Overseas Investment Robs U.S. Workers

General Motors is negotiating to build autos in Poland (no jobs here); Johnson’s Wax is planning to make products in the Soviet Union (no jobs here); Wilshire Associates is organizing a government-insured fund to invest in the Soviet economy (no jobs here), “This Is No Time to Be Looking Back” (Dec. 4). We already suffer from the building of U.S.-owned plants overseas and overseas buying of parts--from aerospace to widgets--by U.S. companies

The profits from overseas manufacturing and investing may be good for corporations and stockholders, but how do these expand our economy and job opportunities?

The profits aren’t put into research and development at home, fueling the prospect of more jobs. Plants aren’t modernized so they can compete, and the work force isn’t being educated or properly trained so it can compete with workers in other industrial countries.

GM’s Poland plant will be the last word in manufacturing technology, and its workers will be taught the best of job skills. Then the company will trash American workers as being inefficient and overpaid to justify why it produces elsewhere.

What have American workers and their families to look forward to in all this? Global expansion is all well and good, but how does this translate into a decent life for them? Our government and industrial/banking interests appear determined to stay on their disastrous produce-jobs-anywhere-but-here track. Promising? Not for U.S. workers and their families.

STANLEY MOSS

Encino