Obama’s outsourcing record draws criticism from the left

Barack Obama promised voters four years ago that he would work to slow the outflow of American jobs to other countries, proposing to revamp a federal tax code that encourages companies to maintain overseas operations.

Obama as president has continued to call for rewriting the rules that allow U.S. corporations to avoid paying taxes for a time on income generated overseas.

But the broad tax changes have not happened.

American jobs have been shifting to low-wage countries for years, and the trend has continued during Obama’s presidency. From 2008 to 2010, U.S. trade with China alone cost about 450,000 American jobs because of the growth of Chinese exports, said Robert E. Scott, a pro-labor advocate at the liberal Economic Policy Institute. That figure was less than in previous years, but the decrease was probably tied to the U.S. economic slowdown, which crimped demand for imports.

“I think he has walked away from the campaign commitments,” said Scott, the institute’s director of trade and manufacturing policy research. “He has done far too little to improve U.S. trade.”

According to a study by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, large American companies in 2010 barely added any workers in the United States, increasing their numbers by 0.1 percent, while they expanded their foreign workforce by 1.5 percent. That was business as usual — between 2004 and 2010, the bureau reported, foreign affiliates hired 2 million workers while 600,000 were added by the companies at home.  (Full story)