The U.S. Chamber and Jobs

The "JOBS" sign on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce headquarters: window dressing for the Chamber's empty jobs policy.

“...There are legitimate values in outsourcing...”
--U.S. Chamber CEO Tom Donohue, CNN Transcripts, February 2004

The U.S. Chamber has called for the creation of 20 million jobs by 2020. Unfortunately, the Chamber has shown far less concern for the jobs that American workers already have, consistently backing overseas outsourcing, even in the face of massive recession, surging unemployment and layoffs.The U.S. Chamber also opposed making sure that taxpayer bailout and stimulus money went to create American jobs, rather than be shipped overseas.  Chamber officials issued a bogus report claiming the legislation would cost America 176,800 jobs because other nations would retaliate by establishing similar provisions in their own stimulus bills.

It never happened. European Union countries, which had the same right to include local purchasing requirements in their stimulus bills, decided against imposing those conditions. And India, China and Brazil, which never signed onto World Trade Organization rules governing procurement, already had far more stringent local purchasing requirements – even before the world economy entered this deep downturn and global government poured a combined $1.7 trillion to stimulate their economies.

As Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman wrote on his blog to counter opposition to the Buy America rules: If every country adopted protectionist measures that “contained” the effects of fiscal expansion within its domestic economy, “then everyone would adopt a more expansionary policy and the world would get closer to full employment than it would otherwise.”

There’s nothing new in the U.S. Chamber championing the needs of U.S - based firms sending operations abroad. Since 2001, over 42,400 factories have closed and 5.5 million good-paying, goods-producing jobs have disappeared. And as this massive job loss occurred, U.S. Chamber CEO Tom Donohue took the lead in championing outsourcing with a callous disregard for the human tragedy behind the statistics.

“There are legitimate values in outsourcing – not only jobs, but work – to gain technical experience and benefits we don’t have here,” he told Lou Dobbs in 2004. “The outsourcing deal over three or four or five years . . . are only going to be, you know, maybe two, maybe three million jobs, maybe four.”

In an interview with The Straits Times of Singapore, he said “we are very confident that outsourcing is here to stay. And why not? It benefits everybody.” His advice for the unemployed? “Stop whining,” he told the Associated Press.