Taking in each other's washing...

While I liked this Kerry-scorching column, I think one criticism is possibly unfair.

...What Mr. Kerry likes to call "Benedict Arnold companies that ship American jobs overseas" rank a nasty second, but not enough to rate a pin. (Can't wait to hear Candidate Kerry denounce HJ Heinz, his and his wife's own Benedict Arnold company. As columnist James Glassman has written to inexcusably scant notice, "Of the 79 factories that the food-processor owns, 57 (felicitous number!) are overseas." That ships plenty of "American jobs" to Botswana, Thailand, China, India and elsewhere.) ...

I don't have any specific knowledge here, but I'd guess the HJ Heinz also sells in those countries. If catsup is made in India and sold in China, those aren't "American jobs."

And there's probably a lot of in-sourcing going on that politicians aren't interested in. If Heinz ads written on Madison Avenue are used to sell catsup in Thailand, that's in-sourcing. Some ad-man in Thailand doesn't get a job because the work is being done in New York. And probably those foreign factories don't set up their own accounting and inventory systems, but use those of the parent company. So IT jobs are being in-sourced. (With some of the programming being out-sourced to India...)

In a globalized world, these questions start to lose their meaning in tangled recursions...

Posted by John Weidner at March 12, 2004 10:20 AM