Opportunity?

Rocky found this quote on the Internet the other day of unknown source:

“Seriously, you are going to be outraged over ‘illegal aliens coming and taking all of the good American jobs’ but you don’t say a word about American corporations hiring people overseas? General Electric, Caterpillar, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, Chevron, Cisco, Intel, Stanley Works, Merck, United Technologies, and Oracle cut their workforces by 2.9 million people over the last decade while hiring 2.4 million people overseas.”

Think about that for a moment. The movement of jobs overseas is a response to two large developments, I think. First is tax policy set by congress. That policy rewards American firms to earn profits off-shore and reduce its employment rolls at home. Pure and simple.

And second, the flattening of global marketplaces requires businesses to adopt global investment and participation. There doing so is quite natural and appropriate.

A few other thoughts are apropos here:

1. Pushing ‘illegal immigrants’ from southern states [state laws in Alabama and Mississippi which demand ‘your papers or deportation’] resulted in many abandoned jobs for which no locals offered to fill. This suggests immigrants are not taking jobs from ‘legal citizens’.
2. The laws of economics suggest strongly that jobs replaced by cheaper labor overseas allows our firms to redeploy labor resources to higher economic tasks. If this is true (and I don’t doubt that it is) the problem is more the need of new investment by firms to quickly make good use of our well-trained and creative workforce. This is being done in many innovative industries, but not done in slow moving, non-adaptive industries. This is another way of spotting opportunity. Where are the American entrepreneurs? Where are the investors? Are they seeking government protection? Are they actually too risk averse?

 I’m sensing an oxymoron here! We tend to blame that which we are impatient to fix. Or we blame that which we do not understand. Alert persons can benefit from this vacuum. Where are these people?

Change is not all bad. Change requires adaptability. Adopting the right change is the job of the entrepreneur or investor. And where are these people?

A good question. I don’t hear this discussed on CNBC!

June 25, 2012