NAFTAed in the Back by Congress

It all sounded good. Like the European Union, North America would stop charging tariffs on goods shipped inside the northern hemisphere. It sounded fair. Mexico wouldn't be penalized for growing tomatoes and could sell them in the United States for more money than before. Then with the extra money they could afford to buy US manufactured machinery cheaper, to harvest their tomatoes. That makes for a win-win situation, right? Canadian-American trade, already our biggest trading partner, increases with tariffs out of the way. It would be just one big happy family of trading partners, with everyone getting richer. What's not to like, on a deal like that.

Ross Perot, a multi-millionaire from years of lobbying in Washington, cried out, "I can hear a giant whooshing sound of American jobs rushing to Mexico." This especially interesting since part of the whooshing sound was him moving production to Mexico and laying off thousands of Americans. Others were saying on the propaganda circuit that it would drastically cut down on the mass migration from south of the Rio Grande. At the same the WTO proposed a world-wide free trade zone, where all the peoples of the earth live in harmony and love; where their labor is exchanged in a fair manner such that they receive a living wage.

The other side of "outsourcing" American manufacturing, customer service, and technical jobs is "insourcing". That's where the flood gates of immigration are cranked wide open; allowing tens of millions of workers from all over the world pour into our country to underbid Americans on jobs that can't possibly be physically shipped abroad. Like groundskeepers, janitorial, waste management, retail sales, fast food, restaurants, all types of home maintenance services, every job that had to be done here inside our borders. With companies claiming they can't find qualified people here to do what must be done; they request the federal government take all caps off every type of work visa on the books, all this because they can't find M.I.T. graduates in engineering to work for $18,000/year. The president gets on TV and says we need the undocumented workers because Americans refuse to do the work that has to be done. He doesn't mention that the jobs pay half of minimum wage and workers are often not paid at all by his supporters. Care is taken that the census avoids accurately counting the influx of people to this country, which is why when you're out and about; you can go hours without hearing English spoken. Russian, Cambodian, Hungarian, Mandarin, every tongue of the world but English. I don't blame any of them for wanting to get out of their old country, but the fact their underbidding American citizens for jobs is never talked about in polite society, where all the wealth is gathering in secret Swiss bank accounts.

Then there's the "No Child Left Behind" legislation, where the federal government requires by law, certain guarantees be given to all students, but fails to provide funding for those new demands. The president says on TV that our children need to study hard to compete in this new world, but fails to say where they are to live and what they're to eat when competing with a PhD from Bombay asking $8,000/year over the internet. This obvious oversight makes these statements absurd in nature, and vicious in intent.

So, after a decade of "downsizing" starting in 1980; the new word was strategic sourcing. You remember downsizing, that's where corporations were able to get rid of the same men that had made their growth possible through hard work, long hours, and well deserved raises and promotions. Now, with the mechanisms in place to run an efficient company in place, younger men were given the same titles, only at half the pay, sometimes a third. Mistakes were made by lack of experience and expertise, but the upper management had no problem since their retirements were secured by this point. And if a company went under they merely jumped to another company and rode that gravy train.

Before downsizing there was the technology revolution of the seventies. You know where customers could bring up a screen and check their orders so companies could lay off the customer service people, who used to expedite and quote lead times. Now the customer could see right away what the projected ship date would be, with no way to ask a live person to help get it done sooner. Finally, sales people would just tell the customer 6-8 weeks and if it didn't happen, they'd say 2 more weeks, and if that didn't happen they'd say 2 more weeks, and so on until the customer gave up asking. A type of service economy they still tout as the best in the world to this day.

My question is, where do I work until I'm 62 and have to settle for a greatly reduced social security check, that's made even smaller by being denied the last ten years of work at good pay earned over three decades of experience in manufacturing. I was laid off at 28 by technology, downsized out of management at 40, and now after working my way up a third career path, I've been NAFTAed in the back at 55. With 7 years to go and only 30-40 year olds as hiring managers, I have no idea what to do now. Sixty interviews and over 10,000 resume submissions says I'm not going to be a buyer. Was the "golden years" referred to, in many a retirement planning seminar, like the grasses of California in the summer, sniff and dead?