Bob McClure
Outsourcing of jobs must stop By BOB MCCLURE
Article published on Tuesday, Aug. 12, 2008 OK, it's bad enough that home insurance rates and taxes went sky-high a couple of years ago.

Recent spikes had us all gasping for air, which most of us still have not recovered from.

Making matters worse has been the downturn in the economy, spurred by a struggling real estate market and the passage of Amendment 1.

Through all of this another negative phenomenon has been taking place in larger numbers and it's something you don't hear our government leaders talking about too much.

We're talking about the loss of jobs to other countries. More specifically, outsourcing.

Outsourcing is nothing new. U.S. companies started it back in the 1980s.

It's basically a subcontracting process, such as product manufacturing, to a third-party company in the interest of lowering costs.

While, on the surface, it was once a good idea for some U.S. companies, it has become so prevalent now that it is ripping the heart out of the American work ethic.

Globalization and a weaker U.S. dollar have forced companies like Wisconsin-based Paper Converting Machine Co. to shrink a 2,000-person workforce in half and send about 900 jobs to China.

Other companies are following suit.

The Tampa Tribune is outsourcing its advertising production services to a cheaper company in India. According to a report on National Public Radio, an online community newspaper in Pasadena, Calif., recently outsourced its city council coverage to a company in India. Dell computers uses Pakistani and Indian workers on its help desk. So does America Online. And the list goes on.

Here locally, Coca-Cola announced plans last week to outsource about 150 accounting jobs from its Brandon-based Tampa Bay center to Guatemala, India and Poland.

As Apollo 13 astronaut James Lovell so famously quipped in 1970, "Houston, we have a problem."

And a big problem it is. Fewer jobs in this fine nation of ours means higher unemployment, which is a major ingredient to any recession.

This situation has been an accident waiting to happen for a long time. The question is how do we rebound from it?

Should U.S. companies be given incentives to return call centers and manufacturing to the United States? Maybe companies that outsource jobs should be hit with higher taxes and penalties. Perhaps something even more stringent should be invented. Maybe Congress needs to become involved.

It's anybody's guess and certainly not my area of expertise.

But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out a very simple solution that was once the hallmark of our nation.

Very simply, we need more manufacturing and exports. Only then will the dollar rebound and maybe the term outsourcing will be discussed only in history books.

Bob McClure is editor of the Seminole Beacon.