Have you been looking all over the place for the millions of jobs the United States has lost in recent years?

I finally found some of them today: They went overseas! Unfortunately, new data [1] out from the Commerce Department is no surprise.

The Daily Labor Report [2] (subscription required) summarizes Commerce’s new findings:

In 2008, the first year of the recession, U.S. nonbank multinational corporations reduced employment domestically by 2.1 percent, while expanding jobs at foreign operations by 1.1 percent, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis said Aug. 18. 

The number of workers involved is not trivial: 
Parent companies cut a total of 445,500 jobs in 2008, while foreign affiliates added 111,700 jobs.

Multinational parent companies employed 21.1 million full- and part-time workers at the end of 2008, or approximately one out of every five private-sector workers in the United States, while 10.1 million employees worked at majority-owned foreign affiliates.

Corporations that are moaning about being unable to help out with the unemployment crisis in this nation – in which more than 26 million of America’s workers are unemployed or underemployed [3]–can sure find ways to create jobs overseas.

August 19, 2010

URL to article: http://blog.aflcio.org/2010/08/19/corporations-create-more-jobs-overseas-than-in-united-states/

URLs in this post:
[1] New data : http://www.bea.gov/scb/pdf/2010/08%20August/0810_mncs.pdf
[2]Daily Labor Report : http://news.bna.com/dlln/DLLNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=17643998&vname=dlrnotallissues&fn=17643998&jd=a0c3z8u3j0&split=0
[3] More than 26 million of America’s workers are unemployed or underemployed: http://blog.aflcio.org/2010/08/06/131000-jobs-lost-in-july/