Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to re: 308,000 new jobs; It's damn well about time! There is no general prosperity without general employment. If this keeps up, Bush just might get re-elected. (I hope.)

The other side of outsourcing

Some are calling it "insourcing."

U.S. receiving more 'outsourced' jobs than it's losing:

Bell and BMW illustrate the flip side of the election-year debate in the United States over job "outsourcing." While U.S. companies including Hewlett-Packard Co., the world's second- largest computer maker, and AIG Life Insurance Co., the world's largest insurer, have transferred white-collar work to low-wage countries such as India and China, more jobs are coming the other way, according to government estimates and trade analysts.

"Any way you slice it, the world is creating or transferring more jobs to the U.S. than we are doing to the rest of the world," said Daniel T. Griswold, a trade specialist at the Cato Institute, a research organization in Washington.

India's Essel Propack Ltd., Taiwan's Teco Electric & Machinery Co. and Denmark's Vestas Wind Systems A/S all have built plants in the United States in the last year and a half.

Other non-U.S. companies announced plans to increase hiring in the United States last year including Japan's Nissan Motor Co., with 3,350 jobs in Canton, Miss.; DaimlerChrysler AG of Germany, with 2,000 at a new Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Ala.; German appliance distributor BSH Bosch and Siemens Hausergate GmbH, with 1,300 in New Bern, N.C.; and Magna International Inc. of Canada, with as many as 800 in Bowling Green, Ky.

The movement of U.S. jobs abroad "has been blown out of proportion" mainly because domestic companies in the United States have been slow to increase hiring, said Martin Baily, chairman of former President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers. "There was lots of offshoring going on in the 1990s, but job growth was so strong in the U.S. that nobody really took much notice."


The article concludes:

The 57-year-old Bush holds up the creation of U.S. jobs by companies from abroad as an example of the benefits of free trade. In a speech in Cleveland on March 10, he said 10 percent of Honda's worldwide workforce lives in Ohio. Honda has two vehicle-assembly plants in two Ohio towns.

"About 16,000 Ohioans work for Honda, with good, high-paying jobs, and that's not counting the people who work at 165 different Ohio companies that supply Honda with parts and material," Bush said. "When politicians in Washington attack trade for political reasons, they don't mention these workers, or the 6.4 million other Americans who draw their paychecks from foreign companies."

Even companies from India are creating jobs in the United States. India's Essel Propack, the world's largest maker of laminated tubes for packaging consumer products, based in Mumbai, is adding 50 positions to its toothpaste tube manufacturing plant in Danville, Va. The additions will bring total employment at the factory to 137.

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