Offshoring the Economy

[unixronin]

A sobering article in Fast Company magazine says that as many as 14 million jobs in the US could be offshored.  It's not just IT any more.  It's accountants, customer service reps, medical transcriptionists.

"More than just outsourcing IT or anyone's job, we're outsourcing the American middle class," says Bronstein.

I find myself increasingly thinking it's time to abandon both this career and this country, and find some other way to make a living, somewhere else.  I just don't know what.  I still don't know if I could handle the schooling to become a pharmacist.  I'm seriously considering retail; I'm told Home Despot pays $16 an hour.  Our friends wolfspaw and stoda already abandoned IT to become massage therapists.  And frankly, I seriously think that the US economy is going to crash as a result of offshoring -- the ultimate manifestation of the shortsighted Wall Street quest for short-term profit.

A partial list of Fast Company's "at risk" jobs:

• Extreme risk:  Accountant, industrial engineer, production control specialist, quality assurance engineer, helpdesk specialist, telemarketer
• High or moderate risk:  Automotive engineer, computer systems analyst, database administrator, software developer, customer-service representative, CAD technician, paralegal/legal assistant, medical transcriptionist, copy editor, journalist, film editor, insurance agent, lab technician, human resources specialist
• Low risk:  Aircraft mechanic, artist, carpenter, civil engineer, headhunter, interior designer

We're not just offshoring jobs:  We're offshoring our economy.

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Oh, profit is not in itself a bad goal, no, any more than property is theft. But if this trend continues, companies that do business in the US are going to find their US markets in serious trouble and suffering from a shortage of people who have any money to buy their products with. If it's a choice between a new LCD monitor, a new plasma TV, loan payments on a new Chrysler Crossfire, or having food on the table and clothes on the kids, most people are going to pick the food and clothes. Offshoring 14 million jobs, if it gets to that point, is going to have a pretty damned major impact on the economy.

I don't think the government's entirely at fault for the cost of labor in the US, either. We have a far higher standard of living than, say, India, but that standard of living costs money. Even India's starting to lose jobs now to China. If India can't compete with China, we sure as hell can't. (And I find it interesting that Indian workers are being told they're replacing people who are moving on to better, higher-paying jobs, not that the people they're replacing are being tossed out on their asses to save a buck.)

That said, at the end of the day, there's a lot of argument that offshoring isn't the dramatic cost saving companies seem to think it is, either. Oh, sure, it saves them money, but not the 70% to 80% many offshoring companies keep claiming, because they don't consider the infrastructure costs of offshoring -- or problems such as the one my first wife, now a senior technical writer for Tibco, is discovering: Indian technical writers and engineers who are, according to the org chart, supposed to be reporting to her or working with her are not doing the things she tells them need to be done, because they consider it demeaning and beneath them to have a woman tell them what to do. They'll quite calmly lie to her and tell her that a document she told them to update has been updated, when she has the latest version of that document open on her screen and can see perfectly clearly that the changes she told them to make have not been made.

I've also read articles asserting that while many of the Indian developers that work has been offshored to are perfectly competent coders, they wouldn't know innovation if it leapt up and bit them in the ass (and at least one friend who's had to work with offshored coders and said they couldn't even write decent code). If you can get away with paying your coders only 20% as much, but it takes three times as long to get the project finished (and you're paying your remaining US staff their full salaries over that triple time period too), have you really saved money?


The gripping hand is this: In feudal days, it was understood that just as the serfs and men-at-arms of a lord had fealty to their lord, so their lord had fealty to them. It was his responsibility to keep them fed and protected. The same relationship should exist between a company and its employees -- as employees depend on the company for their jobs, so the company depends on its workers for their knowledge, their skills, and their experience. You can buy skills, and you can transfer knowledge, but you can't offshore experience. It doesn't come à la carte. When you lay off your skilled employees, their experience is gone and you can't buy it back.

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

If the economy falls that much, workers here will become cheaper to hire.

If offshore workers really are not that efficient to hire, and noone here can buy the goods being produced, the situation will self correct.

What you say about experience is true.

-Ogre

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

If the economy falls that much, workers here will become cheaper to hire.

But enough to compete?

Well, time will tell, I guess.

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

Somebody has to buy the products. There has to be a middle class to support wealthy business owners. But the more the government intervenes, the longer things will take to self correct.

-Ogre

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

yeah. Government, I have increasingly come to see over the past thirty years, is not even a poor solution; it's the problem. "That government is best which governs least," indeed. Or, as I saw stated once on a bumper sticker:
"If more government is the answer, it must have been a really stupid question."

[jilara.livejournal.com]

We techies are getting a lot cheaper. "Increased productivity" = longer hours, same pay. Our wages at my work have been frozen for 4 years, and if folks hire, it's at less, not more, money. My former boss from the early '90's has taken a $10K a year cut every time he's been rehired after being laid off. Since this has happened 4 times in as many years, he's making $40K a year less than before. My former officemate is making 2/3 of what he was making at his job in 2001, now as a contractor with no benefits. Believe me, it's sorting out.

A coworker lit into a striker outside Safeway (they're protesting having to pay for part of their health benefits) and said "Most of us not only have taken pay cuts to stay employed, we're paying for part of our health benefits, so what's with you? Wake up and smell the coffee!"

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

So stop doing it. It obviously bothers you, so get all of your people together and organize. Like unixronin said, you can't offshore experience, so if you were to unionize for better hours, or better pay (but probably not both) either you'd get it, or you'd lose your job. Which is more important you you? Work or Sanity?

Yeah, I had an interesting conversation with the strikers outside of a Ralph's one day after I ahd moved here. I asked what they were protesting, and they said they were striking for health benefits. I asked if they were striking to get them, and they said they were striking because they had been asked to pay for them. I pointed out that in New Mexico, noone at a grocery store had any hope of ever having health benefits, let alone being spoiled enough to complain about having to contribute to them. And that even as a programmer, I didn't have them. The guy looks sort of uncomfortable.

-Ogre

[jilara.livejournal.com]

Actually, it's Cadence now, with the offshore problems, but Tibco had its own set of global issues. ;-)
But yes, all of the above, and overseas people who are engineers but don't know coding as well as I do. I have to do part of their work for them, because I understand our proprietary code better than they do. I'm also not the right caste. They ask for information from management, who doesn't know anything, and refuse to talk to mere engineers (or writers) at the end of the food chain because we aren't on the correct level of the org chart. (I really enjoyed when they blew off the VP, not knowing who he was, because he was backing my attempts to gain information from them for one of his projects. They've been much more humble since they were called on the carpet for that one!)