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Due to the condition of the United States economy, the national labor union condition can best be described as fluctuating in a downward direction. This fluctuation is more severe because of the corporate trends and escalating efforts to both outsource and export lower paying, blue-collar jobs. This situation is causing extreme difficulties in the U.S. while broadening the global labor position. The U.S. economy has 3.2 million fewer jobs today than it did when President Bush was elected, including 2.5 million fewer manufacturing jobs. In the past three years, nearly 1 in 5 U.S. workers were laid off from the job according to The Disposable Worker: Living in a Job-Loss Economy, a Rutgers University report released in late July. Among workers laid off from full-time work, roughly one-fourth was earning less than $40,000 annually. To further effect the job market, in July, a total of 15 million workers were unemployed, underemployed or discouraged by the lack of success in their job hunt, according to the Labor Department. While the U.S. labor market was suffering as indicated in the paragraph above, U.S. corporations were sending jobs to the global economy. For example, corporations such as IBM and General Electric were sending thousands of jobs to economy poor countries such as India, China, Mexico and Central America. This trend has put the national labor union environment and the global labor union climate into extreme losses and gains. The labor picture becomes even more depressing when we realize that multinational corporations are transferring jobs to countries where workers earn low wages and have few or no protections. Also, small U.S. businesses are lying off workers or shutting their doors because they can not meet foreign competitors’ prices. The dire condition of the U.S.
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