What I Want for the New Year

empowering girls for the needle trades, 1904

Shortly after the holidays, a new Congress will be seated, with a Republican majority in the House of Representatives. I suspect the new Congress will produce very little in the way of a course correction, especially since they’ll start with an appropriations framework — what used to be called a “budget” — established in the lame duck session. But here’s my one tiny, sad, simple little hope for the new Congress.

A few months ago, the US Department of Commerce launched the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF) Upskilling Initiative, in partnership with a bunch of American corporations and the Asia Foundation. You’ll be shocked to hear that the Asia Foundation is very committed to social justice, and so has joined in the fight for gender equity:

In the case of the IPEF Upskilling Initiative, the fight for “women’s empowerment” is a massive training effort at the bottom end of the labor market, “a public-private endeavor to support sustainable and inclusive economic growth by providing primarily women and girls in IPEF emerging economies and middle-income partners access to training and education in digital skills.” The plan is to train seven million entry-level digital workers in Brunei, Fiji, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. The Commerce Department’s press release says that this training “bolsters U.S. private sector engagement” in the region:

Fourteen U.S. companies – Amazon and Amazon Web Services, American Tower, Apple, Cisco, Dell Technologies, Edelman Global Advisory (EGA), Google, HP, IBM, MasterCard, Microsoft, PayPal, Salesforce, and Visa – will each provide 500,000 or more upskilling opportunities that use digital tools for primarily women and girls in IPEF emerging economies and middle-income partners by 2032.

Which is a bit like early-20th century Chicago meatpacking houses empowering Eastern European immigrants. It’s Triangle Shirtwaist empowerment, opening the turnstiles of the labor market to new entrants at the bottom. Tragically, the IPEF Upskilling Initiative fact sheet says that girls will be trained on computers to “combat disinformation,” so spare a thought for Nina Jankowicz, whose existence is about to outsourced to social media whinemakers in Vietnam and Indonesia. I need a piecework quote for “Covid vaccines are safe and effective, and Elon Musk is very dangerous,” with and without hashtags, in volume.

So what I want for the New Year is for the federal government to stop digging out the floor under the American labor market, using public funds to promote offshoring and H1-B farming while using woke language about empowerment to describe the extremely calculated development of cheaper labor sources for giant corporations. I’d like Salesforce and Google to train or find their own skilled labor, without public subsidies. I’d like the federal budget to be drained of all of…this.

Probably a waste of a wish. But it would be a pretty simple change.