Is Outsourcing Jobs Funny? Ask NBC

Is it funny if your job was sent to India and you are losing your home and car? Is it a laugh if you find yourself working in Wal-Mart for $8 per hour when you formerly earned $20 per hour?
NBC has the nerve to put a situation comedy in its Thursday night line up of shows called “Outsourced,” making a joke out of the fact so many American jobs have been sent overseas.
I would expect NBC, which is a corporate monster owned by General Electric, to insult the intelligence of the American public. It is little surprise General Electric would look favorably at outsourcing jobs overseas since it started its own outsourcing company called Genpact.
I also must question how people from India feel watching a show where they are portrayed as somewhat clueless and simple-minded.
The official description from NBC: “Outsourced is NBC’s new workplace comedy series centered around a catalog-based company, Mid America Novelties, that sells American novelty goods including whoopee cushions, foam fingers and wallets made of bacon, and whose call center has suddenly been outsourced to India.
After recently completing Mid America Novelties’ manager training program, Todd Dempsy learns that the call center is being outsourced to India, and he is asked to move there to be the manager. Having never ventured out of the country, he is unprepared for the culture shock.
Overwhelmed, Todd discovers that his new staff needs a crash course in all things American if they are to understand the U.S. product line and ramp up sales from halfway around the world.”
Some call center jobs may return to the U.S. from India because wages have fallen so sharply in our country. The Financial Times reports: “high unemployment levels have driven down wages for some low-skilled outsourcing services in some parts of the U.S., particularly among the Hispanic population.
At the same time, wages in India’s outsourcing sector have risen by 10 per cent this year and senior outsourcing managers based in the country command salaries above global averages.”
“We’re still shipping the good jobs to places like India — the low-paying jobs being sent back here ‘because of cost advantage’ won’t bring any sustainable boost to U.S. employment,” said Ron Shah of Geena Ventures, an India-centric private equity firm, in a interview with CNBC’s Fast Money,
Let NBC know you don’t think having your job outsourced is funny. See a petition at: www.thepetitionsite.com/1/ProtestOutsourced/
An estimate earlier this year found at least 300,000 call center workers in India. Average wage for such workers is $3,000 per year.
In 2004, Sen. Joseph Lieberman warned, “Bit by bit, we’re not just moving good jobs overseas, but we may be transporting big blocks of our innovation infrastructure, the talent and technology that fueled our record setting growth and prosperity in the 1990’s.”
I hear outsourcing explained away by television commentators with the phrase “that America is no longer a manufacturing nation.”
In the Huffington Post, Leo W. Gerard, president of United Steelworkers International, interviewed Richard McCormack, founder and publisher of Manufacturing and Technology News.
McCormack said that a solid economy rests on manufacturing products of real value. He said a defining event for our country’s economy was when Wal-Mart replaced General Motors as this nation’s largest employer.
“Americans have allowed the big corporate multinational companies and their agents to take control of their political system. It remains to this day a system that is stacked against American workers and American taxpayers. Americans have not entered the fight to save American jobs.
I wonder if the middle class is drugged up on Britney Spears, Michael Jackson and Tiger Woods; addicted to sugar, salt and fat; fake “news” shows on television; and Prozac to deal with depression and lull them into thinking that their condition is beyond control.”
“Something is stopping Americans from getting off their couches and demanding a voice in America’s economic future. Americans have lost their country to a few people who make a lot of money off outsourcing, off-shoring and importing everything Americans used to make and continue to buy. Americans must take their country back before it is too late,” he continued.
McCormack said that a country that doesn’t make what is consumes is going to fail.
“The financial meltdown wasn’t caused by the housing bubble or the financial bubble or the dot-com bubble, although all of those things contributed. It was caused by the simple fact that American consumers have sent all of their wealth to China, Korea, Japan, Germany and Mexico, buying all of the things they once made,” said McCormack.
No one is talking about bringing back jobs to America, not President Obama, not the Democrats, not the Republicans, not the Tea Party. I don’t believe we are in a recession. I believe this is the new American economy. Without major action, this depressed economy is here to stay.