The poor in the U.S. are more likely to be obese. The poor in India starve.

If a job can be done efficiently in India, then send it to India and let Americans do jobs that can’t be done efficiently over there. Like carpentry, plumbing, etc.

Oh, and enforce the borders.

Your example about what American workers can expect isn’t that far off the mark when you consider the number of factories that have closed and relocated to countries where employees will work for a lot less.

American workers have plenty of competition for jobs, and unless something changes, the latest generation can’t really expect to be high maintenance and hold out for something better.

If you look at voting blocks, I don’t think you can expect Boomers to pay more for products, which tariffs would eventually compel them to do, as they move into retirement. It’s going to take a lot to convince them that they should vote for people who will effect the changes that you seem to think are inevitable. I suppose you might be imagining a time after they are all dead, but I think the damage will have been done by then in terms of relaxed immigrations policies.

Normal feedback is reasonable; wanting feedback beyond what any previous employees needed is a problem. And that seems to be what employers are saying.

No one can expect to be handed a living wage and basic benefits just because they’d like them. Even socialist economies have to stay afloat.

Wow. Try getting out of your country occasionally.

Indians are highly educated, multilingual, and the ones who are doing tech jobs there are living quite well on half or a third of the pay that the same job would require to be “competitive” wages here.

They just don’t have to pay Silicon Valley rates for housing and food.

If you can’t get out of the country, try finding an Indian or Pak restaurant and striking up a conversation with the customers. You might learn something.

Phoinix - Please don’t spout crap about protectionism unless you know what that means. I’ll be the first to say it: free trade sucks. At the same time, it happens to suck less than unfree trade. Anybody care to remember back to the heady days of the Great Depression when the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act saved the economy?

Kick and scream if you want, but good old Tariffs are on the way back into fashion. Unregulated trade/investment/capitalism as it currently stands isn’t sustainable. Not even in India.

Why would ANYONE think it’s a good thing to have US workers competing against slaves in India and soldiers in China? You think that’s good do you? It would be SO profoundly stupid on both a work force and economic level to be lured into direct competition with 3rd tier nations.

Please don’t spout ignorant crap about free market ideology unless you really know what that means. That means going down to our lumber yards, steel mills and paper mills and letting the nice workers know that the “nice folks in India will be happy to do the job” unless they work for .05 an hour. Without benefits. That means telling your doctor that elective procedures can be done in India SO much cheaper - Even with airfare. That means getting used to recalled toys, food, and medications as daily reality.

Seriously. “Entitlement” indeed. Thankfully the lazy GenY’rs do not share the “greed is good” ideology.

On a different note, it’s one thing to make choices about what will make you happy and entirely something else to have an entitlement to the employment that you want. If people are happy with the freedom and pay at the jobs they are taking, it won’t really be a problem for anyone. But there’s no guarantee that they’ll be happy with that choice forever, and meanwhile the good paying jobs will be filled by someone else, internationally if that’s what it takes. For every self-employed millionaire there are probably 10-20 people at home living with their parents well into adulthood because the real world is too harsh to provide the job and earnings that they want.

And I think we’re really talking about a different issue with the millennials anyway. Generation Xers were also sometimes inclined to forgo the corporate route, but I don’t remember employers being reluctant to hire those who did choose it because the ones who did accept the jobs weren’t especially demanding as employees. The problem with the latest generation, if there is one which is probably questionable, is that the newest generation of “adults” require so much feedback, direction, and praise beyond that which was previously required, and yet even when you’ve made that investment in them, they still leave at the drop of a hat.

I think there’s an attitude that they can be selective in the employment that they accept, but I think they’re a little delusional about what a global community really means in this case: the nice folks in India will be happy to do the job that you feel is too stifling.

“While it may be legal, now, to discriminate against those under 40, when the ACLU gets through with it, it won’t be.”

I think you are unreasonably optimistic. There are a *lot* of areas in which it is legal to discriminate against the young, but not the old (or, alternately, to give preferential treatment to the old). The ACLU can’t just say, “Hey, we don’t like this!”

Additionally, this is *very* hard to prove…

-Mark Roulo

While it may be legal, now, to discriminate against those under 40, when the ACLU gets through with it, it won’t be.