I found this article about corporations not giving the numbers for
total employees vs U.S. employees interesting:
Some of the country’s best-known multinational corporations closely
guard a number they don’t want anyone to know: the breakdown between
their jobs here and abroad.
So secretive are these companies that they hand the figure over to
government statisticians on the condition that officials will release
only an aggregate number. The latest data show that multinationals cut
2.9 million jobs in the United States and added 2.4 million overseas
between 2000 and 2009.
Some of the same companies that do not report their jobs breakdown,
including Apple and Pfizer, are pushing lawmakers to cut their tax
bills in the name of job creation in the United States.
But experts say that without details on which companies are
contributing to job growth and which are not, policymakers risk flying
blind as they try to jump-start the hiring of American workers.
“It’s an important piece of information that the American people
should have,” said Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy
at the Rochester Institute of Technology. “Should you listen to the
kind of advice these companies have about how to grow the economy when
their record and their model indicates they’ve cut jobs? . . . Or
should we talk to people who actually do create jobs in the United
States?”
One of the things businessmen, conservatives and Republican
politicians are saying is, if the corporation tax rate were reduced or
eliminated, many of the jobs the companies have overseas, would be
brought back to the U.S. It is said the U.S. has the highest corporate
tax rate in the world. That may be so, but I doubt that many of the
jobs will be returned to the U.S.
The push to "outsource" help desk jobs was not because of the tax rate
but because the costs of Indian IT workers was much cheaper than U.S.
workers. The push to outsource IT jobs, as said by IBM, Motorola,
Microsoft, CISCO, and other IT companies was partially because of cost
of IT workers but also because the U.S. was not producing enough
engineers to fill these positions. I've always said that was false and
the prime motivator of IT engineer outsourcing was cost. But what is
not being said, much, is that the cost savings aren't that great
because of software development quality problems and problems managing
global teams.
So, I state that even if the tax rate goes down to zero, the jobs will
not "be brought back" to the U.S. because the highest cost for
companies is the cost of employees.
Of course, the companies don't want to report the numbers because they
don't want the public relations hit.
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