corrente

"They said that President Bush's war in Iraq has cost the former Spanish Prime Minister his job. So President Bush isn't losing American jobs anymore, he's branching out to other countries."
- Jay Leno

"President Bush is now focusing on jobs. I think the one job he's focusing most on is his own. The White House is now backtracking from its prediction that 2.6 million new jobs will be created in the U.S. this year. They say they were off by roughly 2.6 million jobs." - Jay Leno

Ha Ha! Funny. But really fuckin' sad too. And Rick Perlstein of the Village Voice explains why:

Outsourcing and the sad little movement to stop it
The Jobs of the Future Are a Thing of the Past

Then there is garden-variety apathy. Recently an angry thread broke out on a listserv of tech workers in North Carolina after a company called Keane (slogan: "We Get IT Done") began boasting, on the underwriting ads it broadcasts on National Public Radio stations around the country, of its prowess at helping American companies move jobs overseas. A letter-writing campaign was proposed, and it shouldn't have been hard to achieve. NPR invites listeners to e-mail ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin front and center on its website; Dvorkin receives some 4,000 such missives a week. He's gotten all of five complaints about Keane's underwriting on NPR.

The ancient, everyday anxieties of workers suddenly finding themselves dispensable in a "dynamic" economy may finally be making it onto the cover of Time magazine; but the kind of people who read Time are turning out not to be very effective advocates for their own anxieties. Part of the problem is structural. Unions could be doing more to help. But the way the law works in the United States, you can't join a union if you serve in a "managerial" capacity. Service-oriented companies respond by classifying more and more of their workers as "managers"—where Charlene used to work, the official ratio of "managers" to "managed" is an unlikely 20 to one. [ Much more to read: Read the whole article ]

Unleash the missives! Fire away at NPR.

"In his annual economic report to Congress President Bush said that the transfer of American jobs overseas is actually part of a positive transformation that will enrich the U.S. economy over time. So basically, losing your job to someone else can be a good thing. Of course we'll see how he feels about that in November." - Jay Leno

Screw the Cheap Labor Laissez Faire Conservative Swindle!
Unionize it!

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