Workers for iconic U.S. candy maker Hershey can kiss nearly 1,500 jobs goodbye. Jesse Russell reports.

Employees of the company born in Hershey, Pennsylvania are beginning to see the repercussions of planned job cuts announced a day after Valentines Day. The company is closing its last Canadian factory, laying off 580 workers, and is set to shutter additional plants in Oakdale California, Naugatuck, Connecticut, and Reading, Pennsylvania. Many jobs will be shifted to Mexico where a new plant is being built. The company also has plans to shift product production to China and India.

By Jesse Russell

Outsourcing may not have the benefits previously touted by advocates. A new study by outsourcing advisory firm TPI says that after governance costs, professional fees and severance pay savings are on average around 15 percent. The new information flies in the face of previous estimates that outsourcing could save companies upwards of 60 percent in costs.

By Doug Cunningham

Delphi's CEO says it's going to make its parts in China and there's nothing that can be done about it. New York businessman Jack Davis says there IS something that be done - tariffs can balance U.S.-China trade and save middle class American jobs.

[Jack Davis 1] : "Products are coming in at slave wages building the parts. That's just not the right thing to do. I'm against globalization. I want to get out of the NAFTA, I want to get out of the CAFTA, the WTO and put trade balancing tariffs on any country. If they want to sell us something, they have to buy something of equal value from us or they'll get a tariff on their product. And this is the only way I see to stop this hemorrhaging of jobs and industries."

On Thursday, New Jersey became the fifth state to sign into law a bill that would ban the outsourcing of government contracts to foreign governments. The law says that only American citizens authorized to work in the United States can work under a New Jersey state contract. The bill was signed into law by Governor Richard Codey who called it "an important step to protect workers and keep jobs from going overseas." The New Jersey Chamber of Commerce has criticized the new law, suggesting it may discourage multinational corporations from operating in the Garden State. Maryland, Oklahoma, Montana and Washington are all considering or are in the process of passing similar bills.

Workers in the United States aren't the only ones with concerns about job being offshored to places like India and China. Amicus, the United Kingdom's largest manufacturing, technical and skilled person's union, says more than 12,000 British jobs were offshored in 2004. The union projects more than 18,000 additional jobs leaving by the end of next year. Companies insist that they are only moving low-paying processing jobs out of the UK. Amicus representatives say, however, that high-paying management positions have also begun to move offshore. The union says Scotland has been hit especially hard because a high number of call centers operate there.

U.S. call centers are increasingly turning to “homesourcing” in addition to the infamous outsourcing they’ve been doing with customer service jobs. A report by the research firm IDC says there are roughly 100,000 workers in the U.S. working from their homes as call center representatives. Some companies are finding that using this method can cut their costs while avoiding problems associated with shipping that work overseas. Some customers have discovered they’re dealing with overseas representatives who often aren’t familiar with U.S. customers. But home-based U.S. workers solve that problem. The research company Forrester has estimated that by 2015 more than 3 million U.S. service jobs will be sent offshore. But this new trend may mitigate that job exportation.

A class action suit filed by forty-four former Best Buy IT workers charges the retail giant used age to determine whose jobs to eliminate. The move was part of Best Buy's plan to outsource the management of 650 of its 820 IT employees to a company called Accenture.

Stephen Snyder, the Minneapolis-based lead attorney for the plaintiffs, says eighty-two of the 126 terminated IT workers were forty years old and older.

[Snyder1] "These plaintiffs were all solid performers. Their most recent performance scores were at the solid performer or better levels. Neverless they were terminated and when we looked over all the terminations and the ages, we found that their was a very strong statistically correlation between higher age and termination."

By the end of the year, the countries second largest telephone company plans to eliminate 10,000 U.S. jobs, reducing it's workforce by more than 6 percent. The cuts at SBC come on top of 7,000 jobs already lost this year through what the company calls "normal attrition." The company says it is adjusting to a changing market where more and more people are replacing their landlines with cell phones and internet calling. In addition, SBC representatives say that new jobs could be added in the future as the focus is shifted towards Cingular Wireless, a company it owns 60 percent of. To date, SBC has sent more than 4500 jobs overseas.

The world’s second largest tech service provider offshored more than 20,000 jobs to places like Mexico, India and Hungary by the end of 2003. So it comes as no surprise to critics of offshoring that Electronic Data Services announced early this week that it’s offering an early retirement plan to over 9,000 U.S. workers. More than 17,000 of the jobs offshored by EDS were in the customer service field. However, at the end of last year the company sent nearly 2,400 jobs for software developers and engineers abroad. In its announcement, EDS says the offshoring is part of a larger plan to reduce its U.S. workforce by up to 20,000 employees.

Outsourcing is a bigger problem in America than first thought. Officially the Bureau of Labor Statistics says just over 4600 private sector jobs in companies with 50 or more workers were lost to outsourcing in the first quarter of this year. But two labor experts says the toal is really much higher. Stephanie Luce with the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Kate Bronfenbrenner at Cornell says the total is closer to 400,000 jobs by the end of this year. The two prepared a report for a bipartisan Congressional group investigating outsourcing. Not only are many more jobs actually being exported but more white-collar, information tech and call center jobs are now leaving the country compared to 2001 when most outsourced jobs were blue-collar.

The Wisconsin AFL-CIO presented a report to journalists Tuesday, detailing manufacturing job losses in the state. The study comes on the heels of similar reports in Washington, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The report finds that between January 2001 and May 2004, 61 percent of the layoffs by Wisconsin manufacturers were trade related. Since 2001 one in nine of Wisconsin's manufacturing jobs have disappeared. Milwaukee, the Fox River Valley and Janesville are areas of the state hit hardest by the current trade policies. Bob Baugh, executive director of the AFL-CIO Industrial Union Council said that the report is the first ever to rely on publicly reported official data to measure trade-related job losses. He says that the study is powerful evidence that current trade policies are hurting America's working families. Detailed information on job losses in America and which companies are shipping jobs overseas can be found at www.workingamerica.org.