What are your thoughts on outsourcing?

Many things are a good idea for the business owner – letting that rule all is what’s wrong with a lot of other things in this country. Your assessment is correct.

Yes, local people lose jobs, but the Company can then both produce and sell the product at a lower cost. That’s how Walmart can sell for so little.

We all benefit from lower cost goods, because we can buy more of them. The more we buy, the more stores have to be opened, and then some jobs come back. Unfortunately they are lower paid jobs.

The key thing here is the question of what kind of jobs we want to be doing? Sure, it’s hell to lose a job. However, it usually gives you a chance to get more education, which prepares you for a higher paying job.

In the US, industrial jobs are pretty much disappearing overseas. Even certain intellectual jobs are going overseas. This trend will continue.

There are only certain kinds of jobs that can’t go overseas: service jobs. They can’t have a furniture or car salesman overseas. It has to be here.

In addition, you can’t develop culture overseas. Art happens here. If it happens overseas, it isn’t relevant to our culture. Some of our art is exported (movies and such), and certainly we import art. However most culturally relevant stuff can not be created overseas. It can be produced there, but not created there.

Our economy will change over the years. In the future there will be very few industrial jobs here—only those that are highly automated or those where you cant do it anywhere else (you can’t build a road to Chicago anywhere but near Chicago). We will have many more service jobs (sales clerks, health care providers), and more intellectual and creative workers. America is good at providing education and creative movies and television, and our advantage in that area will only grow, I think.

So, it’s not all bad. In fact, it is inevitable that the economy will change. People complain because their own individual jobs are lost, but overall it is a net gain—as everyone gets wealthier. The key is to cushion the transfer between jobs. I’m not happy when people lose jobs—it’s happened to me three or four times in my life—but there’s little any of us can do about it, except slow down the economy by trying to mandate employment. That won’t work.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

It is sometimes hard to manage overseas workers. If you use them for customer service, then there can be a backlash from US customers.

We might consider the ethics behind such an issue as well: those ten-year-old Pakistani kids making shoes for Nike are still dirt poor and without basic necessities (food, clean water, health care). There are so few other opportunities for these overseas workers that they’ll take what they can get… which means we can get away with paying them pennies per hour.

Capitalism. It’s evil anyway you look at it.

On paper, in theory, outsourcing is amazing for both countries (or however many). IT gives them a chance to specialize more in specific products, and increase efficiency. And in the long-term, that is so.

In the short-term, you just have a load of people on one side of the fence who are without jobs and have to find a new one in a field they’re not specialized.

@borderline_blonde I’m wondering what the alternative is in your mind. Are you suggesting the companies pay them more? Voluntarily?

Outsourcing takes care of the skills necessary to run a particular business process, your business is much more flexible in investing in key resources. It is proven to help your business grow in terms of financial stability. Staff.com actually is one of the sites I trusted when I outsource jobs in different parts of the world. They only offer full time workers who are skilled in both technical and English skills.