Outsourcing Of American Jobs Must Be Stopped

Have you ever called the customer service department of an American company and found yourself talking to a person who barely speaks English and clearly is speaking to you from a foreign country? This irritates me to no end. If I call an American company about a product or service I have purchased from them, I expect to be able to talk to an American who can help me -- not someone from the Philippines, India, South Africa, Indonesia or some other foreign country.

The reason that this happens (and it happens a lot) is because of American companies outsourcing American jobs. They have realized they can save money by sending those jobs to another country where they can pay wages that amount to only a fraction of what they would have to pay in this country.

That may make sense to the capitalists who care nothing about giving back to the country that made them great, but the continuing job drain is depressing wages and hurting American workers -- so the owners make huge profits while workers either lose their jobs or must work for inadequate wages.

During the 2008 campaign, President Obama and the Democrats promised to take steps to stop the outsourcing of American jobs. So far, nothing has been done. Hopefully, that is about to change. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-New York) is introducing a bill that would be a good first step in identifying and stopping some of this outsourcing.

Sen. Schumer's bill would do a couple of things. First, a customer service call could not be routed to a foreign country until the customer calling was first notified that the call was being rerouted out of this country. In addition, the company must pay a 25 cent tax for every call rerouted to a foreign country (and could not pass this charge on to the customer making the call). With the millions of customer service calls made each year, this tax could quickly take the profit out of the outsourcing.

This is a good bill, and I hope is it passed by the Congress and signed by the president. But it is not enough. We also need to do something about the many companies who have moved the production of their products to a third world country so they can abuse those workers by paying an extremely low wage (while taking jobs away from American workers).

When they try to import those foreign-made goods back into this country, they should have to pay an import tax -- a tax sufficiently high enough to make the cost of those goods the same (or higher) than they would be if made by American workers. When the cost of outsourcing no longer has any financial advantage, the outsourcing will stop.

This outsourcing has been going on for years now and has hurt American workers. It needed to be stopped anyway, but with the current recession this country is experiencing it is even more important that something be done to stop it.