Many jobs that allow blue- and white-collar workers to be part of the middle class and adequately support their families have gone away and are never coming back. Too many working people are now stuck in low-paying, dead-end jobs. Unemployment remains high, and the statistics do not even account for the millions of underemployed workers who struggle to get by or those who simply have given up looking for work.

Many of the jobs allowing blue- and white-collar workers to be part of the middle class and adequately support their families have gone away and are never coming back. American unemployment remains very high, and the statistics do not adequately reflect discouraged and severely underemployed workers who struggle just to get by.

Corporations that have sufficient work and financial resources to create new jobs are not doing so, preferring instead to channel the dividends to investors. Rather than hiring new workers, existing workers are expected to do the work of two or three employees, while economists praise the increased "productivity" numbers as a sign of an improving economy. And an increasing number of jobs are going overseas: not just manufacturing jobs, but increasingly white-collar work such as call centers and software development.

As many as 79 percent of jobs are in industries where jobs have been lost forever, while the number of manufacturing jobs declined for more than 40 months in a row before recently rebounding slightly. By 2015, some 3.3 million service-sector jobs, representing $136 billion in wages, will be shipped overseas or rendered obsolete by technology. Twenty-six percent of jobs that require fewer skills, are automated or are highly portable, such as computer programming and software engineer jobs will be gone, while clerical jobs, financial research, data-entry and various administrative services also are vulnerable since their tasks are either becoming automated or can be performed by less-expensive workers somewhere else. The percentage of jobs being offshored is expected to roughly double in the next three years. An average of 13 percent of jobs are already located offshore, and an additional 12 percent could be relocated within the next three years.

Despite slightly more promising job statistics in recent months, unemployment remains very high, and the statistics do not even begin to reflect the number of workers who have simply given up looking for a job, or who are severely underemployed compared to their previous job history and their personal economic needs.

About 4.7 million Americans want jobs but are not looking for work, many because they believe there are no jobs out there. A record-high 375,000 jobless workers exhausted their unemployment insurance in January 2004 and an estimated 2 million workers will find themselves in the same predicament during the first half of 2004. The average time spent looking for work is now more than 20 weeks, longer than at almost any point in the last two decades, with one out of every four looking for 27 weeks or longer. In October 2003, 4.8 million people were involuntarily working part time - either because they could not find full-time jobs or because their employers had put them on part-time schedules, up 11.6 percent from a year earlier.

Workplace Fairness supports policies that seek to stem the hemhorraging of American jobs, such as tax incentives to keep jobs in the United States, restrictions on federal and state government contracts that limit outsourcing, and union contracts that maintain minimum staffing levels. We urge corporations to take the "high road" of preserving American jobs and liveable wages and benefits, rather than cutting labor costs to boost shareholder returns and executive salaries. We support a continuation of unemployment benefits and expansion of job training programs to provide a better safety net for those workers whose jobs are in declining industries and geographic regions where unemployment remains high.