Anti-Outsourcing Campaign Renewed By Lou Dobbs
Veteran CNN anchor Lou Dobbs has had it with American companies shipping jobs overseas and he wants you to know it. So much so that his "Lou Dobbs Tonight" show is featuring the controversial topic in a weeklong, five-part series examining its effect upon American society. Operating in a medium where a two-minute segment is often considered in-depth, Mr. Dobbs has dedicated up to 10 minutes a night on the subject.
Mr. Dobbs, who was not available to comment, has not minced words on the issue, telling MSNBC last April that, "I think if this trend continues that the United States, without being unduly alarmist, is headed toward if not a third-world category than a second world category as a nation."
In accordance with his antipathy to outsourcing, Mr. Dobbs has long been worried about India, the recipient of many of the outsourced jobs, especially in technology support. Last night's report - "India Too Costly" - centered on the hidden costs of shipping technology support and back-office tasks to India. On Monday, Mr. Dobbs featured a report from CNN business correspondent Christine Romans on an elite software coding competition sponsored by a Connecticut company, TOPCODER, where Indian programmers routinely place in the bottom ranks.
The Romans report prompted a mini-editorial from Mr. Dobbs: "Another way to look at this report that you've just shared with us is straightforward. When corporate America starts talking about running down the productivity of American workers, their lack of education, their ineffectiveness, what they're really talking about, again, code words, nothing more than for cheapest possible labor. And it's not about quality, and it's about time everybody got real."
Mr. Dobbs's focus on these subjects has made him a polarizing figure in trade policy circles, earning him the scorn of free-market advocates whose views of Mr. Dobbs are often unprintable.
One intellectual opponent of Mr. Dobbs's said he focuses on the costs of America's free-market policies without even trying to communicate the benefits. "His reports are often unbalanced," said an economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, Daniel Mitchell. "They resolutely do not measure the fact that our job growth is driven by the free movement of capital and workers in America."
Mr. Mitchell said that Mr. Dobbs does not understand that "there has never been an example in global history where protectionism worked, period."
