Off shoring – it never seems to go away from the news and now there are grass root organizations to protest the exporting of American jobs overseas. I have really mixed feelings about it.
Concern – I am an IT professional, and exporting my job overseas to people who can do it for much less is worrisome to say the least. I have bills to pay and a life style to support. I don’t get an exorbitant salary, off shoring has already hurt me. What I earn today is the same as what I earned in 2000. The IT bust together with IT jobs going overseas has had an impact on my economic well being.
Economic Good Sense – I do understand that in a global economy, businesses need to be as cost effective as possible to remain competitive. If you can buy products cheaper don’t you? Why should business be held to a different standard? Additionally Out sourcing provides businesses with a relatively painless mechanism to expand and shrink services and manpower based on their current need while freeing themselves emotionally from the rigors of ‘pink slipping’ their employees. As a consumer I have benefited from this practice – the 24 in TV I bought last year is cheaper then the 13 in one I bought in 1990, and I am sure the reason has a lot to do with the fact that it is made in Korea. How many of us have Japanese cars, and most of us will admit that ‘exporting American car manufacturing jobs’ overseas, not only made cars cheaper, but improved the quality of American cars.
Coming back to concern however, if I don’t have a job, I am not going to be able to afford a new car or TV, cheap or otherwise. And what is it that I am expected to do to support myself when my job no longer exists? The argument often made that low-paying and low-skilled jobs are being exported is misleading and disingenuous at minimum. I’m not sure I would consider programmers unskilled workers (by and large they have at minimum graduate degrees, a lot of them post-graduate degrees), and low-paid they may be compared to CEO pay scales, but compared to the average American worker, they are not. What is it that we should retrain ourselves to do? As I see it there are only two kinds of jobs which will not be outsourced, a job which requires physical proximity, this could be the restaurant waitress, the grocery store attendant, the garbage collector, the policeman the fireman and doctors (Unfortunately I think its too late for me to go through 7 years of Medical school now). Very hard to out source those jobs. The other job staying in the US, is that of people making the decision to out source jobs. I still haven’t heard of any CEO / CFO saying he could find a person in India or Mexico who could do his job at cents on the dollar.
Equally concerning to me is the level of hate / mistrust and racial abuses being hurled at countries where the out sourced jobs go. I am an Indian by birth; I have lived and worked in the US for 15 years. Yes I am very worried about my job, but the culture of hate worries me as much. Indians, Mexicans, Americans alike have the right to earn a decent wage, and in a global economy it stands to reason that we are all competing for the same jobs. Yes it does seem that ‘they’ have an unfair advantage, the cost of living in countries like Mexico and India is so much lower, that they can work for much lower wages. The economists tell us in 10 / 20... Years the cost of living in these countries will rise to the level where they will not have this 'unfair' edge any more – I'm just not sure how I am going to pay my bills till then.
As I said before I have very mixed feeling about out sourcing – the only thing I do know is that fear (and yes we are scared about losing our jobs) should never be a driving force for action.