Obama, IT in India, and the Global Economy

This really has little to do specifically with India, but for the fact that it was an Indian fellow I follow on Twitter who set me off on this direction of thought:

Allow me to follow a very simplistic rule for a moment: If everyone in the mass media hates it, and I still think it’s an okay idea, it’s probably a really good idea.

Recently, President Obama has proposed what the MSM calls a radical, unorthodox, and foolish idea: he’s going to stop giving companies incentives to move jobs overseas.  So says the LA Times, Washington Post, and to some extent, the New York Times.  In the midst of this all, I’m trying to find some equilibrium that keeps foreign workers employed (who, by the way, have nothing like the social safety net we have here in America) while giving American labourers the opportunity to compete for jobs in a global economy.

Can we achieve parity with the competing interests of foreign and local job numbers?

For one, I think this is more a problem that global corporations are creating.  I’m in no way xenophobic, and not for a moment do I think that this is any fault of a group of workers looking for a job.  Rather, I place fault in the corporations who are all too willing to set aside ethical and just job standards to gain the most they can out of a worker’s efforts.  It is the fault of the companies who are taking advantage of the people, and not the people who are being taken advantage of.

But what of Obama’s new foreign economic policy move?  Is it too radical, harsh, or unfair?  My instinct tells me no.

It doesn’t seem harsh to reincorporate a job that moved out of the country beacuse of cheaper labor and lax foreign laws.  Injustice is moving a job to another nation because it’s cheaper and easier to take advantage of its people.  Yet immediately after typing this, I find myself worrying about workers of other nations who will be left out of jobs if corporations retract and pull jobs back into America.  Where’s their justice?

And it’s about at that point that I get stuck.  My desire to have an equal, global job market trumps any other thoughts I have on this subject.  Ideally, all job markets would be equal, and thus more based on skill and proximity.  How to achieve that standard is an impossible goal which I can only charge myself to think about in the years to come.

Do you have any ideas?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 at 11:10 pm and is filed under Comics, Policy, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.