T.C. Moore says:

1) You posted this already.
2) It seems more of a political piece, than hard numbers and information about their treachery. It also looks like a list of the biggest companies, with their current CEOs, not who actually started the outsourcing trend (so you can pursue your “Indian Executives Conspiracy” theory, John.)
3) G.E. has been an international company for decades. Why doesn’t Arianna mention the thousands of jobs that have been “outsourced” to Ireland?

Which ironically means that the real culpability falls on the small, home-grown firms that did not have any off-shore employment until recently, like Dell and Earthlink. How many of these jobs were added during the dot-com boom, when we practically had full employment (especially in tech)?

4) How come Wal-Mart isn’t on this list? They do far more damage with their constant downward pressure on prices, and preference for Chinese suppliers. They all but tell their suppliers “if you can’t compete, maybe you need to open a factory in China”.
So they can reduce the price of a garbage can by 1 buck.

I looked at Lou Dobbs’ site. It’s practically a list of the Fortune 500, and a lot more. Which proves that everybody does it. The kicker is that Wal-Mart is not on there! They have a full time office in Shenzen where they deal with the 80% of Wal-Mart’s 6000 suppliers that are based in China. What a crock.

If this debate is going to mean anything, we have to be a lot more discerning about what’s supposedly right and wrong. Creating jobs overseas is not bad, especially if your growth is constrained in the US. Moving jobs overseas is apparently the issue, but what if you have had overseas operations for decades? If a company concentrates their growth overseas, instead of in the U.S., is that bad?

I found out this week that SUN is laying off developers in distressed divisions, while they are sponsoring H1-B visa holders in the US as “Software Quality Engineers”. Surely if you write software, you can also guage it’s quality. One difference is how much they get paid. But would a writer of hardware device drivers want to move over and test Java software, and take a pay cut? Meanwhile, the trend is to locate their SQE teams over in Russia, where they can hire 3 people in St. Petersburg for 1 person in the Silicon Valley.

No one is safe anymore.

What we need are specific anecdotes of corporate behavior like this, instead of broad numbers and ridiculous charges of colusion or “partners in crime” by quoting political donations. Given the differences between the Democrats and Republicans, any businessman would be insane to support the Democrats. (Unless they hate freedom. 😉