now has 22. I have a gut feeling you have to work it like any other business.
It still is in beta, so don't hope for much. I had numerous conversation with the owners and management team of this system about creating an inner circle training program. Alas, everyone wants something for nothing. You can generate free leads, but then you have to know what to do with them.
Check out my blog on the subject, too, at "The SpiderWeb System Information and Reviews".
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19. How to Produce 365 Videos in One Year
(Archived in: Online Income Reviews)
If you have been involved in the blogosphere for long, you know that many bloggers are gravitating towards video aka Video blogs, Vlogs, Vidcasts, or a Video Podcast.
This is a heads up on Mark Wielgus at 45n5.com. Mark is on top of online trends, and I am here to tell you that he researches, tests, and reports on things you will come to appreciate on a daily basis. All the information in this post was gleaned from 45n5. My belief is that Mark combines some marketing savvy with geekdom knowhow. He even writes simple, but useful utility programs and then gives them away for free on the blog. Here is a recent link to one he dubs "Keyword Scrubber".
45n5.com has turned into one of the few blogs I simply must check out on a daily basis. Now Mark is committed to deciphering Affiliate Marketing as a top priority. Another project he is combining with this effort is his personal mission to produce and post a video every day in 2008.
I think with 365 videos in the planning, his little experiment is one to watch for trends, plus the techniques, tips and tricks he is bound to uncover along the way. So, if you want to make 365 videos in one year, watch this guy in 2008 and I think you will learn something.
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20. Prioritize Your Blogging for 2008
(Archived in: Social Media Marketing Social Media Optimization)
Welcome to the New Year! I have been spending the last week planning for 2008, which has included changes to my blogging style. If you follow my blogs, you know that I have decided to concentrate on Digital Nomads and The Rugged Notebooks Blog as my main focus for blogging, and with less frequent posting to this blog and The Sovereign Journey.
This is not for a lack or loss of interest, but merely a necessity of time management. Regardless, my blog niche revolves around the central theme of mobility and using technology to be independent. So, you can always check back here and/or catch my more frequent updates at the Rugged Notebooks or Digital Nomads sites. My plan this year is to move to private domains.
One thing I have been doing is writing more focused posts...themed, if you will, or a series of posts on a subject of interest. Recently, this has had a major slant towards telecom, and in particular new gadgets like MagicJack and VoIP telephoney solutions like Google GrandCentral.
I am finding that being more focused on a particular subject area makes it easier and more interesting to research, test, review, and write. I think my readers appreciate it a well and it is helping in the SERPS.
If you are still blogging, drop me a line and let me know how you are getting on. There seems to have been a drop in the number of friends I met online in 2007 that have continued to blog, or scaled back like I have. -Digital Nomad
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21. Twelve Step Program for Email Addicts
(Archived in: Online Usability Reviews)
I saw this over at the BigString 2.0 website and thought it was good advice. BigString is an interesting concept in itself, which I will let you discover for yourself. These 12 items have been edited somewhat, so not to get dinged for duplicate content. There were some typos in the original text anyway. Enjoy.
1. Do not send email when you are angry. Wait until you calm down before you send that email. Feelings and thoughts can be difficult to interpret and easily misconstrued.
2. Never send a sarcastic email that could be taken out of context. Sarcasm and email do not mix. You can easily offend someone in an email without intent to do so.
3. Do not send email gossip. You never know where the email will end up. Just make a commitment to yourself not to participate in any gossip.
4. Never end significant relationships via email. Email is the equivalent of an electronic paper trail. Not good for any sour ending, whether business or personal.
5. If you don't want your boss or coworkers to see it, better not send that email from work.
6. Never put anything in writing that may come back to haunt you. A good overall policy. Not just for email.
7. Never, ever, hit ‘Reply to All’ when you just want to send an email to one individual.
8. Don’t email pictures of yourself to others. Especially, online acquaintances and complete strangers.
9. Don’t make promises or commitments via email that you cannot or will not keep.
10. When you send attachments, be sure that you have selected the correct files and documents.
11. Good advice from New York Governor Elliot Spitzer, “Never write when you can talk. Never talk when you can nod. And never put anything in an email.â€
12. Try BigString recallable email. If you do happen to make errors...the recallable, erasable, and non-forwardable features will help to correct such mistakes.
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22. How to Build 10-Minute Affiliate Website Mashups
(Archived in: Online Income Reviews)
If you are searching for ways to be innovative with your online marketing, then here is another plug for many of the ideas featured at 45n5.com authored by Mark Wielgus. No, this is not a paid post.
This is the good stuff, it's an addendum to the post on "30 Websites in 30 Days", and Mark calls this his YouTube-Ebay-Amazon Affiliate Website Mashup Thingy.
I have had a few email exchanges with Mark, and these are a few of his cautionary thoughts by way of how he has explained the ideas behind how it should work. Most people will not succeed with this mashup concept, or any other website scripting without the underlying concept and knowledge (or experience from learning) of how to build such a niche site.
Cranking out "out of the box" and rubber stamp solutions is what everybody else is doing. Doing the same thing that everyone else is doing online will bring the same results...which happens to be not making any money online. This also happens to mirror Einstein's theory of insanity, and he was no dummy. It's also making many people wealthy for some pretty worthless online information products.
So, if you use the script out of the box, most of your money will be made from luck or successful keyword research (aka) what words and topics you use to build these niche minisites in mass production.
Now is the time to learn. Take the time to consider doing it right. - Digital Nomad
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23. A SOHO Reprise of Honest Riches System
(Archived in: Online Income Reviews)
A 25 Year Old Entrepreneur Making a Living Online from Home
You probably have read about or heard of The Rich Jerk and Chis X of Day Job Killer. If not you better stop and do a Google search right now. About 2 years ago, Holly Mann, a young mother started to successfully market directly against high profile Internet marketing gurus like these guys.
Living in a foreign country with no job and few resources, Holly decided she could research, design, and deliver a kinder and gentler approach to online marketing. Evidently she found her niche selling "How-To" information, because she has become successful in a short period of time (well, a couple of years).
"Honest Riches 2" is a 95 page proven guide. Holly shows all the techniques she has used to make money online through affiliate programs starting with no website and no start-up money, then on to free websites that can easily be setup with little or no experience, including free advertising that most people don't know or think about.
Yes, it seems possible to make money online and work from home just about anywhere (Holly lives in Thailand), but don't quit your day job just yet. You need a system and you need the right tools and knowledge to be successful. Changing your career is a life altering decision.
Before taking the leap, do plenty of due diligence and adequate research for information and resources about starting an online business and becoming an online entrepreneur. This e-book is geared for beginners, but is a valuable resource for all online marketers. No "get-rich-quick" schemes here....like any real business endeavor, it involves some effort and some work. But you will learn strategies and techniques to start making money right away.
To read more about Holly Mann techniques and other online marketers, visit Thank You Holly Mann.
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24. John Chow Calls It Quits on Agloco
(Archive in: Weblogs and Business)
After many attempts at beating a dead horse, everyone involved in the Agloco fiasco can now uncross their fingers. It ain't gonna happen. Even John Chow has finally admitted defeat along with almost 30,000 signed up in his Agloco network.
Here is a partial screenshot of his last post on the subject, and here is a link to the post about the Agloco demise at TechCruch. Like John says...it shows that all those MBAs don't always muster up success, even the second time around. For posterity, watch the video on the Agloco viewbar attributes, and think about all the gurus that were on board for this.
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25. How to Build 30 Websites in 30 Days
(Archive in Ecommerce SOHO Online Usability)
It may sound implausible, but it is not impossible. Follow this Digital Nomad and you know that just feeding the blogs is not going to cut it anymore. Blogging should be part of your online marketing network, but not a diversion.I have been searching heavy for the folks that are making it online and not the wannabes. One such source is 45n5.com authored by Mark Wielgus. This guy tells it straight. You have to hunt an peck to find the good stuff, and you will have to piece it together, but I think a good start is on this website.
Mark will show you how to find a niche, create a website in 10 minutes, and then shove it in the pipeline with some SEO tricks. Theoretically, there is no reason why you could not do this everyday for a month and then have 30 minisites up and running for affiliate programs in thirty days. That's if you want to have a website between you and the merchant.
I am finding that you maybe don't even need a website to market affiliate programs, but you do have to commit to spending some money for Google Adword campaigns. Better have a pad and pen ready.
There is always something to learn. Take the time to learn something new each day. - Digital Nomad
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American Jobs: Going, Going...
Jane Birnbaum
2005
Reprinted from: AFLCIO.org
Corporations are escalating efforts to ship out jobs that pay well and build the middle class—and now they are aiming their axes at workers in the nation’s fast-growing white-collar sector.
The U.S. recession that began in March 2001 officially ended in November 2001, say the National Bureau of Economic Research and other analysts.
So why are so many workers still out of jobs?
“We’ve declared victory over the recession, and we’re still laying off a couple hundred thousand workers a month,” says Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.). “If it weren’t so painful for so many people who are out of work, it would be hilarious. But it isn’t.”
The U.S. economy has 3.2 million fewer jobs today than it did when President George W. Bush took office, including 2.5 million fewer manufacturing jobs. Bush appears headed for the dubious distinction of being the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a decline in total employment during his term in office.
In the past three years, nearly one in five U.S. workers was laid off from the job, according to The Disposable Worker: Living in a Job-Loss Economy, a Rutgers University¡V University of Connecticut report released in late July. Among workers laid off from full-time work, roughly one-fourth were earning less than $40,000 annually, the report finds.
In July, a total of 15 million U.S. workers were either unemployed, underemployed or too discouraged to job hunt, according to the Labor Department.
In contrast, within a year after the official end of the last recession in March 1991, the nation had embarked on six straight months of solid job growth.
This time, say economists, there are crucial differences: Companies are sending well-paying manufacturing and service jobs to countries with few, if any, protections for workers and the environment. And these jobs are probably not coming back.
“The movement of jobs and production overseas is handcuffing the recovery,” according to Mark Xandi, chief economist at Economy.com, as quoted in the New York Times.
“With NAFTA, the World Trade Organization and other trade deals of the last decade, American corporations are now tapping into a global supply of workers who can be trained to do everything from design to production, maintenance to marketing,” says Jeff Faux, economist and founding president of the Economic Policy Institute. “And while these workers become more productive, their pay doesn’t rise, because in many of these countries, to be a labor organizer means you risk winding up in a ditch with a bullet in your head.”
American jobs sent out of the country aren’t likely to return anytime soon. “As long as employers can take advantage of much lower labor costs in other countries, there’s no compelling reason to bring back many of these well-paying jobs,” says Ron Hira, an engineer and assistant professor of public policy at Rochester Institute of Technology. “Policymakers seem to be at a loss as to what to do about this problem.”
Meanwhile, the Bush administration directs multimillion-dollar tax cuts to the wealthy while supporting trade laws that encourage offshore outsourcing. And even as Bush opposes unemployment insurance extensions for some 1 million Americans who have exhausted their benefits, his administration refuses to embrace job-creating programs that would repair the nation’s infrastructure and help balance devastated state budgets.
“The Bush administration doesn’t seem to care about jobs,” says Center for Economic and Policy Research co-founder Dean Baker. “To retain and create jobs, there have to be policy changes, and I don’t think this administration is willing to make them.”
Manufacturing: America’s Foundation Is Crumbling
|
Manufacturing jobs traditionally have provided high wages and good benefits that allow workers to care for their families. But 2.5 million manufacturing jobs have disappeared since President Bush took office in early 2001.
Multinational corporations are transferring jobs to countries where workers earn low wages and have few or no protections. And small U.S. businesses are laying off workers or shutting their doors because they can’t meet foreign competitors’ prices.
African American workers have been hit particularly hard. Because of manufacturing job losses, the unemployment rate among African Americans is rising twice as fast as it is for whites and faster than in any downturn since the mid-1970s. “The number of jobs and the types of jobs that have been lost has severely diminished the standing of many blacks in the middle class,” says William Lucy, president of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists and AFSCME secretary-treasurer.
Manufacturing job loss starts the downward spiral
The loss of good manufacturing jobs has ripped apart communities and permanently lowered living standards for families throughout the United States, including in Rockford, Ill., 70 miles from Chicago. The northern Illinois city is historically second only to Cleveland as a center for machine tooling, the making of tools used in machine manufacturing.
Machine tooling, which traditionally employs the most highly skilled manufacturing workers including members of the Machinists and UAW, is the bedrock of America’s manufacturing industry.
But the bedrock is crumbling. The Rockford area lost more than 20
percent of its manufacturing jobs—about 10,000—between May 2000 and
2003, according to MBG Information Services President and Economist
Charles McMillion’s analysis of Department of Labor data.
General
manufacturing jobs have been among those lost in Rockford, including
jobs held by Steelworkers Local 745 members at the Goodyear tire
plant. USWA members at Goodyear now number 750, down from 1,650 in
1999, before the corporation shipped the jobs to Asia and South
America.
But most manufacturing jobs lost in Rockford have been in machine tooling. At Greenlee/Textron, which makes drill bits and tools for electrical contractors, about 180 Machinists now represented by IAM Local 1553 are employed today, down from about 900 in the late 1980s. The 112-year-old crown jewel of Rockford machine tooling—Ingersoll International—declared bankruptcy this spring and laid off 300 employees in Rockford and 70 in Michigan, leaving only skeleton crews of managers and a few contract workers.
“The lesson of Rockford,” says Faux, “is it disproves the free traders’ argument that America could afford to lose manufacturing jobs in areas like textiles and steel because we would ultimately triumph in global competition by making the things hardest to make. In fact, those things are machine tools—and we’re losing them.”
A loss of manufacturing jobs reverberates throughout the community—and ultimately the nation. When manufacturing factories aren’t being built, maintained or expanded, jobs disappear in areas such as construction.
“Our union has about 30 percent unemployment,” says Mark Bramble, business agent for Electrical Workers Local 364 in Rockford. “Guys burn through their unemployment, lose all their benefits, get divorced and then go where the grass looks greener or settle for working as a greeter at Wal-Mart.”
A question of national security
There’s a sense of betrayal in Rockford these days. “Free trade was sold to America with the line that it helps us export more goods,” says Eric Anderberg, who manages his family’s 37-year-old machine tool company, Dial Machines Inc. “But what’s happened is the exportation of our jobs and means of production so multinational corporations can exploit foreign labor and sell their goods back to us.”
Today Dial employs 40 workers, down from 75 in the late 1990s. It recently lost work to a lower-bidding Czech Republic manufacturer that nabbed a contract making parts for a supplier of General Electric Wind Energy Corp.
Anderberg and other Rockford employers worry that a Chinese government-owned machine tooling company, which already has bought two divisions of Ingersoll International, may now be poised to buy another—one containing intellectual property, including high-level research and design and military technology. “I cannot understand how our government can justify not only the debasement of our manufacturing industries but also our national security in a time of war,” he says.
The Rockford community and U.S. national security would get a boost from Buy America provisions House Armed Services Committee Chair Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) added to legislation authorizing the 2004 Pentagon budget.
Rep. Donald Manzullo (R-Ill.), who represents the Rockford area and helped write the bill, says, “The Pentagon wouldn’t care if everything it buys is made in China.” Joined by armsmakers such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, the White House says the Buy America provisions are “burdensome, counterproductive and have the potential to degrade U.S. military capabilities.” But the administration does not mention jobs.
“American steelworkers are also American taxpayers, and they do not want their tax dollars subsidizing the export of their jobs,” says USWA President Leo Gerard.
White-Collar Jobs: America’s Growing Export
Ask anyone which sector of the U.S. economy comes to mind as the most likely to be shipped overseas, and chances are he or she will say manufacturing.
But though the United States lost 2.5 million manufacturing jobs since the Bush presidency beginning in 2001, U.S. corporations now are racing to outsource white-collar jobs—including work in computer sciences, engineering, entertainment, financial and medical services—to countries where workers earn far less.
Terry Antisdel was a Chicago-area engineering associate for Lucent Technologies Inc. and its predecessor AT&T for 35 years until his entire 42-member International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers Local 81 was laid off in July. He figures his job will end up in India or China. “The words management used were a 'less-expensive offshore site,’ ” recalls Antisdel, who estimates Lucent will send a total of about 5,000 U.S. jobs offshore this year. “I feel let down,” he says. “Companies used to provide jobs for people, but now they’re just there to give money to executives, board members and shareholders.”
In late July, the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers (WashTech), a Communications Workers of America affiliated group that helps high-tech workers win a voice at work, released a tape of a conference call in which IBM’s top human relations executives discussed transferring 3 million U.S. service jobs to countries such as China and India by 2015.
Testifying in June before a House Committee on Small Business investigating the globalization of white-collar jobs, AFL-CIO Department for Professional Employees President Paul Almeida said, “If these cost-saving jobs shifts are taken to their logical extreme, even American corporations should be wondering where their future consumers will be located and how they will buy the goods and services.”
A Forrester Research study predicts U.S. employers will move about 3.3 million white-collar service jobs and $136 billion in wages overseas in the next 15 years, up from $4 billion in 2000.
White-collar jobs going and gone
The jobs already are leaving. By the end of this year, General Electric will have sent a total of 20,000 aircraft and medical research and design jobs to India and China, according to Business Week. And the Accenture consulting firm, which incorporated in Bermuda after splitting from Enron accountant Arthur Andersen, plans to send 5,000 accounting and software jobs to the Philippines in 2004, the magazine says.
According to WashTech, Microsoft plans to eliminate at least 800 full-time call-center jobs near Dallas and shift the work to India and Canada in the next fiscal year. It would be the largest one-time firing of full-time Microsoft employees in the company’s history. WashTech says a Microsoft senior vice president recently urged company managers to “pick something to move offshore today,” though Microsoft publicly has repeated it will not lay off U.S. workers and send the jobs offshore.
While the Bush administration remains silent about offshore outsourcing, states such as New Jersey are considering corrective measures. New Jersey legislators acted after the state outsourced the electronic administration of welfare and food stamp benefits to a company that then sent the jobs to India. When New Jersey citizens called to ask about benefits, they were connected with Indian workers who gave Americanized names.
A bill authored by state Assembly member Linda Greenstein (D)
would have required such offshore subcontractors to disclose to New
Jersey residents their employers’ true names and locations. But even
this common- sense measure had no chance in the face
of massive
opposition launched by Indian and American corporate interests, such
as Verizon.
“We got a copy of an e-mail Verizon sent managers in New Jersey, thanking them for sending 1,800 e-mails opposing the bill,” says Don Rice, CWA’s New Jersey legislative coordinator. Activists and legislators hope to bring the bill to a vote before the legislative session ends this year.
U.S. security at stake
Offshore outsourcing of white-collar work also raises security concerns. U.S. firms are sending mapping and other such work to India, Pakistan, China, the Philippines and other countries with lower labor costs, says John Palatiello, administrator of the Council on Federal Procurement of Architectural and Engineering Services.
“This practice raises issues regarding access to data about the location of¡Kcritical infrastructure by individuals in foreign countries who have not been through any degree of security clearance and where control of access to data simply does not exist.”
Bush’s January 2002 State of the Union address made clear the danger of access to data by unfriendly foreign operatives: “Our discoveries in Afghanistan confirmed our worst fears....We have found diagrams of American nuclear power plants and public water facilities¡Ksurveillance maps of American cities and thorough descriptions of landmarks in America.”
Activists are demanding Congress review trade and tax policies that encourage white-collar offshore outsourcing. Without government intervention, warns Almeida, “short-sighted corporate policy focused on saving a few bucks in the short run will have an enormous deleterious impact on the entire U.S. economy.”
Low-Wage Jobs: Betray America’s Workers
Laid-off U.S. workers thrust into a hostile job market are discovering another ugly part of the American economy: low-wage work that pays too little to keep even a small family out of poverty.
Nearly a quarter of all U.S. workers labor in jobs that pay little but are essential to society. Sixty percent of these workers are female, and many are people of color. They care for nursing home patients and clean offices at night. They prepare food, answer call-center phones and care for our children.
These jobs generally pay less than the $8.85 hourly wage the U.S. government says it takes to keep a family of four out of poverty. Even so, many low-wage jobs offer only part-time hours, with few or no benefits. And workers in low-paying but essential jobs often are treated as disposable, quickly fired if they get sick or stay home with a sick child.
As more good jobs leave the country, the percentage of low-wage jobs keeps growing. By 2010, about 30 percent of working Americans won’t be making even poverty wages, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. A Labor Department list of the 10 occupations likely to show the largest job growth this decade is dominated by jobs that typically pay poorly—food preparation, customer service, office clerking, security and food service.
This world of low-wage jobs and the workers who do them is illuminated in The Betrayal of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 35 Million Americans, published on Labor Day by the New Press. “Traditionally, there was a promise in this country that if you worked hard, you could take care of your family,” explains author Beth Shulman, an attorney and former United Food and Commercial Workers vice president. “That promise has been broken¡Kand we have built our national prosperity on their backs.”
No job is inherently low wage
Workers in low-wage jobs frequently are labeled as lacking skills
and in need of training to move into better-paying positions. But
while education is a traditional route to higher pay, Shulman
contends no job is inherently low wage.
“Take autoworkers, who
had horrible jobs that became good ones because of unions and social
legislation,” she says. “The same thing must happen with currently
low-paying service- sector jobs. In Las Vegas, for example, the
housekeeper represented by the Hotel Employees Restaurant Employees
has decent wages and benefits thanks to unionization.”
Low-wage jobs tend to imprison the workers who perform them because of what Shulman calls a “piling on” of hardships. Workers in low-wage jobs are unlikely to have sick leave or health insurance or make enough money to afford reliable transportation or child day care. At the same time, they are likely to be in inflexible situations in which being late or missing work can result in a quick firing.
“It’s not just that you make less money in these jobs, but you have none of the basic things many of us take for granted, such as health insurance, time to care for a family member, adequate child care, some kind of retirement security, even a telephone,” Shulman says. “And this applies to one in four U.S. workers.”
Gap is growing between U.S. rich and poor
As low-wage work continues to replace jobs that pay well, the U.S. economy increasingly resembles that of a less-developed nation, with a wide gulf between rich and poor. Among all western industrialized nations, the United States has the greatest income and wage inequalities, with the best-paid 10 percent of workers making 16.6 times the amount made by the lowest-paid 10 percent, according to a 2003 analysis by the United Nations Development Program. “That’s the way we’ve been moving for some time now and continue to move,” says Heather Boushey, a Center for Economic and Policy Research economist.
To reverse this trend, the United States needs to change the rules of the game, according to Shulman. “For starters, we should immediately raise the minimum hourly wage to the poverty guideline for a family of four—$8.85 an hour versus the current $5.15 hourly federal minimum wage—and then have automatic increases so there’s not a big political battle every time it needs raising. Then, all Americans should have access to affordable health care. There are a variety of ways to do this, and we should just get it done.
“Finally, all American workers should be able to care for their children—to have access to affordable child care, and to stay with them when they’re sick or go to a PTA meeting without getting fired. The consequences for the children of today’s low-wage workers are enormous—they’re following their parents into this low-wage world.”
Companies in India celebrate
"loss of American jobs"
Mike Crane
December 2004
Reprinted from: Southern Party of Georgia website
In our previous article we reported how various companies in India were employed by the Republican National Committee and the Bush Re-election campaign (see: India claims big election victory and laughs at Americans).
One interesting comment that was documented in that article was:
As Vivek Paul, Wipro VC, said after the Presidential poll, “The elections are over and so is the rhetoric; it will be easier for American corporations to step out with their outsourcing plans.”
Well a little research has found some estimates from within India about what that meant. First and foremost, it means that India is celebrating the "loss of American jobs." Folks, that is the jobs of friends, family or perhaps even your own.Specifically on November 4, with time zone changes, roughly a day after the polls close the following was published in the India Times:
The industry is quietly celebrating that outsourcing and loss of American jobs will not be the hot-button issues any more.
And that is why they believe that "it will be easier for American corporations to step out with their outsourcing plans." Does this mean that American companies put their plans on "hold" to minimize the impact on a close election?
But the folks in India gloat a little more:
Of the documented jobs that left the US for other countries in January through March 2004, 23,396 went to Mexico, 8,283 to China, 3,895 to India, 4,419 to other Asian countries, 5,511 to Latin American countries other than Mexico and 2,933 to other countries.
A brief look at these numbers show what they call a documented American job loss of 48,237 for the first quarter of 2004. On an annual basis this would be 192,968 American jobs. And they expect American companies to now - step out - with their outsourcing plans.
Some will say that 192,968 jobs is not very many. But as you will see in coming articles that is just what is called BPO and is not the whole picture.
Lets look at the effect of three policies that affect American jobs:
- Outsourcing - In this article it has been shown that it is at least close to 200,00 jobs a year for the BPO segment and expected to increase
- H1-B visa program - allows high tech foreigners to take American jobs here without being counted in immigration totals. Used by many companies to train personnel for their foreign outsourcing programs. There are roughly a million H1-B visas active today.
- Legal immigration of about 1 million a year and illegal immigration of about 3 million a year resulting in lower American wages and increased social costs.
Ladies and gentlemen, you are paying the salaries of the elected and appointed officials who are doing this to you. Is this what you want to pay for? If so, why are you reading material on this web site?
If not, you are being ignored!
It should be obvious to all that this trend can not continue forever. Are there any signs that it is getting better:
A recent study of A T Kearney shows that nine out of 10 chief executives wanted to outsource to India. 25 % of the respondents wanted IT and auto component work to be given to India, 15 % favoured China and 13 % Mexico.
That should answer that question beyond a reasonable doubt. Interesting that 15% of the outsourcing chief executives favor Red China! Remember these are the folks that make the big campaign contributions that have so much influence on many of your elected officials. How will you feel when YOUR job is sent to Red China?
If you do not agree with these policies you are being ignored and your elected officials are representing special interests more than you! If you believe that this is a serious problem it is time to get involved now. The longer you wait, the harder it will be stop these destructive trends.
The BPO and your elected officials are doing offshore calculus, are you?
BPO biggies do offshore calculus
TIMES NEWS NETWORK [ THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 04, 2004 02:13:09 PM]India’s silicon valley is delighted to move out of the
limelight. The industry is quietly celebrating that
outsourcing and loss of American jobs will not be the
hot-button issues any more.
BPO bigwigs are already
computing the gains from mega-offshoring plans on hold waiting
for US presidential race to be over.
Though most of
the industry majors refuse to comment on who will safeguard
their interests better, they feel that economic benefits of
transfer of jobs to low cost destinations will now overshadow
the political rhetoric against outsourcing in the run up to
the US poll.
The US presidential election was fueling
the protests against job losses due to transfer of jobs.
“American law will remain the same and the outsourcing
will go up irrespective of who wins. Already, we see our
clients getting ready for bigger offshoring plans,’’ says head
of a leading Delhi-based BPO firm. Insiders also feel the
American clients might be more open to talk about their
outsourcing plans to low-cost destinations like India now.
Though Kerry’s tax proposals that seek to end tax
breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas could deter
fence-sitter, analysts feel they are no more than short-term
sentiment dampeners. After initially branding the shipping of
jobs to countries like India and China as a threat to the US
economy, Kerry has gone on record saying he can’t stop
outsourcing.
Clearly, what is of greater concern is
that a clear decision comes soon, irrespective of whether it
favours Bush or Kerry. Though Bush is more popular, the $ 2.6
billion BPO industry is convinced that “it will soon be
difficult to differentiate between Democrats and Republicans.
Obviously sector’s fate is closely tied up with the US
elections, with US accounting for over 70 % of India’s IT
exports. A recent study of A T Kearney shows that nine out of
10 chief executives wanted to outsource to India. 25 % of the
respondents wanted IT and auto component work to be given to
India, 15 % favoured China and 13 % Mexico.
Of the
documented jobs that left the US for other countries in
January through March 2004, 23,396 went to Mexico, 8,283 to
China, 3,895 to India, 4,419 to other Asian countries, 5,511
to Latin American countries other than Mexico and 2,933 to
other countries.
Costly Trade With China
Millions of U.S. jobs displaced
Robert E. Scott
October 9, 2007
Reprinted from: Economic Policy Institute
Contrary to the predictions of its supporters, China's entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) has failed to reduce its trade surplus with the United States or increase overall U.S. employment. The rise in the U.S. trade deficit with China between 1997 and 2006 has displaced production that could have supported 2,166,000 U.S. jobs. Most of these jobs (1.8 million) have been lost since China entered the WTO in 2001. Between 1997 and 2001, growing trade deficits displaced an average of 101,000 jobs per year, or slightly more than the total employment in Manchester, New Hampshire. Since China entered the WTO in 2001, job losses increased to an average of 353,000 per year—more than the total employment in greater Akron, Ohio. Between 2001 and 2006, jobs were displaced in every state and the District of Columbia. Nearly three-quarters of the jobs displaced were in manufacturing industries. Simply put, the promised benefits of trade liberalization with China have been unfulfilled.
As a matter of policy, China tightly pegs its currency's value to that of the dollar at a rate that encourages a large bilateral surplus with the United States. Maintaining this peg required the purchase of about $200 billion in U.S. Treasury Bills and other securities in 2006 alone.1 This intervention makes the yuan artificially cheap and provides an effective subsidy on Chinese exports; best estimates are that the rate of this effective subsidy is roughly 40%. China also engages in extensive suppression of labor rights; it has been estimated that wages in China would be 47% to 85% higher in the absence of labor repression. China has also been accused of massive direct subsidization of export production. Finally, it maintains strict, non-tariff barriers to imports. As a result, China's exports to the United States of $288 billion in 2006 were six times greater than U.S. exports to China, which were only $52 billion (Table 1). China's trade surplus was responsible for 42.6% of the United States' total, non-oil trade deficit. This is by far the United States' most imbalanced trading relationship. Unless and until China revalues (raises) the yuan and eliminates these other trade distortions, the U.S. trade deficit and job losses will continue to grow rapidly in the future.
Major findings of this study:
- The 1.8 million jobs opportunities lost nationwide since
2001 are distributed among all 50 states and the District of
Columbia, with the biggest losers, in numeric terms:
California (-269,300), Texas (-136,900), New York
(-105,900), Illinois (-79,900), Pennsylvania (-78,200),
North Carolina (-77,200), Florida (-71,900), Ohio (-66,100),
Georgia (-60,400), and Massachusetts (-59,300) (Table 2A).
- The 10 hardest-hit states, as a share of total state employment, are: New Hampshire (-13,000, -2.1%), North Carolina (-77,200, -2.0%), California (-269,300, -1.8%), Massachusetts (-59,300, -1.8%), Rhode Island (-8,400, -1.8%), South Carolina (-29,200, -1.6%), Vermont (-4,900, -1.6%), Oregon (-25,700, -1.6%), Indiana (-45,200, -1.5%), and Georgia (-60,400, -1.5%) (Table 2B).
China's entry into the WTO was supposed to bring it into compliance with an enforceable, rules-based regime, which would require that it open its markets to imports from the United States and other nations. The United States also negotiated a series of special safeguard measures designed to limit the disruptive effects of surging Chinese imports on domestic producers. However, the core of the agreement failed to include any protections to maintain or improve labor or environmental standards. As a result, China's entry into the WTO has further tilted the international economic playing field against domestic workers and firms, and in favor of multinational companies (MNCs) from the United States and other countries, and state- and privately-owned exporters in China. This has increased the global "race to the bottom" in wages and environmental quality and caused the closing of thousands of U.S. factories, decimating employment in a wide range of communities, states, and entire regions of the United States.
False promises
Proponents of China's entry into the WTO frequently claimed that it would create jobs in the United States, increase U.S. exports, and improve the trade deficit with China. President Clinton claimed that the agreement allowing China into the WTO, which was negotiated during his administration, "creates a win-win result for both countries" (Clinton 2000, 9). He argued that exports to China "now support hundreds of thousands of American jobs" and that "these figures can grow substantially with the new access to the Chinese market the WTO agreement creates" (Clinton 2000, 10). Others in the White House, such as Kenneth Liberthal, the special advisor to the president and senior director for Asia affairs at the National Security Council, echoed Clinton's assessment:
Let's be clear as to why a trade deficit might decrease in the short term. China exports far more to the U.S. than it imports [from] the U.S….It will not grow as much as it would have grown without this agreement and over time clearly it will shrink with this agreement.2
Promises about jobs and exports misrepresented the real effects of trade on the U.S. economy: trade both creates and destroys jobs. Increases in U.S. exports tend to create jobs in the United States, but increases in imports tend to destroy jobs as imports displace goods that otherwise would have been made in the United States by domestic workers.
The impact of changes in trade on employment is estimated here by calculating the labor content of changes in the trade balance—the difference between exports and imports. Each $1 billion in computer exports to China from the United States supports American jobs. However, each $1 billion in computer imports from China displaces those American workers, who would have been employed making them in the United States. On balance, the net employment effect of trade flows depends on the growth in the trade deficit; not just exports. Another critically important promise made by the promoters of liberalized U.S.-China trade was that the United States would benefit because of increased exports to a large and growing consumer market in China. This market, in turn, was to be based on an expansion of the middle class that, it was claimed, would grow rapidly due to the wealth created in China by its entry into the WTO. However, the increase in U.S. exports to China has been overwhelmed by the growth of U.S. imports, as shown below.
Growing trade deficits and job losses
The U.S. trade deficit with China has increased from $50 billion in 1997 to $235 billion in 2006, an increase of $185 billion, as shown in Table 1. Between 1997 and 2001, prior to China's entry into the WTO, the deficit increased $9 billion per year on average. Between 2001 and 2006, after China entered the WTO, the deficit increased $30 billion per year on average.
While it is true that exports support jobs in the United States, it is equally true that imports displace them. The net effect of trade flows on employment must look at the trade balance. The employment impacts of growing trade deficits are estimated in this paper using an input-output model that estimates the direct and indirect labor requirements of producing output in a given domestic industry. The model includes 200 U.S. industries, 86 of which are in the manufacturing sector (see this paper's methodology appendix for further details).3
The model estimates the labor that would be required to produce a given volume of exports, and the labor that is displaced when a given volume of imports is substituted for domestic output.4 The job losses presented here represent an estimate of what sectoral employment levels would have been in the absence of growing trade deficits.5
U.S. exports to China in 1997 supported 138,000 jobs, but U.S. imports displaced production that would have supported 736,000 jobs, as shown in the bottom half of Table 1. Therefore, the $49 billion trade deficit in 1997 displaced 736,300 jobs in that year. Job displacement rose to 1,000,000 jobs in 2001 and 2,763,000 in 2006. Prior to China's entry into the WTO, an average of 101,000 jobs per year were displaced by growing trade deficits between 1997 and 2001. After 2001, an average of 353,000 jobs per year were lost.
Growth in trade deficits with China has reduced demand for goods produced in every region of the United States and has led to job displacement in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, as shown in Table 2A and Figure A.6 More than 100,000 jobs were lost in California, Texas, and New York each. Jobs displaced due to growing deficits with China equaled or exceeded 2.0% of total employment in states such as North Carolina and New Hampshire, as shown in Table 2B. An alphabetical list of job losses by state is shown in Table 2C.
Growing trade deficits with China have clearly reduced domestic employment in traded goods industries, especially in the manufacturing sector, which has been hard hit by plant closings and job losses. Workers displaced by trade from the manufacturing sector have been shown to have particular difficulty in securing comparable employment elsewhere in the economy. More than one-third of workers displaced from manufacturing drop out of the labor force (Kletzer 2001, 101, Table D2). Average wages of those who secured re-employment fell 11% to 13%. Trade-related job displacement pushes many workers out of good jobs in manufacturing and other trade-related industries, often into lower-paying industries and frequently out of the labor market.
Some economists have quibbled with job-loss numbers extrapolated from trade flows, based on the presumption that aggregate employment levels in the United States are set by a broad range of macroeconomic influences, not just by trade flows. There is a grain of truth to this—the trade balance is but one of many variables affecting aggregate job creation in the United States.
That said, the employment impacts of trade identified in this paper can be interpreted as the "all else equal" effect of trade on domestic employment. The Federal Reserve, for example, may decide to cut interest rates to make up for job loss stemming from deteriorating trade balances (or any other economic influence), leaving net employment unchanged. This, however, does not change the fact that trade deficits by themselves are a net drain on employment.
Administration officials and other economists have argued that the capital inflow that is the mirror-image of trade deficits supports jobs in the United States by keeping interest rates lower than they would be absent this inflow. During the late 1990s, for example, these capital inflows fought rising trade deficits to a draw in terms of aggregate employment effects, and, through much of the 2000s recovery, interest-sensitive industries (housing and construction, for example) have surely expanded more than they would have absent foreign capital inflows. While these claims may be correct from a simple accounting standpoint, they do not support assertions that trade flows are a useless indicator of job loss.
First, and most simply, it is just not true that foreign capital inflows always make up trade-induced employment losses one-for-one. In the 2001 recession and the jobless recovery following, growing trade deficits accompanied aggregate job loss, even as interest rates scraped historical bottoms. Clearly, low interest rates do not always translate into enough growth in investment and consumption in interest-sensitive sectors to always sterilize the impact of growing trade deficits.
Second, the job-loss numbers identified in this report are a good measure of just how unbalanced the U.S. economy has become due to rising trade deficits. Tradable goods industries have hemorrhaged jobs, while interest-sensitive, often non-tradable, industries have seen rapid growth. At that point in the future when trade deficits begin to close (and this will happen—it is only a question of when and how), the U.S. economy will need to return many of the jobs displaced by rising trade deficits out of non-tradable and into tradable industries. Moving millions of workers back and forth between sectors is no mean trick, and accomplishing it without a recession in between will be hard; trying to do it after another couple of years of deficit growth—and an even more lopsided U.S. economy—will be even harder.
In short, while aggregate employment in the United States may well not respond job-for-job with the numbers reported in this paper on trade deficits with China, these numbers provide insight into how much harder other macroeconomic influences have to work to eliminate the employment drag from these deficits, and they provide a good (and ominous) measure of how lopsided employment growth in the U.S. economy has become owing to the unbalanced U.S.-China trade relationship.
Conclusion
The growing U.S. trade deficit with China has displaced huge numbers of jobs in the United States, and been a prime contributor to the crisis in manufacturing employment over the past six years. The current U.S.-China trade relationship is bad for both countries. The United States is piling up foreign debt, losing export capacity, and facing a more fragile macroeconomic environment. Meanwhile, China has become dependent on the U.S. consumer market for employment generation, has suppressed the purchasing power of its own middle class with a weak currency, and, most importantly, has held hundreds of billions of hard-currency reserves in low-yielding, risky assets, instead of investing them in public goods that could benefit Chinese households. Its repression of labor rights has suppressed wages, thus subsidizing its exports and making them artificially cheap. This relationship needs a fundamental change: addressing the exchange rate policies and labor standards issues in the Chinese economy are important first steps.
April 2007
The author thanks Lauren
Marra for her research assistance
and Josh Bivens and Ross
Eisenbrey for comments.
This research was made
possible by generous support
from the Alliance for American
Manufacturing.
Methodology
This analysis utilizes an input-output model to estimate the relationships between changes in trade flows and production that could support domestic employment. The analysis covers trends in goods trade, which is dominated by manufactures. Services trade is not considered because of problems with the data, and because many of the services traded involve returns to capital and intellectual property that have little or no direct effect on employment. In addition, goods trade dominates the nation's international accounts.
This study uses the model developed in Rothstein and Scott (1997a and 1997b). This approach solves four problems that are prevalent in previous research on the employment effects of trade. Some studies look only at the effects of exports and ignore imports. Some studies include re-exports (transshipments)—goods produced outside the United States and shipped through this country to other nations—as U.S. exports. The trade data used in many studies is usually not adjusted for inflation. Finally, a single employment multiplier is often applied to all industries, despite differences in labor productivity and utilization.7
The model used here is based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics' employment requirements tables, which were derived from the U.S. input-output tables that are published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. These tables are adjusted to 2000 price and productivity levels (BLS 2007b), in real, chain-weighted 2000 dollars. A base year with 2000 employment requirements was used to estimate the employment content of trade in all years covered in this study. This assumption was needed to control for the effects of technology. This technique isolates the effects of trade on employment from pure technology effects. This model is used to estimate the direct and indirect effects of changes in goods trade flows in each of 200 industries. This study updates the 1987 input employment requirements table used in earlier reports in this series (Rothstein and Scott 1997a, 1997b).
This analysis requires four-digit, trade data based on the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) (U.S. International Trade Commission 2007), deflated with industry-specific, chain-weighted price indices (BLS 2007a), which were updated using industry-specific producer price indexes (BLS 2007b).8 Trade data were downloaded from the U.S. International Trade Commission (2007) Web site in NAICS format. The data for 2006 are preliminary estimates; this report will be updated and expanded when the final 2006 trade data are released in June 2007. State-level employment effects are calculated by allocating imports and exports to the states on the basis of their share of four-digit, industry-level employment for 2000 (U.S. Census Bureau 2001).
The trade data were converted into chain-weighted 2000 dollars. A domestic employment requirements table for a particular base year was used to estimate the employment effects of trade in each year of the analysis, holding technology constant. The domestic employment requirement calculates the labor required to produce all of a given product within the United States. Thus, it reflects the complete labor content of output, including jobs indirectly supported in service industries. The base year of 2000 was chosen for this study because it was an approximate mid-point in the data covered in this study.
CPS data on employment by industry by was collected for each of the detailed sectors in the model. These data were used to calculate each state's share of national employment.
References
Bureau of Labor Statistics, Office of Employment
Projections. 2007a. Special Purpose
Files—Industry Output and Employment. Washington, D.C.:
U.S. Department of Labor.
http://www.bls.gov/emp/empind2.htm.
Bureau of Labor Statistics, Office of Employment
Projections. 2007b. Special Purpose Files—
Employment Requirements. Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Department of Labor.
http://stats.bls.gov/emp/empind4.htm.
Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2005. Access to
historical data for the "B" tables of the Employment Situation
News Release.
http://stats.bls.gov/ces/cesbtabs.htm.
Clinton, William J. 2000. Expanding trade,
protecting values: Why I'll fight to make China's trade status
permanent. New Democrat, Vol. 12,
No. 1, pp. 9-11.
http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?contentid=965&kaid=108&subid=127
Faux, Jeff. 2007. Globalization That Works for Working Americans. Briefing Paper #179. Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute. http://www.sharedprosperity.org/bp179.html.
Kletzer, Lori G. 2001. Job
Loss From Imports: Measuring the Costs. Institute for
International Economics. Washington, D.C.: IIE.
http://bookstore.petersoninstitute.org/book-store/110.html
Ratner, David. 2006. "Appendix: Methodology and
Data Sources", in Faux, Jeff, Bruce Campbell, Carlos Salas,
and Robert Scott. 2006. Revisiting NAFTA:
Still Not Working for North America's Workers. Briefing
Paper. Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute.
http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/bp173
Rothstein, Jesse and Robert E. Scott. 1997a.
NAFTA's Casualties: Employment Effects on
Men, Women, and Minorities. Issue Brief. Washington,
D.C.: Economic Policy Institute.
http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/issuebriefs_ib120
Rothstein, Jesse and Robert E. Scott. 1997b.
NAFTA and the States: Job Destruction is
Widespread. Issue Brief. Washington, D.C.: Economic
Policy Institute.
http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/issuebriefs_ib119
Scott, Robert E. 2005.
U.S.—China Trade, 1989-2003: Impact on Jobs and
Industries, Nationally and State-by-State. Working
Paper # 270. Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute.
January.
http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/wp270
U.S. Census Bureau. 2001. 2000 Basic Monthly
Survey of the Current Population Survey. U.S. Department of
Commerce, U.S. Census Bureau. Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Department of Commerce.
http://www.census.gov/cps/
U.S. International Trade Commission. 2007. USITC
Interactive Tariff and Trade Data Web.
http://dataweb.usitc.gov/scripts/user_set.asp.
Endnotes
1. These purchases financed about one-quarter of the U.S. $857 billion current account deficit in 2006 (the broadest measure of all U.S. trade and income flows). But for these purchases, the reduced demand would have put significant downward pressure on the U.S. dollar. A substantial depreciation in the dollar would begin to improve the U.S. trade deficit within a few years.
2. NewsHour with Jim
Lehrer transcript. 1999. "Online NewsHour: Opening
Trade—November 15, 1999."
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/asia/july-dec99/wto_11-15.html.
3. See Ratner (2006) for a more complete, technical description of this model.
4. For the purposes of this report, it is necessary to distinguish between exports produced domestically and re-exports—which are goods produced in other countries, imported into the United States, and then re-exported to other countries, in this case to China. Since re-exports are not produced domestically, their production does not support domestic employment and they are excluded from the model used here. See Table 1 for information about the levels of U.S. re-exports to China in this period.
5. This model assumes that everything else is held constant and the results are counterfactual estimates.
6. See the methodology appendix for computational details.
7. Other studies—see California State World Trade Commission (1996), which finds 47,600 jobs created in California from increased trade with Canada alone—have allocated all employment effects to the home state of the exporting company. This is problematic, because the production—along with any attendant job effects—need not have taken place in the exporter's state. If a California dealer buys cars from Chrysler and sells them to China, these studies will find job creation in California. However, the cars are not made in California; so the employment effects should instead be attributed to Michigan and other state with high levels of auto industry production. Likewise, if the same firm buys auto parts from China, the loss of employment will occur in auto-industry states, not in California.
8. Industry-specific producer price indices are unavailable for certain industries between 2005 and 2006. In order to construct price deflators for all 200 BLS industries, we used a combination of commodity PPIs and industry PPIs. For instance, NAICS-based industry 3331 (which maps to BLS industry 72) is composed of agricultural, manufacturing, and mining machinery manufacturing. To compute a price index for this industry, a trade-weighted average of the commodity indices for agricultural machinery and construction machinery was used as a proxy for the industry PPI. Industry PPIs were used wherever available.
Outsourcing Not the Culprit in Manufacturing Job Loss
Wes Iversen
December 9th, 2003
Reprinted from:Automation World
Productivity gains spawned by factory automation are driving a worldwide decline in manufacturing jobs, even in developing nations, says researcher.
For many Americans, the word “outsourcing” conjures up images of manufacturing job decline. But the United States is far from alone in losing manufacturing employment, points out Dan Miklovic (shown above), vice president and research director at GartnerG2, the business research arm of Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc. “Recent studies show that manufacturing jobs are declining everywhere,” said Miklovic, during a Nov. 17 panel discussion on outsourcing, part of a Global Media Summit sponsored by Rockwell Automation, Milwaukee.
Over the past decade, U.S. manufacturing jobs have declined by more than 11 percent, Miklovic noted. But at the same time, Japan’s manufacturing employment base has dropped by 16 percent, while the number of manufacturing jobs in countries including Brazil have declined by some 20 percent, he pointed out. “And one of the largest losers of manufacturing jobs has been China,” Miklovic added. “We like to pick on China and say that all of these jobs are going to China, but they’re losing jobs in manufacturing as well.”
The reason for the job losses? Miklovic summed it up in one word: automation. Through automation, he said, “we are really doing a good job of improving the productivity of people.”
Miklovic reminded media attendees at the panel session that 25 percent to 30 percent of the U.S. population was at one time involved in agricultural jobs. But today, only 3 percent of Americans work in agriculture, yet they have turned the United States into a net agricultural exporter, he noted. “The same thing is now happening in manufacturing,” Miklovic said. “Through automation, through improved productivity, we’re driving the number of jobs down on a global basis.”
Job loss in India
Confirmation came from another panel participant, K. Muralidharan, senior general manager for Sundram Fasteners Ltd., a major Indian automotive parts manufacturer. In India, he said, growing use of automation is holding down manufacturing job growth despite the large amount of outsourcing work that is flowing to the country. “I find that outsourcing in India has actually cost jobs in Indian industry, though in the long term, it will probably have a positive effect on employment,” Muralidharan said.
Manufacturing employment remains at about the same level in India today as it was during the recession of the late 1990s, according to Muralidharan. “The Indian economy is booming now, and it is predicted that in the next five years, the curve will only be upward. But still, the jobs and employment are not really growing at the same pace,” said Muralidharan. “The economies of scale that have been created due to outsourcing from developed countries have forced Indian industry to take on automation heavily, which was not the case about 10 years back,” he said.
GartnerG2’s Miklovic noted that the use of automation contributes to a cyclical situation in many industries. When a U.S. manufacturer develops a new product, for example, the company has first-mover advantage for a time. But in the next phase, when other manufacturers enter the market, competition often shifts to price. In response, some U.S. producers may move manufacturing offshore to developing nations, to take advantage of lower labor costs. However, said Miklovic, they frequently find that the level of automation and technology available in developing nations is less than that of the United States.
This means that U.S. manufacturers who then invest in sophisticated automation technology at home can gain the upper hand for a time over lower-priced imports, thanks to the higher quality product allowed by the automation, said Miklovic. But the automation technology used in the developing nations eventually catches up, giving products produced there the advantage, he added.
“We see this in semiconductors all the time,” Miklovic said. “Semiconductors typically have been produced in Japan and Taiwan. But now there is a booming semiconductor market that’s starting in China.” While the density and sophistication of semiconductor chips produced in China cannot yet match that of Japan and Taiwan, said Miklovic, China’s technology is moving in that direction.
“Automation only works for a period of time,” said Miklovic. The lesson for manufacturers is that they must continually reinvest in automation and innovation, he said. “If you stand still, ultimately you lose.”
Inetekk a USA company
Thomas Prendergast
Fall 2007
Corporate Site: Inetekk.com, Inc.
Inetekk was built in America by Americans!
All programming done by Americans
Sure it cost us more to build the Inetekk technology by ourselves and outsourcing to US programmers and US software developers. The prospect of sending our work abroad was never a consideration. Primarily doing so we lose the security of proprietary development to another country were we have little if any legal control regardless of how cheap that option could be. Then quality and communications is another factor, but we are also sensitive to doing business within our culture because of the process of getting what we are looking for and having the ability to have laws in effect that protect our interest in getting just what we are paying for.
Customer support by Americans
We are constantly getting offers to do our work at deep discounts by these foreign nationals, primarily India, but we are not cheap price motivated. Even our support service is run by Americans in America. We may ad to our support from Australia, but that is because they can offer the needed time frame for that region, not a cost consideration, so we can offer 24/7 seamless support for our clientele. Plus we have many Australian and New Zealander subscribers using our services and we love their accents.
Collocation in San Jose, CA USA
When we first started building the Inetekk systems, we went from a shared server in Florida to needing our own servers. We could have co located our servers in a foreign company for 1/3rd the cost but we realized by doing so our proprietary technology and secured databases would be at risk. Not a good idea. So we contracted with a well know company in San Jose. This was expensive but a very good decision. As the Internet has grown, the necessity to keep your data well secured is of the utmost importance and again, keeping this service local has proved to be a very good decision.
Servers built in USA
As we started building our server farm, again quality and service were the key issue. We went to a local shop in San Diego and hired them to build them. The first server, unaware to us, was built from foreign parts and within weeks the server started having failure issues. From then on we have demanded that all parts be US made as best we could and we have never had issues since. Our farm now runs with US made servers like NetAps, Intel, etc.
IT services by Americans
As with any server farm and web systems, having good IT professional's is imperative, and again, we hired US IT database engineers and server engineers. Same reason as our security is key and far more important than cost. For example, to use foreign IT services cost around $10 per hour. US costs are around $150 per hour. In my humble opinion, you get what you pay for.
The bottom line is future forecasting. I subscribe to the belief that our customers deserve the very best. Not only in the quality of the service, or the best customer support, but also security and the dedication to keep Inetekk around for the long run delivering the very best.
It seems the the big corporations in the US have lost sight to this fact and are all heading for serious issues as they continue down this road to losing control of their companies to the quest for seeking the lowest prices regardless. Take the Mattel toy company for example. Not long ago all their toys were US built. Today, they have lost major market share because the toys the sell now coming from Red China are toxic and low quality. It is scandalous that our children are getting toys painted with lead paint.
The future is at risk.
Thomas Prendergast
CEO
Inetekk.com, Inc.
Your job is secure if you are your boss
Bill Repp
October 14, 2007
Reprinted from: commercialappeal.com
Q: I've been out of work for nearly five months, and the prospect of getting a job in my field (mechanical engineering) doesn't look good -- unless I want to move my family across the country. I've always wanted to have my own business, but I'm worried about the comparative lack of job security that goes with it. What's your opinion? I'm over 50 and in good health. -- Deidre N.
A: You have a lot going for you: you've always wanted to have your own business, you're over 50, and you have good health. Security? You don't have it now, and you didn't have it when you got laid off. I don't think there's anything more secure today than working for yourself. Companies will cut any costs they have to just to stay in business, and the popular trend for the past several years has been to cut staff -- fast. And consider this: when you work for someone else -- big company or small -- only a few people -- your boss and one or two more managers -- control your future security. But with your own business, if you lose a few customers, you still have others to back you up. I've always thought that having my own business gives me more security, not less, than I'd have if I worked for someone else.
Another stunning fact of life: at 50, you're more likely to be more successful at hiring yourself than trying to convince someone else to do it. Fortune magazine once ran a cover story: "Finished at Forty," detailing the corporate trend of hiring younger people. As one CEO put it: "Why should I hang on to someone who's over 50? He's tired of the long hours and wants to spend more time with his family. He probably hasn't kept up with the newest technology. I have to pay him $75,000 a year or more, and he argues with me. I can hire someone in his 30's and pay him $35 to $40,000. He'll work 60 to 70 hours a week without complaining, and he won't argue with me. This is a no-brainer."
What Do YOU Want?
My best advice: do what feels right for YOU. When you're motivated and committed to a career you really like, the money and security usually take care of themselves. There's a big difference in putting in 50-60 hours a week into a job you love, and one you just feel so-so about. If you don't look forward to going to work when you get up in the morning, you're in the wrong job. Life is too short to work at a job you don't like.
Think carefully about how you want to spend one-third to half of the rest of your life (your waking hours). It you really think it's time to have your own business, then write your answers to these questions. They'll also form the foundation for a good business plan -- an absolute must if you want to succeed.
How would you describe your business (name, location, product/service?)
How would you describe your total target market -- the customers who will be willing to pay you for your products/services?
What industry, local, or consumer trends or needs will you react to?
How would you analyze, and then describe your competition (how many; current prices; their strengths/weaknesses)?
What are your marketing and business goals?
What are your first-year growth problems -- and how will you solve them?
What finances will you need to start the business and keep it going until it can stand on its own? How will you get them?
What's your operating plan for the next five years? (At least half of the new businesses started each year fail within the first 12 months. You must plan for a long-term business.)
What's your management plan to control and develop your basic operation/service?
What equipment, inventory, labor, space, overhead do you need?
Talk to Your Banker
Once your business plan is ready, prepare your personal financial statement (all your assets and liabilities). Next. prepare a projected balance sheet and profit and loss statement for your business -- at least for the first year. Then it's time to meet with your banker.
A good banker can advise you on the likelihood of your succeeding in getting a loan. He or she can point you in the right direction to get additional information. An excellent source for learning about starting your own business is on-line: Search for "sba.gov" and you'll discover a site that has all you need to know to write your business plan and finance your business. You'll even have models of nearly 100 business plans to study and benefit from. The rest is up to you -- and your energy and commitment.
Bill Repp is president of Organization Development Group, and has extensive experience in creating and delivering programs in marketing, communication, team building and business writing. E-mail Bill Repp at billrepp@rochester.rr.com
Testimonials
Inetekk Systems
November 09, 2007
Hear them live:
Sohomatic Back Office
NOTE: All of these testimonials are recent and unedited
When you subscribe to the Sohomatic back office you will be able to meet many of these people and hear their recorded meeting talking about what this system has done for them.Butch Hamilton
My name is Maria Angelozzi. I signed up previously, as a Silver member and was truly, amazed with what the system has to offer . I want to Thank Thom, and Mike, for putting such a Wonderful system together, and allowing others to share in this Wonderful Opportunity! I also, want to Thank the Trainers, they are all Wonderful! :)
Thanks Again,
Maria Angelozzi
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Veretekk Internet Marketing At Its Best
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I was a Silver Veretekk member for two years before I discovered the power that lies within the Veretekk Marketing System. It is not an easy system to understand but with the expert help of trainers such as Butch Hamilton and Leo Silvestri, I began a journey which is leading me on the road to my goals.
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There are more, a lot more, but you get the picture.