Senator John Kerry

Senator John Kerry has managed occasionally to trouble Indian Americans with his anti-offshoring views, but committed Democrats contend citizens should look at the fine print. As it is, Indian Americans are torn over this outsourcing issue, on the one hand feeling India is being targeted even though only a portion of jobs make it to India; and on the other, worrying about their own children growing up in a jobless world.

Kerry campaign managed yet again to bring India into their argument against offshore-outsourcing.

Even as the Presidential candidates are in a feud of gigantic proportions in the last few days before voting day, the Kerry campaign hoped to rope in the straggling “undecided” by detailing their anti-offshoring agenda and what they call the ‘Plan to Keep High-Paying Jobs in America.’

Accusing President Bush of being “insensitive” to the needs of American workers, the Kerry-Edwards Plan which quotes among others, the U.S. Ambassador to India David Mulford to shore up its case, says it recognizes that “America must prepare itself for a new age of global economic competition,” to maintain high standards of living and technological leadership.

In all fairness, the Bush administration’s plan is also to retrain the American worker or to make the global trade and industry playing field more level.

So the Kerry plan does not break much new ground because as Senator Kerry very clearly said during one of the three Presidential debates –– he cannot stop outsourcing.

But American labor organizations are prone to support Kerry more than Bush because Sen. Kerry has made “outsourcing” a bad word and while he cannot stop it, he promises he is going to stop giving what he calls “incentives” to American companies to remain abroad.

Rhetoric aside, the Kerry camp reiterates its outsourcing agenda saying it is going to stop the “special tax breaks” for companies under the deferral rules that enable companies not to pay taxes on income they earn abroad until they bring it back to the U.S.

“This encourages companies to create jobs overseas and reinvest profits there to permanently avoid paying U.S. taxes,” the plan says.

On the issue of federal contracts, the Kerry plan qualifies what it had said earlier or at least, appears to take a step backward. Many months ago people will remember the hoopla over giving federal contracts to offshore entities. Well, now the plan says “John Kerry believes that, where possible, U.S. federal contracts should be performed by American workers,” a possible toning down of the bombast of the past.

Then comes another very realistic approach though some would contend, very lame, drawing down of the earlier rhetoric against outsourcing –– that companies give at least three months of advance notice before laying off employees and shipping their jobs overseas.