Offshoreing of Pilots now?

On ABC news last night they hit on something that I've been seeing for a while now given all this offshore job loss...

They were talking about the recovery of the economy and used the example of a shoe store. It went something like this...

For months people have been walking by the shoe store thinking about buying a new pair of shoes, but it wasn't until about 3 months ago that we actually went and bought the shoes.

As more people buy new shoes that will require the shoe makers to make, well, more shoes. Which means that more people will be needed to work in the factories to make the shoes. Which means that more people will be needed to drive the trucks to delivery the shoes. Then more people will be needed to sell the shoes in the stores, etc.

The problem is that the shoes aren't made in the US.

They quoted a statistic that manufacturing is about 13% of our economy. We're fast becoming a service based economy. The problem with that right now is as a writer from "Baseline" magazine said is if manufacturers continue to go overseas with the work that they do have "...who is going to buy their [products] -- the low wage factory workers overseas, or the unemployed factory workers here at home?"

What I see is all these companies in such a rush to save money and do things as cheaply as possible. Which may be good for the company in the short term, but in the long run is very bad for the economy that makes that company possible, and if the economy is bad here then well the company can't continue to survive in this country. So then the choice becomes lose your job or move to India, and then once more and more people continue to leave then what does that do to this country?

At the rate we're going we may very well end up as a company that doesn't make anything. Imagine going to buy a new car, and not one car, not one is made here. The only thing that we do is sell the car.

I'm a white collar worker, but I understand that selling something that someone else made isn't as profitable as selling something that you made. So the blue collar people around the country are what drive the economy, and God love 'em for continuing to do so even with management trying to bleed 'em dry. I mean I work in IT doing supply chain. What's the point of a system that schedules production and distribution if we don't have any plants?

The scary thing is that this offshoring crap effecting both bluecollar and whitecollar workers.

It's even more freightening to see that now it's not just the businesses that are screwing us, but the government as well.

I think that everyone, who likes living and working in the U.S., should be writing their reps and telling them this is a bad idea.

Naunga
 
Not sure how shipping pilot jobs overseas would work. You can set up a call center in India or an office in Poland for programmers.

But someone actually has to be in the cockpit to fly the plane.
 
Well the idea is that they are letting the foreign carriers start flying domestically. I can understand the frustration in this case as there are more regulations in the airline industry than any other that I can think of and thus it is not a free market. As for some of the other jobs (manufacturing, IT) if the tariffs are dropped then I have no problem. If we are truely going to have a world market then we have to be fair. If they can produce it for cheaper and same quality then they deserve to. US workers have goten lazy and should realize that there are people out there who will bust their ass for what they have. If we don't want the jobs to go elsewhere, then we have to show the company that we will work harder then the competition. This is coming from a guy who's family is full of GM workers and I work in IT, training to be a pilot. I understand most of all how hard we have to work. I'm sorry, I just get tired of people whining sometimes.
 
"Offshoreing of Pilots now"

If there's one thing american pilots need to get together and do in this world, it's preventing this.
 
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Well the idea is that they are letting the foreign carriers start flying domestically.

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Only when they start letting American carriers start flying domestic routes in their countries. So don't count on that happening.
 
In the case of aviation, though, it's the US that has the large supply of pilots, many of them who might be willing to work cheap to get the experience needed for the majors. After all, isn't why entry-level type flying jobs are so low-paying?

Also, don't a lot of foreign airlines already hire American pilots as expatriate Captains and such?
 
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On ABC news last night they hit on something that I've been seeing for a while now given all this offshore job loss...

They were talking about the recovery of the economy and used the example of a shoe store. It went something like this...
...
As more people buy new shoes that will require the shoe makers to make, well, more shoes. Which means that more people will be needed to work in the factories to make the shoes. Which means that more people will be needed to drive the trucks to delivery the shoes. Then more people will be needed to sell the shoes in the stores, etc.

[/ QUOTE ]Are all you conservatives paying attention? This is the most important economics lesson you'll ever have; it's precisely how the economy works. Not all that b.s. "trickle-down" Reaganomics crap, which only makes the rich richer. You can invest in a company until you're blue in the face, but if consumers aren't consuming what you're selling, forget it. All the idle capacity in American industry right now--the airliners sitting in the desert, the factories scaled back to one-shift, four-day weeks instead of round-the-clock production, is undeniable proof that business investment alone doesn't drive the economy. What does, you ask? The folks who eat at McDonald's, shop at Wal-Mart and fly on Southwest--not the rich who've stood to gain the most from Dubya's "political payback" tax cuts. What's fueled the economic "recovery" thus far--if you can call it that--is nothing more than mass psychology aimed at restoring consumer confidence. As evidenced by the masses of people who believe the invasion of Iraq was justified because of Iraq's involvement with the 9/11 attacks(?!), Dubya and co. are betting that if they repeat themselves enough times that the economy's back on track, people will start to believe it.
 
Aloft you have some good points but lets look at why these companies go offshore:

1) No corporate taxes - which should be illegal. It's double taxation! The employees paying the taxes when the money comes out of the corporation should be enough.

2) Cheaper Labor - AFL-CIO anyone? American labor and their unions have driven themselves up so high they are no longer as competitive as they once were.

3) Less potential liability. American labor is the most comp claim-liability-EEOC violation-lawsuit happy labor group in the world. You will NOT see Indian labor suing their company for another employee putting a picture of a girl in their cubicle! You will not see Chinese employees suddenly "hurting their back" when hunting season starts!

This is a trend. As American business changes, the laws and flows will change and the labor will return back to the US, but only when it's economically sensible to do so.
 
Ok, let's steer this back towards aviation.

I think, in the most part, many companies would love to hire foreign pilots to keep costs and benefits low. You can probably pay a crew a few thousand Indian rupee and as long as they don't wreck a jet, they could honestly care less.

But I think we're fast approaching the point where people are going to start realizing that we can't have a consumer-based society where the high paying jobs dissolved into much lower-paying foreign-based employment centers -- basically, if no one earns more than minimum wage, you aren't going to have consumers to purchase goods/services/etc and keep the economy flowing.

What's an even scarier thought is if Wal Mart got into the airline business by purchasing SWA! Eek!

Persoally, I think there's a few seats reserved in hell for Wal Mart, but that's better left to the squawk box!
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I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. I'm saying that before we start allowing foreign airlines to start flying purely domestic routes in the US, they'll have to let our airlines do that. And you ain't gonna see that happening.

This may be one time where you'll get all the airlines and all their employees on the same side. Nobody, whether it's a network carrier or a low cost carrier or a regional, is going to be in favor of allowing foreign airlines to operate in the US. And no group of employees, whether they're union or not, is going to want to let a bunch of guys from Air India take away their jobs.

Put that combination together and there's no way in hell that you'll get an open market.
 
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"The Stevens amendment will increase traffic on existing Northwest Cargo flights," said Kurt Ebenhoch, a Northwest spokesman. "We believe that by adding business to our ... cargo flights, it will increase jobs."

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Hmmm...Mr. Ebenhoch seems to have a different opinion.
 
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