Penalize Firms That Send Jobs Offshore

Re: “Offshoring Trend Casting a Wider Net,” Jan. 4:

American CEOs apparently do not care at all about their employees when they reward themselves handsomely for offshoring to countries like India. Why would these CEOs want to come up with new jobs here in the United States and lower profits?

Can you imagine what would have happened after World War II if a U.S. company fired Americans and offshored jobs?

The root of offshoring is corporate and executive greed. Wealthy individuals get richer from destroying the lives of their fellow countrymen when jobs are offshored.

Congress should levy a surtax on corporations when jobs are offshored. Conversely, corporations should be rewarded with a tax credit for retaining their U.S. workforces and adding jobs here.

Stan Horwitz

Stevenson Ranch

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I have a great deal of sympathy for Vicki Nelson, the software engineer who has been unemployed since 2001. I work in an information technology department also. My company recently contracted with an offshore company for some information technology services.

But I must ask one very painful question of IT workers, and Vicki Nelson in particular -- was your last purchase of a car from a domestic manufacturer or a foreign (offshore) one? When you had a chance to vote with your dollars, did you support American or foreign workers?

If we don’t support American workers by buying domestic-made products, we cannot complain when companies choose to go offshore for competitive reasons.

Nelson says American companies “are selling us out to save a couple of bucks.” Are we as individuals not doing the very same thing when we choose to buy foreign-made products when domestic products are available?

Jerre Reimers

Simi Valley

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Does anyone else have a security problem with the current rush to outsource U.S. jobs to other countries?

What are these companies thinking with this insane outsourcing? Or do they care so little about their customers that they are happy to accept rampant identity theft and credit card fraud as an acceptable risk?

Neil Storer

Garden Grove

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My complaint with call centers is that they are a deception. They answer electronically with the company name you are calling, but they are not that company.

It is a further deception that these services have been moved to secret locations overseas without so advising us at the time of service contracts. This all becomes more aggravating when the technical support is a coerced contract necessary to resolve built-in software bugs and glitches.

Don Manning

Los Angeles

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More and more is being written concerning outsourcing of white-collar jobs to overseas locations. I have had several situations in recent weeks in which I was a recipient of such services, and it has not been good.

At least twice my service contact with my Internet service provider (EarthLink) resulted in talking to India. They placed me on hold to get the answers (probably from a U.S. contact), and then those answers were unsatisfactory.

One of these responses was an instruction to contact my telephone company for help. I did so and once again found myself talking to an offshore contact, this time in the Philippines, and again without a satisfactory response.

In addition, in trying to have a conversation with people with poor English skills, it was quite apparent also that the contact was from a different culture because of the difficulty with understanding each other.

American business has to understand that we the public will not tolerate such experiences for long.

Marvin Sellers

Tustin