Exporting America byLou Dobbs (Warner Books $19.95 196 pp.)
If you have a job, need a job or about to decide your major in college, you need to read this. CNN's business guru takes corporate America to task for the increasingly common practice of outsourcing -- hiring cheaper workers in foreign countries to do the work Americans used to do. If you think your job is immune, you are wrong.

• U.S. businesses spent 16 billion on outsourcing last year
• Forty states have food stamp help desks operated in other countries
• Radiologists in India are reading and analyzing x-rays and MRI's for U.S. hospitals
• More than 1000 U.S. business outsource business and technology work
• Corporate interests spend more money on lobbying Congress than Congress spends to pay its staff
• U.S. Companies are not taxed on profits earned overseas
• Large Companies such as General Electric and Borg Warner outsource part of their legal work
• Seven of the ten areas of largest job growth in the next ten years are in menial or low-paying jobs

Outsourcing has long been a practice in several industries like clothing (Nike, anyone?)but has lately gained notoriety for the increase of white-collar jobs going overseas. The practice gained national notoriety last year when a report on 60 Minutes revealed that workers in India were completing tax returns for unaware U.S. citizens, who had handed them over to accounting firms or tax preparation agencies.

The big news in this meticulously researched, highly readable book, is that the practice of outsourcing extends beyond call centers and manufacturing to include accounting, medical, legal and tech jobs. Dobbs cites several corporations which have entire departments in China, India or the Phillippines, doing work that used to be done here. Dobbs shines the light on the rabid greed of these corporations, which in most cases don't pay U.S. taxes on the work or departments because it is being done outside the country, and don't pay taxes in the other country because they are an American corporation.

Dobbs blasts through every platitude offered by CEO's in defense of this practice citing rising (and extended) unemployment, shrinking tax bases for states and no development of "new jobs." The bottom line is that it's cheaper to hire a computer programmer in China at 12.50 an hour than one in the U.S. at $126 an hour. Outsourcing also eliminates the need to comply with Armed with faulty trade agreements and oiled with millions of dollars in lobbying fees, American corporations are booming. "There are now more companies than countries on the list of the world's top 100 economies," he writes.

Thanks to favorable tax laws and trade agreements, corporations are free to chase the almighty dollar anywhere they wish; American workers are left in the dust. Without a Congressional overhaul of current trade laws, the future of America's workforce looks bleak indeed.