02-29-2004, 11:12 PM
http://www.sulekha.com/redirectnh.asp?cid=328149
http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=1...FaQwVY&refer=us
Delta Air, General Electric Say Creating Jobs Abroad Helps U.S.
Feb. 23 (Bloomberg) -- Delta Air Lines Inc. created 1,000 call-center jobs last year in India. Hiring by Delta and other foreign employers is spurring the country's economy to the second- fastest growth rate in Asia behind China.
Atlanta-based Delta says the move also helped the U.S. economy. The Indian operations saved $25 million in 2003, enabling the No. 3 U.S. air carrier to add 1,200 positions for reservations and sales agents at home, North America reservations director Debbie Siek said Friday. ``No Delta employee lost his or her job as a result of outsourcing,'' she said.
General Electric Co., which has created 20,000 jobs in India since 1997, and economists including Stephen S. Roach of Morgan Stanley & Co. also say such moves can benefit the U.S. over time. Yet any case they make for economic advantages of so-called outsourcing is turning out to be a tough sale this election year.
Democratic Party lawmakers cite the international shift in labor as showing that President George W. Bush has failed to revive the U.S. economy after the loss of 2.3 million jobs in three years. Members of Congress including Senator John F. Kerry, who is vying to be Bush's opponent in November's election, have threatened to cut tax breaks for companies that move work overseas.
``A lot of this talk is the equivalent of saying we want to be inefficient,'' Robert McTeer Jr., president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said in a speech Saturday in Fort Worth, Texas. ``If we just want jobs, we should outlaw bulldozers and just make people use shovels.''
Among U.S. companies assigning work to Asia are Oracle Corp., the world's No. 3 maker of business management software, Hewlett-Packard Co. and AIG Life Insurance Co. In Europe the list includes Siemens AG, Germany's biggest electronics maker. U.S. software engineers earn an average $75,000 a year, according to the Labor Department. In India, they make about $12,500, says Tata Consultancy Services, a unit of Tata Sons Ltd. in New Delhi.
Mankiw Comments
The debate intensified in the U.S. on Feb. 9, when Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said ``outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade'' that may help the U.S. economy ``in the long run.'' A White House economic forecast he presented to Congress that day said that ``when a good or service is produced more cheaply abroad it makes more sense to import it than make or provide it domestically.''
A unit of management consultant McKinsey & Co. estimated last August that every dollar of U.S. labor cost assigned overseas will generate $1.12 to $1.14 in additional value for the American economy by making goods and services cheaper and companies more competitive.
`Real Blow' to Workers
The Communications Workers of America called Mankiw's remarks ``outrageous'' and ``a real blow to millions of working families who are facing the worst job outlook in decades.'' Union President Morton Bahr made the comments in a Feb. 17 statement posted on the Washington-based, 700,000-member group's Web site.
Mankiw's comments drew criticism from Republican lawmakers as well, including Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. Mankiw apologized for leaving ``the wrong impression that I praised the loss of U.S. jobs.'' Bush unveiled a $503 million job-training program on Feb. 12 and said such action is needed because ``there are people looking for work because jobs have gone overseas.''
Kerry, who is leading the Democratic Party's race to become Bush's official opponent, promised ``to repeal every tax break and loophole that rewards any Benedict Arnold CEO or corporation for shipping American jobs overseas.'' He didn't mention specific companies or executives as examples.
``It's the political season, and it's no surprise that opponents of the administration would jump on'' Mankiw's comments, the Fed's McTeer said in his speech. He called the movement of jobs abroad part of a ``creative destruction'' process that ultimately benefits the U.S. economy.
International Competition
The political rhetoric does ignore the economic reality, said Robert Reich, former labor secretary for Democratic President Bill Clinton and now a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
``Mankiw and the administration stated the economic theory correctly,'' Reich said in an interview Wednesday. ``The problem is that theory is of little solace to workers who are losing their jobs or are in danger of losing their jobs.''
Morgan Stanley's Roach said in a newsletter to clients Feb. 17 that the ``basic conclusion of the theory of free trade is inarguable.''
Roach added that ``international competition lowers costs and prices, thereby boosting the purchasing power and standard of living of consumers around the world.''
Europe Too
For Bush and his Democratic rivals for the presidency, the rub lies in what Roach calls ``that ever-elusive long run.'' Voter concern that the assignment of computer programming, accounting and medical research to operations in developing economies -- coming after decades of factory-job losses -- has Democrats and some Republicans vowing to halt the transfer of work overseas.
Job losses are also an issue in Europe, where companies such as Siemens, Germany's biggest electronics maker, are reassigning work to Asia. Britain's Department of Trade and Industry plans to study the movement of call-center jobs outside the country amid reports that banks and insurers will relocate as many as 100,000 positions to lower-wage countries such as India.
``We'll see this trend increasing,'' said John McFall, chairman of the British Parliament's Treasury Committee and a member of Prime Minister Tony Blair's ruling Labour Party, in an interview Thursday in London. ``The important thing for British industry is to get a slice of the action in India and China, to share in their economic growth.''
Cheaper Wages
Per-capita gross national income was $890 a year in China and $460 a year in India in 2001, a fraction of the $34,280 for the U.S., according to the World Bank. The figure was $22,730 for France and $25,120 in the U.K., according to the bank. India's economy expanded at an 8.4 percent annual rate in the 12 months through last September, second in Asia only to China's 9.9 percent for 2003.
French President Jacques Chirac hosted a roundtable discussion on French industry with company and labor representatives Friday in the Elysee Palace in Paris.
``The state needs to ensure that France and Europe really begin to think about the departure of industry to other regions,'' said Yvon Jacob, head of France's Mechanical Industry Federation, after the meeting. His organization includes 6,800 companies that employ 600,000. ``The greatest threat facing industry today is the global shift that is taking place.''
Telstra Corp., Australia's largest telephone company, said it has outsourced information technology services to several companies in India. The company wouldn't provide statistics on the number of jobs it has transferred, but it cut its payrolls by 6.9 percent in 2003, it said this month.
Shareholder Proposal
General Electric, the world's biggest company by market value, has added almost 100,000 jobs outside the U.S. over the past decade, said Peter Stack, a company spokesman, in an interview Thursday.
General Electric's U.S. workforce has held at around 160,000 and median wages have increased an average 4.5 percent annually since 1993. ``We've added to the quality of jobs in the U.S., and we've done that by investing heavily in high-quality, high- technology jobs,'' Stack said.
Adding employment overseas benefits the company's fortunes as a whole, he said. ``When we sell effectively to international markets, it grows our business, and that benefits our workers here,'' Stack said. General Electric's net earnings rose 6 percent last year to $15 billion, or $1.49 a share, from $14.1 billion in 2002.
The Securities and Exchange Commission ruled Friday that General Electric must permit shareholders to vote on a proposal by the International Union of Electrical-Communications Workers of America's pension fund to require the company to study the risk of damage to its brand name by moving jobs outside the U.S.
Irreversible Trend?
Corporate executives and economists say there's little the government can do to stop or slow the trend without hurting the U.S. economy and making American businesses less competitive.
Estimates of how many U.S. jobs may be affected range from 3.3 million over 15 years, according to a November 2002 study by Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Forrester Research Inc., to 6 million over a decade, projected last September by securities firm Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in New York.
A. T. Kearney Inc., a management consulting group owned by Plano, Texas-based Electronic Data Systems Corp., said in a 2002 report that U.S. banks, mutual fund companies and other financial services concerns planned to relocate 500,000 jobs, or 8 percent of their workforce, offshore over five years.
`Very Low' Numbers
David A. Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor's, said it isn't possible to measure how many Americans have been affected so far. He estimated a few hundred thousand positions. One million people change jobs every week in the U.S., according to Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.
``The numbers are really very low'' compared with the movement of jobs during the 1990s, said Gail Fosler, chief economist of the Conference Board, a New York research group.
Michael Dell, chief executive of Dell Inc., the world's second largest personal computer maker, said there won't be a wholesale movement of U.S. jobs abroad because American productivity is still much higher than in the low-wage countries. Dell is based in Round Rock, Texas.
``That puts a damper on a wholesale movement,'' he said Jan. 6 at a conference hosted by Needham & Co. in New York. ``The U.S. workforce doesn't have quite as much to worry about as the popular press might make it seem.''
Oracle, AIG
Among the companies that have moved jobs overseas in recent years are Oracle, which transferred more than 2,000 software development jobs to India; Hewlett-Packard Co., which assigned 1,200 customer service jobs to India; and AIG, which established a processing center in the Philippines.
Oracle said it plans to set up a client support center in Romania to take advantage of low wages. Siemens is shifting U.S. and European computer programming jobs to China and India.
McKinsey Global Institute, a research unit of New York-based McKinsey, found in an August 2003 paper that benefits for companies that contract work to lower-wage countries include reduced costs, contributing to profits and global competitiveness; creation of new export markets because providers in low-wage countries must buy U.S. telecommunications equipment and services; and flexibility to reassign U.S. employees to other work.
McKinsey estimated that every dollar in U.S. labor costs moved overseas leads to the creation of $1.45 to $1.47 of net additional value for the world economy. The low-wage country keeps 33 cents of that and the rest comes to the U.S., McKinsey said.
After Talent
In a December 2003 paper, Catherine L. Mann, a former Federal Reserve economist now at the Institute for International Economics, a non-partisan research group in Washington, argued that the ``globalization'' of information technology and computer- related jobs increased U.S. productivity between 1995 and 2002 and added 0.3 percentage point to the economy's average annual growth, boosting Americans' living standards.
Limiting such job movement will ``put the entire prospect for robust and sustainable U.S. economic performance at risk,'' she said.
The Business Council, whose members are chairmen or chief executive officers of major corporations, found in a survey of 70 Fortune 500 CEOs published Wednesday that 54 percent reported moving jobs overseas.
``We are looking at taking some software work to India and China, frankly because we're having trouble getting enough high- quality people here in the U.S. because the education system isn't producing them,'' said Rockwell Collins Inc. Chief Executive Clayton Jones in an interview Thursday at the Business Council meeting in Boca Raton, Florida.
Fed Weighs In
The move would involve 50 to 100 software engineers out of a total of 4,000 at the Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based maker of aircraft cockpit instruments, Jones said. ``Our primary motivation is to get the talent,'' he said, ``and if it's a little less expensive,'' so much the better.
In testimony before the House Banking and Financial Services Committee Feb. 11, Fed Chairman Greenspan said that while some workers have experienced hardships as a result of outsourcing, the shift will ultimately benefit the U.S. economy. Fed Governor Susan Bies and regional Fed bank Presidents William Poole made similar points last week.
``Over the long sweep of American generations and waves of economic change, we simply have not experienced a net drain of jobs to advancing technology or to other nations,'' Greenspan said in a speech Friday in Omaha, Nebraska. ``Moreover, real earnings of the average worker have continued to rise.''
`Out of Touch'
Opponents of moving work offshore, such as Paul Craig Roberts, former assistant secretary of the Treasury during the Reagan administration, say that times have changed and that today's migration of service-industry positions isn't likely to provide the benefits that some economists say it will.
``It is not your father's traditional foreign trade,'' Roberts said in an essay published by NewsMax.com. ``Goods are not being traded. Offshore production is not a case of the U.S. making good X and trading it to China for good Y. It is a case of the U.S. ceasing to make good X in the U.S. and making it in China instead.''
Democratic presidential candidates have floated several responses. Kerry said he will propose a new tax break for manufacturers that produce goods in the U.S. and conduct a 120- day review of all U.S. trade agreements.
What Democrats Want
Senator John Edwards of North Carolina said he would ask Congress to pass a 10 percent tax credit for companies that keep jobs in America and would create a venture capital fund to bring work to the areas that have suffered the most.
U.S. Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle joined fellow Democrats Feb. 12 in introducing a bill requiring companies to give employees three months' notice of firings if they're replaced with workers outside the country.
Legislation that restricts job movement will hurt the U.S. economy, executives including Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Carly Fiorina say. In a report issued last month, she and executives from seven other technology companies urged tax reductions and better schools to improve the competitiveness of U.S. industry.
``There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore,'' Fiorina said at a press conference in Washington about the report.
The Fed's McTeer also cautioned against political moves to curb sending jobs overseas. ``If we are lucky, we can get through the year without doing something really, really stupid,'' he said Thursday in response to questions at an education conference in League City, Texas.
http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=1...FaQwVY&refer=us
Delta Air, General Electric Say Creating Jobs Abroad Helps U.S.
Feb. 23 (Bloomberg) -- Delta Air Lines Inc. created 1,000 call-center jobs last year in India. Hiring by Delta and other foreign employers is spurring the country's economy to the second- fastest growth rate in Asia behind China.
Atlanta-based Delta says the move also helped the U.S. economy. The Indian operations saved $25 million in 2003, enabling the No. 3 U.S. air carrier to add 1,200 positions for reservations and sales agents at home, North America reservations director Debbie Siek said Friday. ``No Delta employee lost his or her job as a result of outsourcing,'' she said.
General Electric Co., which has created 20,000 jobs in India since 1997, and economists including Stephen S. Roach of Morgan Stanley & Co. also say such moves can benefit the U.S. over time. Yet any case they make for economic advantages of so-called outsourcing is turning out to be a tough sale this election year.
Democratic Party lawmakers cite the international shift in labor as showing that President George W. Bush has failed to revive the U.S. economy after the loss of 2.3 million jobs in three years. Members of Congress including Senator John F. Kerry, who is vying to be Bush's opponent in November's election, have threatened to cut tax breaks for companies that move work overseas.
``A lot of this talk is the equivalent of saying we want to be inefficient,'' Robert McTeer Jr., president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said in a speech Saturday in Fort Worth, Texas. ``If we just want jobs, we should outlaw bulldozers and just make people use shovels.''
Among U.S. companies assigning work to Asia are Oracle Corp., the world's No. 3 maker of business management software, Hewlett-Packard Co. and AIG Life Insurance Co. In Europe the list includes Siemens AG, Germany's biggest electronics maker. U.S. software engineers earn an average $75,000 a year, according to the Labor Department. In India, they make about $12,500, says Tata Consultancy Services, a unit of Tata Sons Ltd. in New Delhi.
Mankiw Comments
The debate intensified in the U.S. on Feb. 9, when Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said ``outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade'' that may help the U.S. economy ``in the long run.'' A White House economic forecast he presented to Congress that day said that ``when a good or service is produced more cheaply abroad it makes more sense to import it than make or provide it domestically.''
A unit of management consultant McKinsey & Co. estimated last August that every dollar of U.S. labor cost assigned overseas will generate $1.12 to $1.14 in additional value for the American economy by making goods and services cheaper and companies more competitive.
`Real Blow' to Workers
The Communications Workers of America called Mankiw's remarks ``outrageous'' and ``a real blow to millions of working families who are facing the worst job outlook in decades.'' Union President Morton Bahr made the comments in a Feb. 17 statement posted on the Washington-based, 700,000-member group's Web site.
Mankiw's comments drew criticism from Republican lawmakers as well, including Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. Mankiw apologized for leaving ``the wrong impression that I praised the loss of U.S. jobs.'' Bush unveiled a $503 million job-training program on Feb. 12 and said such action is needed because ``there are people looking for work because jobs have gone overseas.''
Kerry, who is leading the Democratic Party's race to become Bush's official opponent, promised ``to repeal every tax break and loophole that rewards any Benedict Arnold CEO or corporation for shipping American jobs overseas.'' He didn't mention specific companies or executives as examples.
``It's the political season, and it's no surprise that opponents of the administration would jump on'' Mankiw's comments, the Fed's McTeer said in his speech. He called the movement of jobs abroad part of a ``creative destruction'' process that ultimately benefits the U.S. economy.
International Competition
The political rhetoric does ignore the economic reality, said Robert Reich, former labor secretary for Democratic President Bill Clinton and now a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
``Mankiw and the administration stated the economic theory correctly,'' Reich said in an interview Wednesday. ``The problem is that theory is of little solace to workers who are losing their jobs or are in danger of losing their jobs.''
Morgan Stanley's Roach said in a newsletter to clients Feb. 17 that the ``basic conclusion of the theory of free trade is inarguable.''
Roach added that ``international competition lowers costs and prices, thereby boosting the purchasing power and standard of living of consumers around the world.''
Europe Too
For Bush and his Democratic rivals for the presidency, the rub lies in what Roach calls ``that ever-elusive long run.'' Voter concern that the assignment of computer programming, accounting and medical research to operations in developing economies -- coming after decades of factory-job losses -- has Democrats and some Republicans vowing to halt the transfer of work overseas.
Job losses are also an issue in Europe, where companies such as Siemens, Germany's biggest electronics maker, are reassigning work to Asia. Britain's Department of Trade and Industry plans to study the movement of call-center jobs outside the country amid reports that banks and insurers will relocate as many as 100,000 positions to lower-wage countries such as India.
``We'll see this trend increasing,'' said John McFall, chairman of the British Parliament's Treasury Committee and a member of Prime Minister Tony Blair's ruling Labour Party, in an interview Thursday in London. ``The important thing for British industry is to get a slice of the action in India and China, to share in their economic growth.''
Cheaper Wages
Per-capita gross national income was $890 a year in China and $460 a year in India in 2001, a fraction of the $34,280 for the U.S., according to the World Bank. The figure was $22,730 for France and $25,120 in the U.K., according to the bank. India's economy expanded at an 8.4 percent annual rate in the 12 months through last September, second in Asia only to China's 9.9 percent for 2003.
French President Jacques Chirac hosted a roundtable discussion on French industry with company and labor representatives Friday in the Elysee Palace in Paris.
``The state needs to ensure that France and Europe really begin to think about the departure of industry to other regions,'' said Yvon Jacob, head of France's Mechanical Industry Federation, after the meeting. His organization includes 6,800 companies that employ 600,000. ``The greatest threat facing industry today is the global shift that is taking place.''
Telstra Corp., Australia's largest telephone company, said it has outsourced information technology services to several companies in India. The company wouldn't provide statistics on the number of jobs it has transferred, but it cut its payrolls by 6.9 percent in 2003, it said this month.
Shareholder Proposal
General Electric, the world's biggest company by market value, has added almost 100,000 jobs outside the U.S. over the past decade, said Peter Stack, a company spokesman, in an interview Thursday.
General Electric's U.S. workforce has held at around 160,000 and median wages have increased an average 4.5 percent annually since 1993. ``We've added to the quality of jobs in the U.S., and we've done that by investing heavily in high-quality, high- technology jobs,'' Stack said.
Adding employment overseas benefits the company's fortunes as a whole, he said. ``When we sell effectively to international markets, it grows our business, and that benefits our workers here,'' Stack said. General Electric's net earnings rose 6 percent last year to $15 billion, or $1.49 a share, from $14.1 billion in 2002.
The Securities and Exchange Commission ruled Friday that General Electric must permit shareholders to vote on a proposal by the International Union of Electrical-Communications Workers of America's pension fund to require the company to study the risk of damage to its brand name by moving jobs outside the U.S.
Irreversible Trend?
Corporate executives and economists say there's little the government can do to stop or slow the trend without hurting the U.S. economy and making American businesses less competitive.
Estimates of how many U.S. jobs may be affected range from 3.3 million over 15 years, according to a November 2002 study by Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Forrester Research Inc., to 6 million over a decade, projected last September by securities firm Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in New York.
A. T. Kearney Inc., a management consulting group owned by Plano, Texas-based Electronic Data Systems Corp., said in a 2002 report that U.S. banks, mutual fund companies and other financial services concerns planned to relocate 500,000 jobs, or 8 percent of their workforce, offshore over five years.
`Very Low' Numbers
David A. Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor's, said it isn't possible to measure how many Americans have been affected so far. He estimated a few hundred thousand positions. One million people change jobs every week in the U.S., according to Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.
``The numbers are really very low'' compared with the movement of jobs during the 1990s, said Gail Fosler, chief economist of the Conference Board, a New York research group.
Michael Dell, chief executive of Dell Inc., the world's second largest personal computer maker, said there won't be a wholesale movement of U.S. jobs abroad because American productivity is still much higher than in the low-wage countries. Dell is based in Round Rock, Texas.
``That puts a damper on a wholesale movement,'' he said Jan. 6 at a conference hosted by Needham & Co. in New York. ``The U.S. workforce doesn't have quite as much to worry about as the popular press might make it seem.''
Oracle, AIG
Among the companies that have moved jobs overseas in recent years are Oracle, which transferred more than 2,000 software development jobs to India; Hewlett-Packard Co., which assigned 1,200 customer service jobs to India; and AIG, which established a processing center in the Philippines.
Oracle said it plans to set up a client support center in Romania to take advantage of low wages. Siemens is shifting U.S. and European computer programming jobs to China and India.
McKinsey Global Institute, a research unit of New York-based McKinsey, found in an August 2003 paper that benefits for companies that contract work to lower-wage countries include reduced costs, contributing to profits and global competitiveness; creation of new export markets because providers in low-wage countries must buy U.S. telecommunications equipment and services; and flexibility to reassign U.S. employees to other work.
McKinsey estimated that every dollar in U.S. labor costs moved overseas leads to the creation of $1.45 to $1.47 of net additional value for the world economy. The low-wage country keeps 33 cents of that and the rest comes to the U.S., McKinsey said.
After Talent
In a December 2003 paper, Catherine L. Mann, a former Federal Reserve economist now at the Institute for International Economics, a non-partisan research group in Washington, argued that the ``globalization'' of information technology and computer- related jobs increased U.S. productivity between 1995 and 2002 and added 0.3 percentage point to the economy's average annual growth, boosting Americans' living standards.
Limiting such job movement will ``put the entire prospect for robust and sustainable U.S. economic performance at risk,'' she said.
The Business Council, whose members are chairmen or chief executive officers of major corporations, found in a survey of 70 Fortune 500 CEOs published Wednesday that 54 percent reported moving jobs overseas.
``We are looking at taking some software work to India and China, frankly because we're having trouble getting enough high- quality people here in the U.S. because the education system isn't producing them,'' said Rockwell Collins Inc. Chief Executive Clayton Jones in an interview Thursday at the Business Council meeting in Boca Raton, Florida.
Fed Weighs In
The move would involve 50 to 100 software engineers out of a total of 4,000 at the Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based maker of aircraft cockpit instruments, Jones said. ``Our primary motivation is to get the talent,'' he said, ``and if it's a little less expensive,'' so much the better.
In testimony before the House Banking and Financial Services Committee Feb. 11, Fed Chairman Greenspan said that while some workers have experienced hardships as a result of outsourcing, the shift will ultimately benefit the U.S. economy. Fed Governor Susan Bies and regional Fed bank Presidents William Poole made similar points last week.
``Over the long sweep of American generations and waves of economic change, we simply have not experienced a net drain of jobs to advancing technology or to other nations,'' Greenspan said in a speech Friday in Omaha, Nebraska. ``Moreover, real earnings of the average worker have continued to rise.''
`Out of Touch'
Opponents of moving work offshore, such as Paul Craig Roberts, former assistant secretary of the Treasury during the Reagan administration, say that times have changed and that today's migration of service-industry positions isn't likely to provide the benefits that some economists say it will.
``It is not your father's traditional foreign trade,'' Roberts said in an essay published by NewsMax.com. ``Goods are not being traded. Offshore production is not a case of the U.S. making good X and trading it to China for good Y. It is a case of the U.S. ceasing to make good X in the U.S. and making it in China instead.''
Democratic presidential candidates have floated several responses. Kerry said he will propose a new tax break for manufacturers that produce goods in the U.S. and conduct a 120- day review of all U.S. trade agreements.
What Democrats Want
Senator John Edwards of North Carolina said he would ask Congress to pass a 10 percent tax credit for companies that keep jobs in America and would create a venture capital fund to bring work to the areas that have suffered the most.
U.S. Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle joined fellow Democrats Feb. 12 in introducing a bill requiring companies to give employees three months' notice of firings if they're replaced with workers outside the country.
Legislation that restricts job movement will hurt the U.S. economy, executives including Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Carly Fiorina say. In a report issued last month, she and executives from seven other technology companies urged tax reductions and better schools to improve the competitiveness of U.S. industry.
``There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore,'' Fiorina said at a press conference in Washington about the report.
The Fed's McTeer also cautioned against political moves to curb sending jobs overseas. ``If we are lucky, we can get through the year without doing something really, really stupid,'' he said Thursday in response to questions at an education conference in League City, Texas.