A corporation cuts jobs in your community and moves them overseas—and nobody seems to notice. Hardworking people are left jobless, but outside your town, it doesn't seem to make a ripple. Meanwhile, corporations keep shipping jobs to wherever they can find the cheapest labor and fewest safety regulations, and Republicans in Congress keep blocking laws that would keep jobs here. At some point, you realize that if you hadn't seen it for yourself, you wouldn't know what had happened.
That’s why Working America and the AFL-CIO created the Job Tracker. Job Tracker is a zip code-searchable database exposing companies that have been exporting jobs, laying off workers and violating safety and health laws and labor laws. Use it to search your area for companies that have sent jobs overseas, risked the safety and health of workers or violated their rights.
David Moberg at In These Times demonstrates:
When Job Tracker became available, I logged on and entered my home zip code in Chicago to find out which corporations within a 50 mile radius were sending jobs out of the country. The map was jammed with multicolor "pushpins" identifying corporate miscreants, not just job outsourcers but also violators of labor, safety and federal contracting laws–including 77 companies that had shipped jobs offshore, 43 where there had been layoffs due to trade, 364 that had posted notices of mass layoffs, and 6,594 Occupational Safety and Health Act violators.
It was a revealing snapshot, one you would be hard-pressed to find anywhere else. Staff and five extra researchers spent months working for the AFL-CIO and Working America to create a site similar to Executive Paywatch, the successful feature introduced in 1997 that monitors CEO compensation. It draws on data such as trade adjustment assistance, mass layoff notices, and news reports, often for the past five years but covering a decade for health and safety as well as labor law violations.
As this makes clear, Job Tracker includes a lot of information. But it’s far from everything, in large part because corporations have gotten really good at hiding how many jobs they’re outsourcing. For instance, Sending Jobs Overseas: The Cost to America’s Economy and Working Families (PDF), a report that accompanies Job Tracker, takes a look at IBM:
The movement of IBM jobs overseas is difficult to track due to the corporation’s focus on secrecy in this area. Though IBM’s domestic operations have shed a net total of nearly 30,000 employees since 2005, the company simply reports its nationwide total cuts, trimming smaller numbers from scattered sites to avoid triggering mass-layoff notifica¬tion laws. The company no longer reports its employment numbers in geographical terms, making it difficult to discover where the company is hiring or where U.S. jobs go when taken offshore.
Because of evasive efforts like that, we know that despite the huge number of companies in Job Tracker, we didn’t catch everything. That’s why we’re asking you to search your area and see if any companies you know shipped jobs overseas are missing. If they are, tell us about it. We’ll research your submissions and add them to Job Tracker if we validate that outsourcing occurred.
Corporations aren’t going to stop moving jobs out of America unless we force them to stop, and we can’t change anything without good information about what they’re doing. Let’s take the first step by shining a light on outsourcing, safety and health violations and labor law violations.
Search on the Job Tracker for companies in your area that have sent jobs overseas, injured workers or violated their rights.