Film about outsourcing hits nerve with workers

The filmmaker said American workers need to fight outsourcing.
By NANCY TULLIS
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
NILES -- For the Mahoning Valley workers who watched an hourlong documentary about American workers' losing their jobs to corporate outsourcing, the stories were all too familiar.
Greg Spotts, a Los Angeles filmmaker, took the first six months of 2004 to travel the country and record stories about the loss of American jobs as corporate executives opt to move operations out of the United States to countries such as Mexico, China, Japan and India.
The showing of Spotts' film "American Jobs" at the Carl Ditmer Union Hall of the United Steelworkers of America Local 2155 easily could have become a labor rally for the Kerry-Edwards presidential campaign. Spotts, however, said he made the documentary intentionally bipartisan, because American workers need to fight outsourcing no matter who is president.
He said the point of the film is that outsourcing is not a Republican-Democrat issue or a blue-collar vs. white-collar issue. It affects all Americans.
Discussion after the film presentation focused on the true reason for outsourcing: It's about corporations making more profit by using cheap labor, not about building up the economies of other nations so they can then have purchasing power to buy American goods.
Personal stories
Subjects in the Spotts documentary are workers of a now-closed textile mill in North Carolina, and software and aerospace engineers in Seattle.
One software engineer had a salary of $79,000 per year plus benefits and stock options and was told on a Friday that she was being replaced, but was not finished working yet. She was to report to work Monday and work for several more weeks training her replacement.
She and others in her division were replaced by workers from India. After nearly two years, the Indian workers are still in the United States. She said her replacement from India is still working her job at her old desk with the same telephone extension -- for about $1,000 a month.
Spotts and state Sen. Marc Dann of Liberty, D-32nd, and John Russo, a Youngstown State University professor and director of YSU's center for working-class studies, said blue- and white-collar workers need to unite and work together to fight outsourcing.
Emotional response
The film evoked powerful emotions from the workers assembled at the union hall -- locked-out RMI Titanium workers, former steel workers and General Electric employees among them.
"No one cared 20 years ago when the manufacturing jobs were going," one woman said. "Now that it's everyone's jobs going overseas, now it's a problem."
Spotts said workers need to mobilize to fight outsourcing and can start by speaking out against the next trade agreement, Central America Free Trade Agreement, which will open the door for American companies to move jobs to Central American countries that have a combined gross national product less than some American cities.
Dann said American workers can also push for federal, state and local governments to buy products made in the United States. RMI workers said they fear that situations such as their own, with parts for U.S. fighter jets being made in Russia, paves the way for industrial terrorism.
Spotts also urged the workers who attended the screening of his film to push for regulation of immigration so that fewer foreign workers are allowed to come to the United States to take American jobs.
XMore information on the film, which is available on DVD, can be found at www.americanjobsfilm.com.
tullis@vindy.com