Outsourcing: Home

This essential volume discusses the impact of outsourcing on business, the U.S., and global economy as well as U.S. government regulation. The viewpoints are selected from a wide range of highly respected sources and publications. By choosing from such diverse sources and including both popular and unpopular views, readers are exposed to many sides of a debate, which promotes issue awareness as well as critical thinking.

When jobs can move anywhere in the world, bosses have no incentive to protect either their workers or the environment. Work moves seamlessly across national boundaries, yet the laws that protect us from rapacious behavior remain tied to national governments. This situation creates an all-too-familiar "race to the bottom,” where profit is generated on the backs of workers and at the cost of toxic pollution. Today, American capitalists threaten that any environmental regulations will drive up the cost of production and force them to relocate our jobs to a country where they don’t face such laws and can re-create their toxic work conditions. It wasn’t always like this. In his insightful book, Loomis shows that the great environmental victories of twentieth-century America--the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the EPA--were actually union victories. This history is a call to action: when we fight for our planet, we fight for our own dignity as workers and citizens.

Having a good, stable job used to be the bedrock of the American Dream. Not anymore. In this richly detailed and eye-opening book, Rick Wartzman chronicles the erosion of the relationship between American companies and their workers. Through the stories of four major employers--General Motors, General Electric, Kodak, and Coca-Cola--he shows how big businesses once took responsibility for providing their workers and retirees with an array of social benefits. At the height of the post-World War II economy, these companies also believed that worker pay needed to be kept high in order to preserve morale and keep the economy humming. Productivity boomed. But the corporate social contract didn't last. By tracing the ups and downs of these four corporate icons over seventy years, Wartzman illustrates just how much has been lost: job security and steadily rising pay, guaranteed pensions, robust health benefits, and much more. Charting the Golden Age of the '50s and '60s; the turbulent years of the '70s and '80s; and the growth of downsizing, outsourcing, and instability in the modern era, Wartzman's narrative is a biography of the American Dream gone sideways. Deeply researched and compelling, The End of Loyalty will make you rethink how Americans can begin to resurrect the middle class. Finalist for the Los Angeles Times book prize in current interest A best business book of the year in economics, Strategy+Business

American manufacturing is on life support--at least, that's what most people think. The exodus of jobs to China and other foreign markets is irreversible, and anything that is built here requires specialized skills the average worker couldn't hope to gain. Not so, says Dan DiMicco, chairman and former CEO of Nucor, America's largest steel company. He not only revived a major US manufacturing firm during a recession, but helped galvanize the flagging domestic steel industry when many of his competitors were in bankruptcy or headed overseas. InAmerican Made, he takes to task the politicians, academics, and political pundits who, he contends, are exacerbating fears and avoiding simple solutions for the sake of nothing more than their own careers, and contrasts them with the postwar leaders who rebuilt Europe and Japan, put a man on the moon, and kept communism at bay. We need leaders of such resolve today, he argues, who can tackle a broken job-creation engine by restoring manufacturing to its central role in the U.S. economy--and cease creating fictitious "service businesses" where jobs evaporate after a year or two, as in a Ponzi scheme. With his trademark bluntness, DiMicco tackles the false promise of green jobs and the hidden costs of outsourcing. Along the way, he shares the lessons he's learned about good leadership, crisis management, and the true meaning of innovation, and maps the road back to robust economic growth, middle-class prosperity, and American competitiveness.