STOP Tax-PAYER SUSIDIZING of JOBS to Be Moved Over Seas !

Republicans Support Off-Shoring Jobs
By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

Like the clear results on a pH test strip, the vote in the U.S. Senate this week on the Creating American Jobs and Ending Off-shoring Act showed Republicans’ true color: Red. Red for China. Or Indonesia. Or Mexico. Or anywhere multi-national corporations get tax breaks for exporting American jobs. In this test of loyalty, every Republican in the Senate voted for corporate profits over American workers. No fluke, this is a GOP pattern. The red party has consistently sided with giant corporations to the detriment of the American economy and American workers. In voting against health care reform, Republicans chose giant health insurance corporations over uninsured Americans. In opposing financial reform, Republicans embraced Wall Street over the taxpayers who bailed out the big banks and don’t want to do it again. Republicans vainly attempted to rationalize those votes as opposing big government. There’s no big government issue in the Creating American Jobs and Ending Off-shoring Act. That Act would have removed tax incentives the U.S. government gives corporations when they close domestic factories, fire American workers and move production overseas. And, conversely, the Act would have instituted tax incentives for corporations to return foreign employment to U.S. soil. Every Republican in the Senate voted against the Act. They voted to continue forcing Americans to give tax breaks to corporations to ship their jobs overseas. The GOP said it is right and proper for Americans to pay multi-national corporations to kill American jobs. And Republicans said it would be wrong to do the opposite -- to use American tax dollars to encourage corporations to move off-shored jobs back to the U.S.
Democrats, whose first priority is American workers, are pushing a 17-bill Make it in America plan. The Creating American Jobs and Ending Offshoring Act is part of that effort to bolster domestic industry and employment. With unemployment stuck at 9.6 percent and with the U.S. trade deficit destroying or displacing 5.6 million jobs -- 70 percent of them good-paying manufacturing jobs -- in just one year – 2007, Democrats developed their plan to preserve American industry and jobs. Recent surveys of likely voters suggest the Democrats’ Make it in American plan is exactly what Americans want. A bi-partisan polling team that conducted a survey of likely voters for the Alliance for American Manufacturing in April found that large majorities believe that manufacturing strength is crucial to U.S. economic security and that the government should fortify American industry. These voters told the pollsters that they believe America no longer leads the world in manufacturing but could again with proper support. The can-do-it attitude is realistic based on recent on-shoring by American manufacturers. General Electric is moving production of its energy-efficient water heaters from China to the U.S. Caterpillar and NCR, a technology company,are doing the same. A survey in June found 21 percent of North American manufacturers brought production into or closer to the U.S. in the previous three months and another 38 percent planned to research doing that. Manufacturers gave USA Today numerous reasons for this repatriation. Chinese wages and shipping costs have risen. They also cited poor quality of foreign manufactured goods; theft of intellectual property; inability to respond to customer demand because of long product delivery times, and the need to keep the assembly line close to engineers and suppliers. The trade publication, Supply Chain Digest, quoted two experts in a story about the on-shoring trend in August: “George Stalk, a consultant at Boston Consulting Group, has led research efforts showing the inventory benefits for high margin, fashion-oriented goods from bringing production at least back to North America almost always trump the value of lower manufacturing costs in Asia. Those benefits come from both not losing sales from being out of stock and not getting stuck with obsolete inventory that a company can’t sell or must mark down dramatically.” And, the story quoted Jeremy Leonard, a consultant for Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI: “A lot of companies who have gone there to take advantage of cheap labor are starting to tell us that if you (calculate) total cost and don't just look at wages, it's actually not worth it." Democrats sought to nurture and expand the repatriation trend. But like numerous Make it in America bills passed by the U.S. House, Republicans in the Senate killed the Creating American Jobs and Ending Off-shoring Act. And they did it with a filibuster. Democrats had the majority with 53 votes for the measure, but Republicans, as they have all year, blocked passage by demanding a super-majority of 60.
The next test for Republicans will occur Nov. 2. In the mid-term election, Americans red-in-the-face angry at the GOP for extending tax breaks to corporations that expatriate American jobs can show Republican politicians what it feels like to lose a job.

Editorial : Tennessee`s Two Republican Senators were among the Wolve`s ! Wake up Tennesseans ~