Among those who apparently didn't listen to the 43-year-old unemployed woman whose recorded message was posted online last week by The Republic were Arizona's Jon Kyl and John McCain, along with 24 of their Senate colleagues, all of them collecting fat government paychecks.

The woman and her husband, who are raising three kids, lost their jobs to foreign outsourcing and are having trouble finding work.

(The senators, as well as you, can still hear her by typing "newsmultimedia.azcentral.com" on the address line of your computer.)

Since the column about the woman appeared Thursday, I've heard from dozens of people just like her. They are a new type of out-of-work Americans. Educated. Professional. Motivated. Lost. The plan a few years back was that foreign countries would take America's less skilled jobs and Americans who might have done such work would go to college and become high-tech professionals. And they did. And now the high-tech jobs are being shipped out of the country.

"I was an IT manager who worked an average of 65 hours a week," one "outsourced" woman wrote. "I spend between 10 and 14 hours a day looking for work. I am a single mother with two kids, a mortgage, a car payment, credit card bills and utilities . . . I was able to make my mortgage payment this month using my tax refund. I don't know what I'll do next month."

Another newly unemployed professional wrote, "I am a 48-year-old woman who lost my job. I was with the company for 18 years. My job went to China. My husband is still working but for how long? The company he works for is always threatening to go to India. It's as plain as the nose on our faces that we are becoming a third-world country."

A frustrated local spouse added, "A year and a half ago my husband was laid off after 21 years at a large company in the Valley. We have a stack of copies of the jobs he has applied for. Everyday he applies for jobs. Sometimes the response comes back, 'Sorry we have received too many applications.' He has reworked and reworked his resume. He writes the nice cover letter. He applies for jobs that pay half of what he made just to work, but he can't even get an interview."

And there was this from a woman trying to crawl out of the hole she found herself in:

"Downsizing, outsourcing, declining market - I was out of a job," she wrote. "In one day all that I had worked so hard for was gone. After a year of looking for a new position, savings depleted, house on the market, I moved back to Phoenix, at 42, to live with my parents. My son dropped out of college and took a job to make ends meet. After almost two years of looking for a job, I finally secured a new position this past September. I am in the process of rebuilding my life, my credit, my self-esteem. My salary is about one-third that of what I was previously making. My circumstances have definitely changed. And what have I learned? This is the American dream."

There are some politicians trying to do something about this. But it's an election year, which makes "outsourcing" political opponents more important than jobs. Still, last week the Senate voted on a bill that would cut federal funding to companies that lay off American workers at a higher rate than employees in other countries. It's one of several that have been introduced. Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., said, "The fact that we're using taxpayers' money to ship somebody's job overseas, I don't think that's a good thing." The bill passed the Senate by a vote of 70-26, with our two Republican senators voting against it.

Democrats plan to use America's fear of outsourcing as a strategy to get voters to reject President Bush in November. And because the opposition is playing up the problem, Republicans must play it down. But as one man who wrote to me said, "It is not about the left or the right, but about the middle."

I've heard the same thing from people living here and in many other states. An engineer from Orlando whose job at the Kennedy Space Center was sent offshore summed it up this way: "I am not remotely concerned about terrorism. I am not even mildly worried about gay marriages. I am in danger of starving to death."



Reach Montini at ed.montini@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-8978.