President, Senate And Congress: Let's Curtail Job Offshoring!

Please Pass And Sign Legislation To Curtail Job Offshoring!

Greetings,

We, the undersigned members of the bottom 99%, have come to the realization that the causes of our current personal financial situations are, stagnant or reduced wages, massive unemployment, uncertain employment, vanishing benefits and a shortage of full-time jobs that force many of us to take part-time employment. Although part-time employment is better than no employment, it usually comes without employer sponsored group health insurance, causing many of us to be uninsured. All of this is the result of almost thirty years of most of our elected officials writing and signing legislation that puts the interests of major corporations and the super wealthy before our interests. Specifically, the almost unanimous support of global “free” trade by the people we elected to look out for our interests is problematic to most Americans who struggle with day-to-day existence in this age of declining expectations and hope.

Nearly thirty years of most of you and your predecessors lowering trade tariffs, promoting and signing “free” trade agreements and doing things like giving China most favored nation trading status have taken its toll on the quantity and quality of jobs that are available in our country and on America’s manufacturing infrastructure! By passing and signing those obviously corporate backed articles of legislation, you and your predecessors have launched the global race to the bottom pitting the American worker against low paid workers in third world countries. That resulted in the wholesale loss of American jobs and the decimation of America's manufacturing infrastructure. The stagnant wages, unemployment and underemployment that ensued caused many Americans to turn to credit as the way to pay for things they could no longer afford, luxury items like food and clothing. The resulting unemployment and underemployment also caused diminished tax revenues, playing a part in our current budget deficit.

We feel that most corporations left to their own devices will go for the highest possible profits on their quarterly reports by treating working people as just another commodity that they buy for the lowest possible cost. That usually involves manufacturing overseas in countries like China and moving call centers to countries like India. Those are places where American corporations can get their products made by people who usually wind up working under squalid, oppressive conditions for extremely low wages. In other words, by farming out their production, they can effectively skirt our labor laws.

Now we want you to ask yourself this question. What is an American made product? To the average shopper, it's a product that has a well-known American brand name or trade mark. The brand name is usually printed in giant letters in a prominent place on the package, the country of manufacture is usually printed in microscopic letters on the bottom. It seems to us that we have an unaddressed truth in advertising/labeling issue here. Does a product really have the quality that brand name implies when it is cheaply made overseas?

We are suffering from the cumulative effect of almost thirty years of most of you encouraging and enabling “free” trade. Many of you now treat it as a given. We say, let's bring an end to this given before it totally destroys the American dream, the U.S. Manufacturing infrastructure and America's future. We ask that you re-institute most of the trade tariffs that you and your predecessors removed or reduced over the past thirty years. We ask that you refrain from entering into and signing any new “free” trade agreements and make every effort to rescind existing ones. We ask for truth in labeling legislation that forces manufacturers to put a cigarette pack style warning label on the package of any product that has a U.S. Brand name on the label, but is actually manufactured overseas. Something like “Warning, this product is made in (China, etc) NOT in the U.S.A and could be hazardous to your current or future employment."

What this all boils down to is that you broke it, we insist that you fix it or we will pick new electeds who truly listen to us and respond by writing, passing and signing the appropriate legislation! You, and the lobbyists who pull your strings might call our list of demands “protectionism” and in a positive sense, we agree, it protects American jobs, our well-being and America's future!
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Sincerely,

[Your name]