  DOUG HENWOOD, dhenwood@panix.com, http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com Author of "After the New Economy," Henwood said today: "It seems the default explanation for the weak state of the job market more than two years after the official end of the recession is outsourcing.
Or, in the crude form, foreigners are stealing our jobs. Reality is a lot more complicated than that. In manufacturing, most countries -- including, to almost everyone's surprise, China -- are losing jobs. And in services, jobs lost to outsourcing would be made up by two or three months of normal job growth.
But we're not getting normal job growth, and the reasons for that are mostly of domestic origin -- mainly the lingering hangover from the late-1990s bubble. But few people want to talk about that -- or the almost nonexistent public support given to unemployed workers. Instead of the sterile back and forth between 'free traders' and 'protectionists,' let's recast the debate: protect the worker, not the job.
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