Senator John Kerry has placed the politically sensitive issue of US job exports to low cost Asia at the heart of his campaign, vowing to plug legal loopholes promoting offshore outsourcing.
Both Kerry and his vice-presidential running mate John Edwards said in their nomination acceptance speeches at the Democratic party convention last week that they would move swiftly to curtail shipping of jobs overseas.
Kerry told cheering delegates he would "close the tax loopholes that reward companies for shipping jobs overseas" and instead "reward companies that create and keep good paying jobs right where they belong -- in the good old USA."
He has promised the most sweeping reform of international tax law in four decades to halt the flow of American jobs overseas. At least 38 state legislatures have or are considering anti-outsourcing proposals.
"We value an America that exports products, not jobs and we believe American workers should never have to subsidize the loss of their own job," Kerry said as he placed tax changes to check outsourcing as part of his "economic plan to build a stronger America."
With the unemployment hovering at 5.6 percent, President George W. Bush has come under fire for more than two million job losses during his tenure and a ballooning trade deficit of US$46 billion, highlighting the tensions over moving employment overseas.
Most of the US jobs are going to Asia, particularly India and China as well as Southeast Asia, including the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand.
"I think I speak for millions of our neighbors when I say: We are tired of seeing American jobs shipped overseas," said Stephanie Tubbs-Jones, a Democratic party lawmaker from Ohio, where 250,000 people have lost their jobs since Bush, a Republican, took office in 2001.
"In my homeland of Cleveland, the unemployment rate is over 11 percent, and more than 24,000 workers stand in the unemployment line instead of on a factory line," she told the Democratic convention.
Backing Democratic party concerns over outsourcing is the 13 million strong American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organization (AFL-CIO), the largest US workers' union group.
At the convention, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney introduced to delegates a machinist from Iowa whose job in a printing plant was shipped to China.
Now, he works in a grocery store for half the wages with no health insurance and pension benefits, Sweeney said.
But the US Chamber of Commerce, which is leading the effort to stop laws that seek to punish firms for shipping jobs overseas, said offshoring was part of free trade.
Restricting US firms from sourcing globally would invite reprisals from trading partners, undermine competitiveness and threaten American global leadership, said the chamber, representing 3 million companies, in a report to both Republican and Democratic parties ahead of elections.
Chamber President Thomas Donohue said it was important not to confuse jobs sent overseas with those that were disappearing from the US economy.
"These jobs, mostly in manufacturing, aren't going to China or Mexico. They are going to a country you've never heard of -- a country called `productivity,'" he said.
In the first government report on outsourcing, the Bureau of Labour statistics found that just two percent of all mass layoffs in the first quarter of the year were associated with the movement of work outside the US.
Donohue said a "rough consensus" was that 300,000 to 500,000 service jobs have been moved so far and that an average of 250,000 per year could move over the next decade.
He said moving work overseas allowed companies to be close to key, emerging markets and strengthen their bottom lines, reduce consumer prices, focus on more profitable operations and create new and better jobs in the US.
But Hillary Clinton, a Democratic senator, cited a recent study which showed that savings from the shipping of jobs overseas were exaggerated.
The senator represents New York, where nine out of the 10 largest firms surveyed are predicted to perform IT or business process work offshore.
The primary reason given by 90 percent of them was "cost savings" but a study which analyzed these savings found that they were not as large as many employers believed, Clinton said in a commentary in the Wall Street Journal last week.
She called for a national agenda that promotes research through tax credits and further direct investments in science as well as tax incentives for jobs.
"We cannot afford to fall behind India and China, who graduate far larger numbers of scientists and engineers," she said.
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