A Real Piece of Work

Re “Why So Many Jobs Have Wanderlust,” Opinion, May 1: Businesses stand on three legs: sales, operations and back office. Kenneth Swift has just facilitated the amputation of his company’s supporting limb. Sure, Praveen works for a lot less and may have advanced degrees, but does he have an ounce of real loyalty? I have seen countless examples of clerical workers spending nights and weekends fixing and undoing the catastrophic miscalculations of executives like Swift. They do it because they belong to an organization and want that organization to succeed. They may be only high school graduates, but they know their jobs and are responsible for a multitude of improvements generally not recognized but quietly accepted.

Let’s see what happens when the wave turns back on those businesses without their own clerical staffs. Praveen will be off doing something better with his degrees, and the years of in-depth experience squandered by the immediate greed of the shortsighted will not be available to keep their two-legged enterprises afloat.

Arnold Schrager

Los Angeles

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I wonder if Swift, in his explanation of how the Darwinian nature of capitalism justifies “offshoring” American jobs to India, stopped to think when he wrote the words “my own job is not affected.”

I’m sure the managers in our manufacturing companies that have moved offshore and the production managers in our entertainment industry that have fled America must have thought the same thing before they lost their jobs.

Come election time, the politicians will no doubt begin pounding the drum for more American jobs, but sadly they continue to allow the mass export of thousands of good-paying jobs that will continue to add to America’s unemployed.

Robert Dean

Lake Balboa

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Re “Even Mollycoddlers Now Are Ready to Slap On the Cuffs,” Opinion, May 1: It is easy for elites like Tamar Jacoby to tout the unchecked importation of Third World labor.

She and her political allies can easily insulate themselves from reality in their ivory towers and gated communities.

The rest of us must deal with falling wages, collapsing social services and an influx of foreign gangsters.

I long for the day that we see an influx of academics, CEOs and politicians willing to work for nothing.

Maybe then, when their livelihoods are threatened, our elites will finally understand how the rest of us feel.

Aaron Smith

Carlsbad