¶ … Union Jobs Being Out-Sourced In recent years, the outsourcing of union jobs has emerged as a disturbing new trend affecting millions of middle-class workers everywhere. As a result of this devastation, the U.S. manufacturing sector and the permanent loss of millions of high-wage, good benefit, middle-class jobs, are now threatened with extinction (Gibson, 2004). Service jobs are affected, as well as high paying, professional and technical career opportunities due to the growing off-shoring movement. Although corporate America has already moved most of the high-paying manufacturing jobs overseas, even minimum wage jobs are becoming out-sourced.

The labor movement has fought the flawed trade and tax policies of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s that rewarded companies for shipping American manufacturing jobs overseas. For decades, unions such as the Teamsters, the United Auto Workers and the Steel Workers Union controlled a great deal of this nation's economy (Gibson, 2004). Researchers have argued that unions do share some of the blame for the now idle factories and manufacturing plants (Gibson, 2004). During the 1960's the corrupt Teamsters Union controlled the shipment of goods and the threat of strikes, walk-outs, and violence kept wages unfairly high in the labor industry (Gibson, 2004).

When manufacturing jobs started moving overseas in larger numbers, American workers were assured that the high-paying, high-skilled jobs would be kept, while the workers in developing countries would do the actual work of making things. Displaced workers were told to acquire new and better skills and more education in order to succeed in the changing American economy. Many workers did, but found that knowledge and talent could not compete against the chase...

Currently, many American companies have ceased hiring American workers and have begun to open plants, factories, and call centers in Third World countries.
Recently outsourcing has become big news because white collar jobs in areas such as telecommunications and information technology have been out-sourced to foreign workers (Thornton, 2004). According to a report by the U.S. China Economic and Security Commission, about 400,000 good-paying U.S. jobs in a broad range of service industries, are expected to be out-sourced to China and India (Kelber, 2004). Forrester Research Inc. predicts that American employers will move about 3.3 million white-collar service jobs and $136 billion in wages overseas in the next 15 years, up from $4 billion in 2000 (Kelber, 2004). A survey by Deloitte Research found that the world's 100 largest financial services firms expect to shift $356 billion worth of operations and about two million jobs to low-wage countries over the next five years (Kelber, 2004).

Lost employment due to off-shoring across many industries has already had a severe impact on the U.S. labor market, has stalled economic recovery and has alarmed policy makers.

Trade agreements must be fundamentally reformed to include enforceable protections for the rights of all workers to form independent unions, bargain with their employers, and reject child labor, forced labor and discrimination. Additionally, more extensive federally funded research must be conducted on an ongoing basis to better understand the full scope of the off-shoring problem, and the federal government must put in place adequate data collection programs on jobs that move off-shore. Education…