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USA: U.S. Senate candidate Pete Coors, running as a job creator, continues to draw fire for his brewery's having outsourced jobs even as it seeks to import skilled foreign workers, Rocky Mountain News revealed on September 28, 2004. Coors creates jobs, "but not for Americans," said Richard Armstrong, president of the National Hire American Citizens Society. The Parker-based group has asked members to boycott Coors beer.

The Coors Brewing Co. contends that many of the employees whose jobs were outsourced - 287 over the past 11 years - stayed in Colorado, employed by other companies that still work with Coors. "Outsourcing has a negative connotation for a lot of folks," said brewery spokeswoman Laura Sankey. But, she said, "many of those people went over (to new jobs) with a straight, if not better, compensation package."

Since 2001, Coors Brewing also has applied to hire 33 skilled foreign workers for jobs paying as much as $135,298 a year, according to a U.S. Labor Department list. Richard Armstrong, president of Hire American Citizens, said he sent that list to Pete Coors last year. It was in response to an e-mail signed by Pete Coors wondering why the brewery was on a list of boycotted companies. "Perhaps there is a way we could work together to create a program that promotes the hiring and retention of American citizens at Coors," Armstrong responded. He said he received no reply.

Coors campaign spokeswoman Cinamon Watson referred questions regarding jobs at the brewery to the company. Coors took a leave of absence to run for the Senate, but he was chairman when the jobs in question were outsourced. Hire American Citizens, which claims 6,500 members, was behind a proposed ballot initiative this year that would have barred Colorado from using offshore workers to perform state contracts. Its backers failed to gather the required number of signatures to place the measure on the ballot.

The Colorado Association of Commerce and Industry opposed the measure. CACI president Chuck Berry said Monday that a better way to guarantee American jobs is "by reducing the regulatory burden and having a good, sensible, competitive tax policy" - positions also espoused by Pete Coors. CACI doesn't endorse candidates in national races, but its parent organization, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, endorsed Coors' candidacy even before the August primary election.

Coors' Democratic opponent, Colorado Attorney General Ken Salazar, aims to halt outsourcing by offering tax cuts to companies that manufacture goods in the United States and to companies that create manufacturing jobs here. Salazar also proposes taxing U.S. companies on profits earned by their foreign subsidiaries. Most of the Coors jobs that were outsourced were in information technology, though 50 building and maintenance workers, as well as 35 people in the brewery's engineering and construction work, also saw their jobs cut, said Sankey. The people were hired locally by other companies, she said. Coors also outsourced 67 jobs in 2001 to Texas-based Electronic Data Systems Corp., which outsources 12 of its jobs to New Zealand.



29 September, 2004