outsourced/offshored to death

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American Workers -
Outsourced/Offshored To Death
By Terry Graham
5-2-5

Three Americans died in Colorado last week, victims of our government's failure to protect its employers' -- Citizens -- jobs and access to healthcare.

The murder-suicide deaths of a Colorado Springs mother and her two young sons left a husband and father without a family. While depression is blamed, the fact is another American breadwinner lost his software engineering job and was forced to relocate to the East Coast to earn a living while his family stayed behind.

When his wife lost her temp job and expressed growing despair, friends called local police who took her to a hospital for evaluation. Jobless, probably without medical insurance, her husband thousands of miles away and aware her children were too young to be alone, she checked herself out of the hospital, bought a handgun, and chose a permanent solution to a growing problem: foreigners taking jobs Americans need with the blessing of our so-called "representatives".

This tragedy occurred as Colorado's Governor Bill Owens (governorowens@state.co.us), lobbyists and legislators killed a bill to bring home tax-funded, offshored jobs -- including programming jobs that might have saved this family.

Senate Bill 05-023, the "Keep Jobs in America Act," would have required Colorado to use tax dollars to hire US workers, ending the State's practice of hiring foreigners.

Introduced in January by State Senator Deanna Hanna (D), SB 05-023 prohibited Colorado from securing services from a contractor/subcontractor using "offshore" foreign-based workers. The Bill required prospective contractors to certify that all services would be performed in the United States when submitting a bid to a State agency.

Contractors failing to comply with those terms risked contract termination, civil lawsuits, and stiff penalties including damages to the State agency equal to the amount that agency paid for work performed outside of the US, plus damages related to contract termination. Violators would be barred for three years from contacts with Colorado.

SB 05-023 was the legislative outgrowth of a proposed Colorado ballot initiative, "Hire Americans First," which fell short of required signatures last summer. I personally collected 250 signatures, speaking with scores of frustrated, angry Coloradans sick of greedy globalist employment scams paid for with our tax dollars.

Support for this populist initiative crossed political, social, economic, educational and racial lines. Many eager signers had lost jobs to foreign workers. (Last week, Microsoft's Bill Gates demanded the US government issue unlimited visas to foreign high-tech workers.)

Young parents spoke of friends who had been laid off, worried they were next. Middle-aged signers described once-flourishing careers lost to foreigners whom they had been forced to train. Many lamented that their children could not pursue technical training because insourcing/offshoring left a dead end for Americans.

Some expressed valid concerns about security/identity theft intrinsic to offshoring. Foreign workers often have easy, unregulated access to highly sensitive personal information including Social Security numbers, income/assets, bank account records, etc. (In April, police arrested 16 offshored call-center employees in India for allegedly cheating Citibank customers out of nearly $350,000.)

One woman ushered a young boy into a store and returned to tell me that his father had lost his job and health insurance to a foreigner. That boy's dad died last year, unable to afford treatment for his heart condition.

A few years back, these talented Americans would have been at the peak of their earning power, preparing for comfortable retirements. Today, many eke out a living, clinging to the thin veneer of our shrinking middle-class.

As unpaid volunteers gathered signatures for "Hire Americans First," State of Colorado spokesholes insisted "we' need offshore workers in India and China because they can work when Coloradans sleep! (These bureaucratic bozos will get a 3% pay increase this year, even though inflation is one-tenth of one percent.)

Hanna's SB 05-023 was a second chance to stop exporting good jobs created and funded by, and for, Colorado's Citizen-taxpayers.

Originally deemed to have no fiscal impact upon the State's budget, the bill stalled when Gov. Owens' Dept. of Personnel and Administration announced it would cost the State $24 million to hire Americans rather than foreigners.

Sen. Hanna calls the $24 million price tag "bogus," designed to ensure the bill would not survive.

"No one has a clue how many [State] jobs are being offshored, what contracts have offshored jobs, or whether the products purchased have been delivered,"she says.

In February, Republican Senator Ron May (ronmay@ronmay.org) , who runs a computer consulting firm, said that, "Considering that technical services for the State's IBM main processing unit is located in Asia, and two software packages utilized are made in London and Israel, 'potential increase' would become an assured reality..."

Do tell, Sen. May, what information is stored in "Asian" computers run by "Asian" workers? Who has access to it? How much are we paying for this foreign operation? Are Coloradans -- your constituents and employers -- too stupid to handle our own high tech needs?

May further claimed that SB 05-023 "will increase costs by depriving citizens of government services at the lowest possible price, decreasing competition among vendors and maintaining a monitoring system."

What do May and others have to say about the State of Colorado's new software package -- designed to determine eligibility for Medicaid, Food Stamps and other services? The system, designed by EDS with an unknown number of "offshore" workers, crashed and burned, putting many vulnerable Citizens at risk while costing the State a bundle of our money.

"The offensive part is that offshoring is touted as a way to save money on the backs of the American workers without jobs," says Hanna, who believes auditing offshored projects would reveal significant problems.

"We are spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about tax incentives to bring good jobs to Colorado," she says. "Why should we use our tax dollars to send jobs out of Colorado?"

Though SB 05-023 was approved by Colorado Senate's Business, Labor & Technology Committee, Hanna pulled the bill given Gov. Owens' threat to veto it. Deep-pocket globo-business groups also fought it.

Still, Hanna promises to bring the bill back when more support is available. "The people of Colorado deserve no less," she says.

Public servants are supposed to serve Citizens, protecting our health, safety and welfare. Contact your representatives, including Senator Hanna (deanna.hanna.senate@state.co.us), for steps you can take to make that happen.


© 2005 Terry Graham.

Terry Graham, an American Citizen, was assaulted by a Mexican national last July at a public forum on immigration sponsored by First Data Corporation/Western Union in Denver. She has filed a civil lawsuit (http://www.freespeechforum.org) seeking damages from her attacker and First Data/Western Union. She can be reached at teegra22@yahoo.com.

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