Too Rosy a View on Exporting U.S. Jobs

James Flanigan’s “ ‘Offshoring’ Can Create Jobs, Too” (Feb. 29) is Pollyannaish.

First off, though the profits “can be used to lift the wages of American workers,” they’re not being used that way.

Second, though companies’ “top lines are fattened,” the excess income is used to pay management bonuses and stockholder dividends, and then the remainder is reinvested overseas, which is only common business sense.

And finally, U.S. workers are not redirected “into more valuable positions as their old jobs go abroad”; they are getting fewer and lower-paying jobs.

Hal Pawluk

Covina

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Your advice to improve education rings hollow to those engineers, scientists and other highly educated and productive workers who are among the long-term unemployed. The problem isn’t stupid Americans -- it’s a system that is producing fewer and fewer good jobs.

Sam Ragucci

Glendora

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We Americans have an inbred knee-jerk response of pointing a finger whenever something goes wrong. The unemployment crisis is no exception.

We Americans are the root cause of the problem. Everyone who buys imported products instead of paying a bit more for U.S.-made goods exports a job.

That is the simple explanation for the loss of manufacturing jobs to the cheaper nations on the Pacific Rim.

Leon Helfet

Camarillo

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Do you believe that everyone in the U.S. will soon be in middle management, while we outsource the bottom end of the pyramid to India?

In every organization, there is a bottom layer.

I get really tired of hearing how we will all be better off when we are not working. That’s the outsourcing argument.

Paul A. Thompson

Belleville, Ill.

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I’d love to see someone come up with a realistic plan that eliminates outsourcing and still allows us to operate and compete in a global economy.

Frank Dayton

Hesperia