I been hearing more and more about companies taking work overseas where the labor is cheap. Part of me got mad, but people have been saying that in the long run, it will help the US Economy. Is this true? What you guys think?

It's bad to hear American institutions like Levi's and Radio Flyer sending work to China, or that Tech Support for major companies going to India, but is it really a good thing for the economy?

 

I don't think that it is a good thing for the American economy, but it is a good thing for the economy in the country where they get the work ..... it also makes financial sense for the company outsourcing the works in their profitability, and probably also allows them to gain tax breaks from the other country and allows clever accounting to reduce their tax liability in the US. None of which IMO can be beneficial to the US economy ...... just my thoughts ....

 

it's a complex question and i don't have an answer. however, if you look at the past 100 or so years you'll note similar exodus of jobs from our country to places of cheap labor, and it's simply history repeating in other industries. i see it as an evolution of our economy to a higher plateau, by try explaining that to someone who's lost their job to someone in india getting paid 50% less than he/she was being paid in the US.

 

I read in the New York Times Thursday Radio Flyer outsourcing their production in China, cutting half of their 90+ staff I mean come on here, how many wagons are you producing which justifies outsourcing? It's important to be competitive in business but where's the morality? If all companies in the U.S. starts operating like Walmart, cutting staff here and there, driving workers to the poor house, where will Walmart find customers? Certainly not the ones who got laid off!

 

This is exactly the point ..... there is no morality in business these days. Profits are the one and only driver of a company anymore but this can't work in the long term since all of the jobs will move overseas, and people locally won't have the money to buy the products/services on offer from the companies ....

 

Outsourcing is a major attribute in the current market's globalisation which could be discussed ad nauseum with no resolution whatsoever. The primary support for the argument is that it increases competition and improves market efficiency by forcing local labour to match the low costs of o/s competitors that have lower overheads and usually lower QA. If you do a search on wal mart on this site you will find a recent thread were mingster described some of the practices from a supplier's perspective that I believe is representative of the overall market's trend pattern over the last 20 years.

A recent move that some larger companies have taken on lately is triple bottom line accounting, this practice seems to me like a counter-force to issues such as outsourcing and relocation by taking sustainability to the top of its performance criteria. At its narrowest, the term

 

Sorry for the rushed essay Im studying commerce at uni at the moment and Im kind of in that mode still If I have time later I'll edit it and include some puntuation so that others can understand

 

Outsourcing sucks.

Esp for those in the customer support and software/tech industry. Imagine you come out of college with a CS degree and cant find a job because a whole roomful of people in india is willing to do the same work at 1/10 the price..

But I myself am guilty of using outsourcing companies. I used a company in india to build for me a CRM system.

The damn thing didnt work because when it sent email out to customers with yahoo or hotmail accounts, it would be thrown in the junk folder. The dumbasses maintain that the system works fine and its a yahoo / hotmail problem not theirs..

Now what good is a customer relations management system if your customers cannot receive email from it?

Those people have the technical skills, just no fuking common sense.

After wasting months with those idiots in india i went with a *USA* based company that delivered me a product that worked.

 

It is expecially bad for tech companies, mostly ones that outsource tech support. Not only are people here upset who can't find jobs, but many customers are upset when they realize who they are talking to....and it is usually quite obvious. Classes must be given for events like the superbowl so that when people call and general conversation starts, the techs know what the hell they are talking about.
And to top it off, companies usually aren't saving much money at all. It takes a lot of extra money to build the facilitys, train the techs, in most cases bus them in as they don't have vehicles, etc.
I personally think that the continued rise in outsourcing sucks

 

I'm someone who lost their job due to outsourcing.

I hear about it pretty much on a daily basis from all the IT forums I frequent. There are many pluses and minuses:

+ Lower costs for the consumer
+ Product name goes globally, giving foreign consumers more money to purchase american products

- 60k salary is now a 30k salary, thus, more bankruptcies, and they can't purchase goods
- Customer service now sucks when you have to call a help desk and talk to someone who reads from a computer screen.

My opinion: There's no way we can pass laws restricting companies from outsourcing. This has been going on for a hundred years, and it's just part of life. Right now, American consumers want a cheap product. But as people start making more money, more emphesis will be put on customer service, and jobs will eventually come back here when customers are willing to pay a premium to get service.

All I know now is that even though I lost my job, I'm making more money than I ever have before.


[QUOTE]Originally posted by KaiWang
Outsourcing sucks.

Esp for those in the customer support and software/tech industry.