Cohen, Solis Rally Workers To Bring Jobs Home

CWA President Larry Cohen rallies activists in San Francisco in a call to bring jobs home.

Labor Secretary Hilda Solis and CWA President Larry Cohen on Tuesday rallied California labor activists around one simple message: Bring Jobs Home!

Protesters flooded San Francisco's Union Square to call on Congress to end tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas.

"It's not just manufacturing jobs that are outsourced...it's all of our jobs, anything they can move, they move," Cohen said. "In five years, 500,000 call center jobs were moved out of this country."

CWAer Christina Huggins, an AT&T technician, told the California Labor Federation's blog that the company downsized her five-building complex to just one floor.

"When we look at our internal directory at AT&T, we see all of our jobs are now in Slovakia, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in Manila — all of these workers with the titles of what we used to do," she said. "And those were all good-paying, union jobs with pensions."

The rally was just one of many events around the country highlighting the AFL-CIO's Bring Jobs Home campaign.

Over the past decade, more than 50,000 manufacturing sites closed and 6 million American manufacturing jobs were lost to offshoring. More than 500,000 call-center jobs have also been shipped out of the country.

Last week, a majority of senators voted in favor of the Bring Jobs Home Act — legislation that would close the loophole allowing outsourcers to still be eligible for tax breaks and provide incentives to companies that bring good jobs back from overseas. The bill failed to get the 60-vote "super majority" needed to break a Republican filibuster and move the bill to the Senate floor. The final vote was 56-42.

But California is currently considering AB 2508, which would ensure that all call centers for public services, such as CalWorks, are staffed only with workers employed in California.