Current Hr Trends

Outsourcing HR functions help businesses manage employee performance and development. Providers implement performance management plans to ensure employees comply with company policies and procedures and successfully meet business goals. Outsourcing firms periodically monitor employee performance and report findings to management. This reduces the workload of managers by minimizing the amount of administrative responsibilities they must focus on.

‘Is your job next?’ headline blared, followed by the disturbing preview of the article inside: “A new round of globalization is sending upscale jobs offshore. They include chip design engineering, basic research— even financial analysis. Can America lose these jobs and still prosper (R. Hira, 2008, p-1)?” The reaction of this news was swift and divided. Definitely large corporations that will be outsourcing will make huge profits in the long run but “what about the American citizens?”

An Associated Press-Ipsos poll in May 2004, found that 69 per cent of Americans thought that outsourcing hurts the US economy while only 17 per cent thought it helped . President Bush’s chief economic advisor Greg Mankiw has stated “outsourcing…is something that we should realize is probably a plus for the economy in the long run” . While John Kerry has emphasized, that he is going to stop the outsourcing of American job . With the presidential election coming up, and the candidates giving mixed signals about the effects of outsourcing, it could turn

While outsourcing may be beneficial to some of the companies partaking in it, the general consensus is that it ultimately proves to be harmful to the American workforce. The act of outsourcing and shifting many company call centers and technical support teams, or “low skill service jobs,” to foreign countries reduces jobs for those that could truly benefit from them within our own country. The unemployment rate has dramatically increased, and continues to rise, compared to what it has been in years past; yet there are numerous companies which still insist on handing over these “low skill service jobs” to people in other countries such as India. The most obvious and logical reason for outsourcing is reducing costs; people are working for

The loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States is extremely important. As this article states, when manufacturing jobs are lost so are service jobs. For every manufacturing job lost to things like outsourcing, 3 service jobs are lost. Not only are the people doing the manufacturing losing jobs, but

The modern day American society hosts a broad spectrum of industries with various occupations and professions to engage today’s workforce. America, much like most first world countries is a service economy based on the exchange of knowledge and expertise rather than materials and products. People have a long history of work and work evolution that has ultimately brought America to a service economy producing both strengths and weaknesses within the society and its economy. As America has moved to a service economy, much of the manufacturing and production jobs have moved oversees to third world countries creating a reliance on other economies. This globalization of the workforce as well as unionization, and the

Not coincidentally, this decline mirrors the ascendancy of neoliberal financial and political programs, which have, more often than not, been antagonistic tó labor unions. Só-called “free tradé” offers have shifted union-large manufacturing jobs from the united states to countriés with few-tó-no worker or environmental protections, while marketplace fundamentalist believe tanks and legal organizations have waged a more insidious marketing campaign to undermine and eventually eliminate collective bargaining and various other workers rights.

Outsource of job caused thousands of people lost their job, and let union lost its power. After carmakers closed their plants, thousands of American workers lost their jobs. Now, these jobs are in Mexico, 80% of the card produced in Mexico are exported to other countries, while 60% of these exported cars are sold to United States (Muller, 2014). Outsource of jobs directly affected the lives of middle-class workers, According to Wallach, “NAFTA contributed to downward pressure on U.S. wages and growing income inequality” (Wallach). While workers lost their jobs, Labor Union also lost its power. Nowadays, only 12% of workers are a union member, which has decreased tremendously from 20% in 1983 (Levs, 2012). The labor union is losing power because there are fewer workers in the US, more importantly, a labor union is working against the big business. Big business wants to

The HR office can be viewed as the heart of the organization and is in charge of a large portion of the important capacities in a partnership. It is responsible for the capacities that permit the organization to address the issues of the administration and staff. Outsourcing is turning out to be more basic to organizations that are attempting to lessen their costs, the topic of it aiding or harming the organization is a begging to be proven wrong theme. Thomas Stewart and Keith Hammonds are adversely incredulous of the human asset division in the article "Determination: Close Down the Human Resource Department". Despite the fact that their sentiment is regarded, a great human asset office can positively affect an organization.

China is one of our biggest labor competitors. The reason many US companies go to China for outsourcing is again, because of their workforce’s willingness to operate at low costs. Michael Zimmerman describes this as a disparity in worker “tolerance”. Where the low wages found in China are “far lower than U.S.

Labor is one of the largest and in certain sectors the most expensive component in the production of goods. Outsourcing acknowledges the labor cost to produce a particular product is cheaper if the manufacturer were to produce the same product in-house where the cost per unit is significantly higher. Stable labor costs are important for long-term revenue projections to be relied upon by managers because they are a precursor of where a company is trending financially. It is this efficiency-in-scale that confirms the benefit of the division of labor memorialized by Adam Smith. As a result of the wage disparity between the costs of American workers versus Chinese workers, hundreds of U.S. based firms relocated all or part of their operations to China, taking advantage of the inexpensive labor market and the many cost-saving incentives offered by the Chinese government.

In “Will Your Job Be Exported?”, Alan S. Blinder argues the quality and security of jobs in the future, service sectors in America will be determined by how offshorable they are. Blinder starts out the story with a quote by Edmund Burke, “You can never plan the future by the past”. Although he stated we are doing exactly that when it comes to getting the American workforce ready for jobs of the future. Blinder states “demand for labor appears to have shifted toward the college-educated and away from high school graduates and dropouts” (p. 8). According to Lou Dobbs, “Well under one percent of US service jobs have been outsourced.” Eventually offshoring for service sectors will exceed offshoring for manufacturing-sectors for 3 reasons. First simply because there is a greater amount of service jobs than manufacturing jobs in the US and other countries that are well off. Second, service sector offshoring continues to accelerate due to technological advances thus increasing the range of services offshore. And lastly, (e.g. Chinese and Indian) workers with the capability to perform service jobs continue to increase rapidly.

Gathering information about the extent of outsourcing is extremely difficult. The Department of Labor relies on employers to voluntarily report in surveys whether they have had any layoffs due to off shoring. Employers are understandably reluctant to be forthcoming with such information. The Brookings Institute held a Data Workshop to discuss problems gathering data on this topic. With the current surveying methods the potential magnitude in underestimating the import levels and overseas job displacement is significant was one conclusion of the workshop.

To the opponents of outsourcing these statistics correctly state why outsourcing is a negative solution to cost cutting and affects the dignity of the people who used to work these jobs. To the people who have lost their jobs their dignity has been partially lost because they are now with out a job that they have worked for most of their lives and now they can’t provide for themselves and their dependents. Also for the companies that have outsourced these jobs they don’t provide adequate services for their employees who’s jobs are being outsourced. To the companies that outsource should help their former employees find other jobs. This would be beneficial to the worker and industry because the worker would loose a means of income and the industry would regain workers. On the other side the supporters of outsourcing say that it helps the dignity of workers who receive the jobs from the American corporations. An example of how outsourcing helps dignity is if you have an industry like web-design and you don’t get a job over a cheaper outsourced company you will have the extra motivation to improve your business or product (Business, ethics, morality).

In this era where the world is globally evolving, due to the nature of the roles, functions and responsibilities on HR in organizations, it outsources some of its organizational activities to line managers to carry out. Although, this form of practice does not involve training, hence I will say it is quite cheap for organizations to carry out because it relieves itself from some duties but it tend to limit the capabilities of the HR practitioners in organizations i.e. instead of adopting the need to in-source, they outsource. This practice has helped in relieving HR department in organizations from heavy workloads overtime (Armstrong 2009). Human resource activities such as recruitment and selection, workers’ payroll, learning and development just to mention a few are now very much outsourced to consulting organizations to carry out and bear whatever risks involved (Taylor 2008).