(clarionledger.com) WASHINGTON — Three weeks ago, Dawn Zimmer became a statistic.

Laid off from her job assembling trucks at Freightliner’s plant in Portland, Ore., she and 800 of her colleagues joined a long line of U.S. manufacturing workers who have lost jobs in recent years. A total of 3.2 million – one in six factory jobs – have disappeared since the start of 2000.

Many people believe those jobs never will come back.

“They are building a multimillion-dollar plant in Mexico, and they are going to build the Freightliners down there. They came in and videotaped us at work so they could train the Mexican workers,” said Zimmer, 55, who had worked at Freightliner since 1994.

That’s the issue for American workers. Many of their jobs are moving overseas, to Mexico and China and elsewhere.

[...]

Princeton economist Alan Blinder, who was vice chairman of the Federal Reserve during the Clinton administration, says the number of jobs at risk of being shipped out of the country could reach 40 million over the next 10 to 20 years. That would be one out of every three service sector jobs that could be at risk.

Those lost manufacturing jobs are fueling an intense debate over globalization – the increasing connection of the United States and other economies. (more…)

And no matter WHAT politician claims that if he/she is elected, they will bring jobs back to the US, don’t believe it. With countries like Mexico, China, India and South Africa proving to the world that they can do the same work for less, the globalization dam is already broken. Anything else is nothing more than empty campaign promises where the future president will spend the entire duration of his/her term blaming past presidents for failure to produce.

With this in mind, this is also why the consistent raising of the minimum wage gives folks very little incentive to move out of the dependent class and into more secure professions.