DAVID BRANCACCIO: NOW on PBS:

What's happening to the American worker? As jobs move overseas, a filmmaker captures pain, bewilderment and a sense of betrayal.

GREG SPOTTS: I'm seeing people who are still unemployed or who have become newly employed in jobs that are maybe two or three notches down from where they were. Jobs that pay significantly less. Jobs that have significantly less benefits.

BRANCACCIO: And cameras in the Sudan document the tragedy in Darfur as human rights advocate Samantha Power finds that those who've fled their shattered villages to refugee camps are still being terrorized.

SAMANTHA POWER: And so what they are doing is a systematic campaign of gang rape.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: Welcome. I thought I'd heard it all in my long years covering the shifting world economy. But I came across a pair of numbers that stopped me in my tracks the other day.

Way back in the depths of the recession in the early 1980's, how many people were worried about losing their jobs then? A measly 13 percent.

Compare that to 46 percent. That's the number of people who worried about getting laid off at the height of the great 1990s boom — when the economy was supposed to be cruising along so well.

This is the great economic shift that we've been training now's cameras on this year: the greater degrees of risk you and I and many American families now live with.

The story of our concerns and fear over our jobs doesn't get much from the media attention.

A fellow named Greg Spotts set out to fix this and decided to go around the country with his own video camera. He talked to people about disappearing jobs. For over six months, he traveled to nineteen burbs — from textile towns in North Carolina to aerospace regions in the Northwest. His interviewees: blue collar families, both union and non-union. He also talked to white collar and management types. His question: what happens when the jobs go?

When the journey was done, spots put it together in a documentary called AMERICAN JOBS that he's been showing to communities, campuses, and even some politicians who are taken aback by the sense of betrayal expressed by folks in the film.

Gregg, welcome to NOW.

GREG SPOTTS: Thanks for having me.

BRANCACCIO: So, you went out there. You criss-crossed America. But let's get right to it.

You're in Kannapolis, North Carolina where Pillowtex Textile Company has shut its doors. What's it like these days?

GREG SPOTTS: A lot of people are suffering very quietly in their homes. People are starting to lose their cars. They're starting to worry about being foreclosed.

VIDEO FROM AMERICAN JOBS:

WOMAN: We're facing the ultimate. I don't want to think it, unless he gets a job or me - we're gonna file bankruptcy."

MAN: My mental state right now, sometimes I feel like I just plum lost it. Really. I mean, it's just a mess. It really is, it's just a mess."

END VIDEO

GREG SPOTTS: And many of them are going around from church to social services group trying to raise money for their next dose of medicine. VIDEO FROM AMERICAN JOBS:

"What kind of medicine do you take?"

WOMAN: Well, I take blood pressure bill, I'm on Synthroid everyday. I have to have that to live. You know I go beg my doctor in Concord if I'm close enough to Synthroid running out to give me a couple to do me till I can get some or a little sample pack.

WOMAN 2: I have the medical insurance and the bankruptcy coming out. Plus the regular taxes you have to pay out of your paycheck. So after all that's said and done, I probably bring home $50 dollars every two weeks.

END VIDEO

BRANCACCIO: After talking to factory workers in North Carolina, Greg Spotts flew to Seattle to speak with laid off tech workers who were experiencing the same struggles.

GREG SPOTTS: Just a few years ago we were being told Americans are going to move up the value chain. We're going to be in computers. And if some, you know, low end manufacturing jobs go overseas, that's just part of our own migration up. But in fact the low wage countries have targeted every job up and down the value chain. India and China want to develop biotechnology. They want to develop the next Wi-Fi.

They want to develop the next high definition television standards. They're just not trying to pick of sort of the crumbs that we're going to leave behind. And this is a whole new challenge that we really haven't even started to address.

BRANCACCIO: I mean, you see college educated middle class people seeing these effects. There's a part of your film where you're in the Pacific Northwest. The company is WatchMark. And who do you talk to?

GREG SPOTTS: Myra Bronstein.

VIDEO FROM AMERICAN JOBS:

MYRA BRONSTEIN: The head of human resources said well the reason you're here today is because, um, there are cutbacks and you are effected by these cutbacks. And the entire QA team is being outsourced to India. We're given you letters in your packets that show a termination date in your future because you are expected to train your replacements. And they will be flying in over the weekend and they will be here on Monday.

END VIDEO

BRANCACCIO: So, Myra has to train her own replacement?

GREG SPOTTS: Yeah and this is a knowledge transfer taking know-how that was generated here and sending to a third party company in India. So, we're not just losing those 17 jobs. We're losing the unique competitive advantage that we used to have in that kind of software. And we're transferring it to our future competitors who will develop their own products with that know how.

BRANCACCIO: Typically in this outsourcing discussion you think of a U.S. based company perhaps hiring a cheaper worker in say India or China. And then they have to fire the person in the United States. But there is a quite a wrinkle on that in your film.

You're in the Orlando area. It's Lake Mary, Florida. And you're talking to some former-- what Siemen's workers?

GREG SPOTTS: Uh-huh

BRANCACCIO: And the group has been shocked to find out what?

GREG SPOTTS: They've been shocked to find out that they've been replaced at their own desks by low wage Indian programmers who have been brought from India to the US.

BEGIN VIDEO:

MAN: They took my job, Pat's job, they took everybody's job and got rid of us but replaced us with this outsourcing firm here in this country. So that's not a lay off or outsourcing, it's basically a job replacement. So we were replaced.

WOMAN: Oh, replaced to the chair. I mean you can call my old telephone number in Lake Mary, Florida and you'll get my replacement. My Indian replacement is here in the United States sitting at my old desk and answering my phone.

END VIDEO

BRANCACCIO: So, people from other countries come to the United States. And they can stay in those positions?

GREG SPOTTS: They can stay for quite a while on a non-immigrant path. Opposing these types of visa is not being anti-immigrant. These are guest worker visas designed for people the come in and work. And they're being paid an Indian wage scale sometimes.

BEGIN VIDEO:

"They must gain knowledge transfer and that's where these Visa programs have come into play. They're allowed to come into this country. They're allowed to make Americans train them so they can move this work abroad."

END VIDEO

BRANCACCIO: Greg. Maybe you're overstating the effects of this outsourcing. That it's essentially a drop in the bucket. I was looking at government figures, Bureau of Labor Statistics, tallied up the figures for 2004, 16,000 jobs. Terrible if you're one of the 16,000 but not much in the grand scheme of the huge American labor pool.

GREG SPOTTS: Oh, it's more than ten times that.

BRANCACCIO: You think the government's statistics are wrong?

GREG SPOTTS: The government actually refuses to compile accurate statistics on service jobs. The statistics were designed for a time to try to figure out all the different kinds of manufacturing when we were a manufacturing-centered economy. So, the Labor Department will count how many jobs have been lost in leather goods versus cotton made goods.

But they have no means at this point to accurately count job movement in services and in high tech services. So, we have to find other ways to count it. For example, you can look at the financial results of the Indian outsourcing companies.

There's a million people in India doing outsourcing work for foreign companies. So, most of that work came from the United States. We don't know if there's a one to one relationship in terms of the jobs lost versus jobs gained.

But that's one indication. Another indication is that the unemployment rate for computer scientists in this country went from less than one percent four years ago, to six percent now. It's higher for computer scientists with engineering degrees than for the general population.

BRANCACCIO: But of course, that's at the same time as the internet bubble collapsed. So, it's not just that unraveling the great high tech boom coming back down to earth?

GREG SPOTTS: Well, people who are unemployed programmers tell me that there are no openings for American citizens in the entire tech industry right now. That you can send out 500 resumes. And not-- you can't get one call back.

One of the challenges is that there's so much money to be made in off shoring the production of software that the software industry is working very, very hard to perpetuate this myth that we have a talent shortage and that we need to bring in talent or go over there looking for talent. But if you go to communities like Seattle, like Palo Alto, Orlando, you will see whole gated communities where half the houses are for sale. We do have evidence that there's a huge erosion in that type of job that was just the best job you could have had only a few years ago.

BRANCACCIO: As we're talking the machinery of Congress is gearing up to actually, I think the term is, liberalize America's trading rules to expand NAFTA, essentially, something called CAFTA. This would be five more countries in Central America plus the Dominican Republic that would also be allowed to engage in free trade with the United States. That has you concerned. You've written a whole book about it, CAFTA and Free Trade.

GREG SPOTTS: It has me very concerned. When NAFTA was being considered in 1993, it was really a new kind of experiment with a regional trading block that mixed a very affluent country with Mexico, a very poor country. There were differences of opinion on how that might pan out. But we now know that the result was a massive movement of about a million jobs lost here and put in Maquiladoras across the border and Mexico.

BRANCACCIO: Yeah, the factorIES just south of the border?

GREG SPOTTS: Yeah and those people are making a dollar an hour. They are not becoming, you know, consumers of American products. We have all this experience.

And yet now we're prepared to push NAFTA five more countries south plus the Dominican Republic. And we haven't made one adjustment based on what we learned about how it works when you integrate these radically different economies. So, I'm concerned about the fact that the gross national product of the five Central American signatories of CAFTA is less than the gross state product of Kansas.

BRANCACCIO: Of Kansas?

GREG SPOTTS: There is so little buying power in these countries to buy American made products.

BRANCACCIO: Do you see globalization as its now constituted as an inevitable process?

GREG SPOTTS: No, I don't see it as inevitable. I think technology is making the world a smaller place, but global commerce is governed by rules. And there are new rules of the road that were written by politicians and lawyers to benefit large, multi-national companies. And they weren't written to benefit workers. And I think there's different ways those ruled could be written. And I think we need to open a dialogue as to what the alternatives might be.

BRANCACCIO: Greg Spotts. director of the documentary AMERICAN JOBS and author of the book, CAFTA AND FREE TRADE: WHAT EVERY AMERICAN SHOULD KNOW. Thank you very much.

GREG SPOTTS: Thank you.

BRANCACCIO:

Disappearing jobs aren't the only things that doesn't get covered in the media. Take the bloody conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa. There are small signs of hope and large signs of worry in the Western region of the Sudan, called Darfur.

These images of Darfur were captured by cameramen from IRIN, a UN-sponsored news service that traveled to the region. The conflict broke out two years ago when government supported militia began attacking isolated villages at first to quell anti-government protestors. The resulting fighting has displaced nearly two million Sudanese and killed tens of thousands of others.

Samantha Power knows a lot about both mass killing and Darfur. She founded the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard and has traveled to Darfur to see the situation first hand. She's a familiar face on NOW and we're happy to have her back.

BRANCACCIO: Samantha, good to see you.

SAMANTHA POWER: Nice to see you.

BRANCACCIO: So, I bumped into you on a plane, late last summer. You were just back from Darfur. I mean, I think you had soot on you. You were singed. Fast forward, what is it five months now?

SAMANTHA POWER: Yeah.

BRANCACCIO: Is the situation gotten better?

SAMANTHA POWER: No, not at all, I mean, villages are still being torched. I thought there weren't that many villages left to be torched actually when I was there. The killings have continued. The displaced population which is around two million is holed up in these people call them camps. But it's really a misnomer, just these large fields, swamps of people almost, you know, sewage swamps.

You have people who are leaving the so-called camps to get wood which they need in order to heat the humanitarian aid that the United States mainly is giving. Because the dirty secret about humanitarian aid is unless you heat it it's actually inedible. So--

BRANCACCIO: You have to heat it up?

SAMANTHA POWER: You have to--

BRANCACCIO: So, you need firewood.

SAMANTHA POWER: --absolutely have to have firewood. And so the Janjaweed have just become much more — they are the Arab militia doing the killing. They've become much cagier about how to conduct this campaign of destruction and degradation. They just wait on the outskirts of these fields for the women to exit the perimeter of the camps, go to get firewood. And so what they're doing is systemic campaign of gang rape and rape of women who travel in groups, rape of women who travel alone.

BRANCACCIO: Did you see there was an American advisor to the African Union's force monitoring the supposed cease fire in the Sudan. He's very, very frustrated, felt that he had to just stand by as truly horrible things happened to women, truly horrible things happened to children. Clearly this African Union force ain't going to do it.

SAMANTHA POWER: It isn't going to do it. It's just about getting up to full strength. And full strength is 3,000. They're unarmed.

The area we're talking about is about the size of France. And they just can't get around to an extent to where they're able to deter the atrocities.

BRANCACCIO: Well, the U.S. has been focused on this. When Colin Powell was still Secretary of State, he spoke out on this issue.

COLIN POWELL: We concluded, I concluded, that genocide has been committed in Darfur, and the government of Sudan and the Janjaweed bear responsibility.

BRANCACCIO: He labeled it a genocide, didn't pussyfoot around that term. But clearly label's not enough.

SAMANTHA POWER: There was a lot of effort put into getting that declaration on the logic that use of the word genocide would oblige a stronger response. And it would alert the world to the gravity of the problem.

And instead of the use of the term genocide becoming a trigger for action by the Bush Administration, to a large extent it became a substitute for action. It became the policy in and of itself. "Well we used the word genocide. What more do you want?"

And what had ended up provoking which is really unfortunate is what is now an almost six month debate since the use of the term in September about whether in fact the Bush Administration is right over, you know, whether it's genocide or whether it's simply the worst kind of ethnic cleansing or systemic crimes against humanity and torture and rape. I mean, what difference does the definition make? The point is, the murders are happening everyday. The rapes are occurring two million people are still in need and still at risk. And that's what we need to focus on rather than the semantics.

BRANCACCIO: Americans have the capacity to care about human rights and terrible things happening to people in foreign lands. I'm do you have African-American groups and Christian groups focused on the Sudan. You have your work, human rights work, we've done some coverage — even a film like HOTEL RAWANDA can help. But it doesn't seem to reach that critical mass, this Sudan story this Darfur story that say the effects of the terrible tsunami has where you have every kid on every street corner gathering dollar bills to send to the tsunami victims. What do you think accounts for that?

SAMANTHA POWER: Well, I think-- first with the tsunami, just about everybody can imagine themselves being a victim of a natural disaster, you know, whether sitting out on a beach at a tourist resort and suddenly seeing a wave and, you know, gravitating toward it and then pulling back. It's a lot harder to imagine ourselves as, you know, herders living in the middle of the Sahara Desert and, you know, carrying spears. So, I think that there's a distance both between us and the victims in terms of our capacity for empathy and also between us and the perpetrators. We - the whole sort of scene just seems so remote and kind of unworldly almost.

But the second reason is the tsunami initiatives by organizations gave people tangible things that they could do. And I think in the case of Darfur, a lot of people do have Rwanda guilt and have seen HOTEL RAWANDA and do want to do something, quote, do something. But they're not exactly sure.

Because the answer is obviously needs to be to send a protection force or to punish. And how can an ordinary citizen, you know, be a part of that. You know, I'll just give you one example of an incredibly inspiring response to the tragedy in Darfur that's an effort to get at this problem and this and the difference between a tsunami and a genocide. A group of-- a handful of students at Swarthmore College, you know, in Pennsylvania have just set up something called the Genocide Intervention Fund.

And they have announced, you know, at the ripe old age of 19 and 20 that they are going to raise million dollars to help pay for the African Union troops that are having trouble deploying quickly to Darfur. Because it's-- you know, it's taken nine months for the African Union to get up to speed.

They've got a liaison contract now signed with the AU. They're going to supply flak jackets and fuel and, you know, non-lethal items that are so indispensable to the Africa Union job. And more important than what they actually do — because a million dollars in the larger scheme of things isn't that much they are signaling, "This is what we, a handful of students in the middle of, you know, Pennsylvania can do. Where is the US government?"

BRANCACCIO: It's quite exciting that these students were able to-- they were able to marshal their resources in this way. But you've got to admit, I mean, international justice-- I mean, globally can't rest on students at a college. Or either your or my capacity to drop everything and focus on all the tragedies going on around the world. There'd have to be bigger structures at play.

SAMANTHA POWER: When Colin Powell went to Darfur, you know, last summer in June of 2004, humanitarian aid access which had been blocked by the Sudanese government for months, suddenly open sesame. You know, this is the kind of effect still that an American Secretary of State can have.

And as a result, the millions of deaths that were predicted in terms of cholera outbreaks and malaria outbreaks in these, you know, concentrated sort of cesspools that double as refugee camps, those deaths haven't occurred.

That's a lesson. That's what we can do when we put our minds to it. But what about, you know, a new trip now by the new Secretary of State? You know, what about a high level ministerial meeting asking not how we feed the victims but how we tackle the political problems, you know, at the root of this crisis.

BRANCACCIO: Well, President Bush kicked off his second term with this appeal to really the moral dimension of America's power overseas. Maybe what is going on-- not maybe but in fact what is going on in the Sudan is so morally offensive, this is something the U.S. needs to do.

SAMANTHA POWER: There is a space with the language of the President who talks so much about how failed states are a long-term threat to U.S. security and how, you know, oppressive regimes-- you know, those regimes who victimize their own people become, you know, dangers to regions and dangers to the world.

The question is can states act on the new rhetoric that comes out of Washington and elsewhere which is that failed states are certainly bad for the people living in them. But they're also the kinds of places that very dangerous threats to us breed.

And I think if you're looking at a kind of classic Afghanistan in a making, that's what Darfur is. I mean, when you travel through the Sahara and you, you know, see these biblical scenes of refugees coming up over the sand dunes, you know, just trying to find water and food, you know, you know that anybody who wants to get in there, it's a very, very porous place. And it's the kind of place that will pose a long term threat.

BRANCACCIO: Samantha Power, thank you very much.

SAMANTHA POWER: Thank you, David.

BRANCACCIO: Good conversations with folks like Samantha Powers and Greg Spotts speak truth to power by documenting the challenges of real people, around the corner and around the world.

Next week, another truth teller. Playwright and actor Wallace Shawn tries to make sense of a troubled world.

WALLY SHAWN: Violence is underlying the pleasant life that we lead. People are killed on a daily basis in order for us to have the material goods that we enjoy.

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