Cohen Joins Top Congressional Panel on Jobs and Outsourcing

CWA President Larry Cohen joined top political leaders and economists for a congressional roundtable Thursday on Capitol Hill to discuss the effects of globalization and outsourcing on American workers, and the role the government should play.

Cohen stressed the importance of passing the Employee Free Choice Act to give workers a collective voice and more job protection in the today's turbulent economy. He also discussed the impact of the United State's record trade deficit, over $700 billion this year. And he called for overhauling the broken American health care system, which is so grossly expensive to employers that it encourages them to take jobs overseas.

"When companies make investment decisions – in this country they have to provide workers with health care and that costs about $15,000 a year, almost as much as a minimum-wage annual income," Cohen said. "In other countries, they're figured out how to take that off the corporate balance sheet and move it to the social balance sheet."

The panel was put together by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chair of the House Committee on Financial Services. Members of Congress attending included House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), Rep. Sander Levin (D-Mich.), Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.)  Economists included Alan Blinder of Princeton University, Matthew Slaughter of Dartmouth and Jeff Faux of the Economic Policy Institute.

Cohen, the only labor representative at the forum, noted the vast differences for workers between companies that recognize union rights and those that don't, citing the 3,000 AT&T help desk jobs that had been outsourced and are now moving back into the United States. "That happened because 185,000 workers at AT&T have collective bargaining rights and management there is prepared to bargain and listen," he said.

He contrasted that experience with Alcatel-Lucent, whose French workers have union rights and are collectively fighting job cuts. In the United States, where most Alcatel-Lucent workers don't have union representation, the company is freely slashing jobs.

Blinder, who has written extensively on outsourcing and argues that 30 to 40 million American jobs will be vulnerable within the next 20 years, gave the panel's main presentation.

"The offshoring revolution will lead to more unemployment, more imports and lower real wages in jobs that are potentially offshorable," he said, urging better safety nets for displaced workers and more and better education for jobs of the future.

He outlined the differences between "impersonal" services that can be outsourced and "personal" services that generally can't, from doctors patients see in person to nurses, taxi drivers and janitors. But radiologists, security analysts, accountants and others in "impersonal" jobs are on their way to joining call center workers in the march toward outsourcing.

"The dividing line between personal and impersonal services will move over time," Blinder said. "As information technology improves, more and more personal services will become impersonal. No one knows how far this will go."