Companies Are Beginning to Hire Again

I don't think that I'm an isolationist by any means. A lot of my friends are originally from other countries. I think that we should have a viable presence in the world, and be open to ideas from other places. But one area that I am a little isolationist is the drainage of jobs in America to other countries.

It seems that every time I call a corporation with a question or concern I run into the language barrier. I simply can't understand what the person on the other end of the phone is saying. They have to repeat what they are saying several times before I get the meaning.

Maybe it's just me I don't know. And sometimes it can really get kind of ludicrous. Like the time an AT&T employee with a heavy Indian accent told me that his name was John Wayne. I guess his parents must have been a big fan of the movies.

We have recently been through some tough economic times. We've had to bailout a number of large corporations that are "too big to fail." As a taxpayer, I now own a small part of General Motors. The rising unemployment rate here in the United States is a big thorn in President Obama's side. And the Republican solution of giving the corporations even more breaks so the money can "trickle down" is ridiculous.

No matter what, the unemployment rate continues to rise. But there was some good news recently. More jobs have been created recently. Some companies are rebounding from the recession/depression. The only problem is that most of the jobs that have been created lately have been overseas.

According to the St. Louis Post Dispatch:

"Corporate profits are up. Stock prices are up. So why aren't companies hiring?
Actually, many American companies are adding employees '" just not in the United States. For example, more than half of the 15,000 people that Caterpillar Inc. has hired this year were outside the U.S. UPS also is hiring at a faster clip overseas."

Except for 4% of the top 500 companies, all of them have reported increased profits this year.

To be fair to the companies, most of the added sales for these corporations have been overseas and not here in the United States. But I'm still sure that the payroll costs that they incur in another country are still a lot less than they would pay hiring American workers.

We have been losing jobs to other countries for two decades now. First, it was all of the manufacturing jobs and now even the service jobs are moving across the seas. Many times what's good for the big corporations is not so good for the American economy.

And now many of the goods that are made by American companies overseas aren't coming back over here. They are staying in the countries where they were made. I don't know what it will take for us to be able to compete in a world economy, but we'd better get started soon.

Source: http://www.stltoday.com/business/local/article_2d9db089-c92d-5294-9834-0673678b6f61.html