Ms. Fiorina is representative of the new class of elite traitors, that care only for profits and not for the welfare of their fellow citizens. Around the world they scurry, always seeking the lowest prices for labor and resources. and it is all justified by the god of the bottom line. Only when they need the muscle of the military do they remember their fellow citizens and U. S. blood and treasury will be spilled to ensure maximum private profits.----rng
Unfortunately, Ms. Fiorina forgets that in outsourcing these jobs she is also outsourcing industrial and manufacturing knowledge as well. These things, like jobs, cannot be brought back. To put it another way, we are hollowing out our hi-tech industries just like we hollowed out our car and steel industries. ----lee
Economists largely agreed with the high-tech industry's outspoken defense of moving jobs to India and China but noted this time the principle applies to a group unaccustomed to losing their jobs to overseas competition: highly educated and highly paid white-collar workers in
Silicon Valley.
Comments made in Washington on Tuesday by Carly Fiorina, CEO of Palo Alto information technology giant
Hewlett-Packard, and Craig Barrett, chief executive of Santa Clara chipmaker Intel Corp., drew an unusually strong reaction from workers, who suggested the pair forfeit their own highly paid jobs to Chinese or Russian executives working for a quarter of their pay.
Fiorina's statement that "there is no job that is America's God-given right anymore" triggered particularly strong reaction. The pair spoke in Washington representing the Computer Systems Policy Project, a group of eight chief executives from the nation's top information technology firms.
They sought to head off rising protectionist sentiment in Congress by urging that the only way to protect
U.S. high-tech jobs over the long haul was to become more competitive.
Warning that the U.S. lead in high technology is in serious jeopardy from competition from other nations, they outlined a long-term agenda to improve grade-school and high-school education, double federal spending on basic research in the physical sciences and form a national policy to promote high- speed broadband communications networks, as Japan and Korea have done.
The CSPP report, called "Choose to Compete," states that the tech industry faces a serious competitive challenge from many countries abroad with highly skilled labor and increasing industrial sophistication, but it argues against protection. "Retreating from global competition is a certain prescription for failure," the report said.
The report says many new jobs will be available when the economy fully recovers, but it asks, "Who will land these jobs? Not the millions of American students who graduate from high school without basic reading, writing and mathematics skills. Not the astonishing number of American students -- upwards of 25 percent -- who drop out of school."
But with unemployment at 7.2 percent in
Santa Clara County in November, the latest figure available, Fiorina's statement hit a sore spot.
"I am curious how Ms. Fiorina would feel about her job being outsourced to China or India," Sean Ryan of Alameda, where the county unemployment rate is 6.1 percent, wrote in a representative e-mail to The Chronicle. "I am certain that there are many extremely bright, ambitious and successful executive types in those countries who would be able to do her job just as well if not better than she can at a cost savings to HP shareholders of millions of dollars per year."
Many Bay Area residents argued that it was the low wages in India and China that were motivating Silicon Valley corporations, not a lack of skilled U.S. workers. Some argued for "Buy America" campaigns and greater U.S. self- sufficiency.
"I have many, many friends who are unemployed, and continue to be so because they are 'over-qualified' or 'not a good fit' for a particular position," one tech worker at Bechtel Corp. in Seattle wrote. "I'm talking about people with degrees from Caltech and Stanford. ... It's not that Indians and Chinese are better educated. It's that they'll work for cheap, and they'll work for what most Americans couldn't live on. That's the issue."
But economists view the changes in Silicon Valley as an inevitable byproduct of the continuing flux of dynamic economies, termed "creative destruction" by the famous economist Joseph Schumpeter.
They say the alarm in Silicon Valley about job losses to India and China is no different from equally painful dislocations in older U.S. industries such as steel, apparel, textiles and agriculture as the world increasingly moves to a global market.
(Note: There is a big difference between losing a job to a local intra-country corporation and to a corporation based in asia-especially a hostile one like China. -------lee)
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