By Jamie McKenzie (about author)

© 2004, Jamie McKenzie, all rights reserved

The loss of nearly three million good factory jobs during the Bush administration is soon to be followed by the loss of another three million well paid jobs during the next few years - white collar jobs being exported as fast as call centers and engineering departments can be created overseas.

Recently, President Bush promised three million new jobs by the end of the year, but this sudden, lately discovered passion for job creation seems hollow and fake. He sold his tax breaks for rich people on the argument that it would create jobs during 2003, but he fell short by hundreds of thousands of broken promise jobs.

What does this have to do with NCLB/Helter-Skelter?

If you take away the good jobs, you undermine the conditions that lead to school success. If parents are scraping by at low wages or no wages, children face many obstacles to success and are far less likely to do well in school. They are unlikely to enter school, as an earlier Bush put it, "ready to learn."

It's Poverty, Stupid!

This dangerous trend to export good jobs is called offshoring. Free trade and new technologies have opened the door to the wholesale export of jobs to countries where pay is 1/10th or less of American pay scales and workers often labor under conditions prohibited by laws in the United States. A century of progress toward building an affluent middle class is being eroded in a single decade.

The President's sudden job promises ring hollow without a concrete program to reverse dangerous trends identified by even the conservative media such as the Wall Street Journal.

Note articles such as "IBM Documents Give Rare Look At Sensitive Plans on 'Offshoring' When Shifting Jobs Abroad, It's $12.50 vs. $56 in Pay, And 'Sanitize' the Memos
By WILLIAM M. BULKELEY - Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL - January 19, 2004

The End of the American Office Worker? When I called the customer service number on my credit card, I had trouble understanding the person who answered my call. She asked me to repeat myself several times. I asked her to repeat herself several times. The problem I was calling about involved an online payment through the company's web site, and it soon became clear that she did not grasp the meaning of my idiomatic language. "Where is your calling center located?" "We're not allowed to give out that information, sir." I asked to speak with a supervisor. "Hi, this is Tom. I'm a supervisor in the Chicago office. How can I help you?" I explained I wanted to know the location of the call center that first responded to my call. He put me on hold while he checked. "That call center is in India," he announced. According to various projections, many U.S. companies will be shifting their white collar jobs overseas in this decade, saving a fortune in labor costs. (See coverage in the Wall Street Journal - January 19, 2004, "IBM Documents Give Rare Look At Sensitive Plans on 'Offshoring' When Shifting Jobs Abroad, It's $12.50 vs. $56 in Pay, And 'Sanitize' the Memos By WILLIAM M. BULKELEY - Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL) First the factory jobs. Now the white collar jobs. I cancelled my account in protest.

In a gesture of profoundly cynical opportunism, the Bush administration proposed a "guest worker" provision to make legal the millions of illegal immigrants now working in the USA - an ironic inshore version of offshoring - the importation of low wage workers to populate the non-union, low-paying jobs of this nation.

It's Poverty, Stupid!

Despite all the talk of improving education for children, the Bush approach puts too much focus on educational outcomes and too little on inputs - both social and educational. While we have clear evidence that much school failure is rooted in poverty and economic disadvantage, the labor, trade and economic policies of this administration worsen those social and economic conditions, increasing the number of children who do not arrive in school ready to learn.

A decade back, a previous President Bush promised that all American children would enter kindergarten ready to learn, but it was one more false promise. Current labor trends undermine the broad-based prosperity that is required to nurture young children and achieve the kinds of learning desired. Raising the educational high jump bar for starving children creates no Olympic champions.

What does this have to do with NCLB/Helter-Skelter?

NCLB's focus on high stakes testing and punishment without adequate funding or support for capacity building will actually drive millions of students into the streets without graduating - a reality well documented in Texas, where NCLB's parent was tried for a decade with disastrous results for a million children.

Henry Ford famously figured out the need to pay workers well enough so they might turn around and buy cars. The current administration builds tax policy around cuts for the wealthiest and is able to manage only a "jobless recovery" as the rich get richer and the rest of the population wonder what is happening to the American way of life.