http://www.hillnews.com/news/030904/insourcing.aspx
Outsourcing is bad, insourcing is better Republicans test a new phrase in debate over jobs By Josephine Hearn
Stung by Democrats. attacks on the outsourcing of U.S. jobs overseas, Republicans have begun to emphasize .insourcing. . a catchy new term that describes the friendlier flip side of free trade.
Insourcing is the movement of foreign jobs to the United States. Conventionally known as foreign direct investment, insourcing has risen in recent years as more foreign firms set up operations in America.
One example: the 4,300-worker BMW factory in Greer, S.C.
Insourcing, which accounted for 6.4 million jobs nationwide in 2001, has been growing at a faster rate over the past 15 years than outsourcing, but from a lower base, figures compiled by the Organization for International Investment (OFII) show.
The trade group, which coined the term insourcing, represents the U.S. subsidiaries of such corporate giants as Toyota (Japan), Nestli (Switzerland) and Siemens (Germany).
Armed with OFII.s numbers . which also show that insourced jobs pay 16.5 percent more than the average domestic job . GOP lawmakers hope to neutralize Democratic arguments that free trade hurts American workers.
.Outsourcing is a matter of concern,. said Senate Majority Whip Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on the Senate floor last week, .but we are proud of the insourcing that is going on, too, and the fact there is an enormous number of foreign corporations that have come into our country because they think it has a good business environment..
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has called outsourcing a .double blow. to U.S. workers already suffering from a rise in unemployment. He proposes requiring companies to notify their U.S. employees if they intend to hire overseas.
McConnell was the first lawmaker to mention the term insourcing on the floor of either chamber, OFII believes. References to insourcing have been circulating in Republican circles for several weeks.
House Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier (R-Calif.) sent around a .Dear Colleague. letter last month that introduced House members to the insourcing term and included a Feb. 4 op-ed piece from the News & Observer of Charlotte, N.C., trumpeting the benefits of insourcing.
A whitepaper on outsourcing written last week by the Senate Republican Policy Committee, which is chaired by Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl, also referred to the News & Observer op-ed and said, .A flip side to the consequences flowing from outsourcing is that foreign firms are also using this practice to move jobs into the United States, which provides additional benefits to U.S. workers and the economy..
.You can.t get upset about outsourcing without considering the benefits of insourcing,. said Todd Malan, executive director of OFII, which considered a number of terms, including .onshoring,. before promoting the insourcing term.
Thea Lee, chief international economist at the AFL-CIO, said: .I think everybody welcomes inward foreign direct investment, especially when people pay good wages and don.t bust unions and so on..
But she cautioned that current trade numbers showed that even with insourcing, U.S. workers were on balance losing. .In terms of international engagement, we are on the losing end of that equation,. she said.
The author of the News & Observer op-ed, North Carolina State University economics professor Michael Walden, told The Hill that, while insourcing has grown at a faster rate than outsourcing over the past 15 years, it has grown at a slower rate since 1994, when the North American Free trade Agreement and the Global Agreement on Tariffs and Trade were signed.
Outsourced jobs outnumber insourced ones by 3.4 million, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Democrats brought the debate to the Senate floor last week when Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) proposed an amendment to the corporate tax bill that would place limits on outsourcing of federally funded contracts.
His amendment passed 70-26 after Dodd worked out a compromise on its language with McConnell and Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.).