Labor in the United States and Outsourcing Essay

By 2004, more than 80 percent of U.S. executive boardrooms will have discussed offshore sourcing, and more than 40 percent of U.S. enterprises will have completed some type of pilot or will be sourcing IT (information technology) services. In fact, some of the biggest firms in the United States have been seriously discussing outsourcing recently. One of these companies being IBM, the world's biggest computer maker, discussed saving about $168 million beginning in 2006 by moving thousands of programming jobs overseas, according to internal information provided. U.S. businesses, battered by the recent three year bear market in stocks and an economy struggling to find its footing, have already developed a taste for super cheap labor in developing countries, where workers are increasingly better trained especially if they've spent significant time working in the United States on temporary visas. The impact of overseas outsourcing could be significant; many economists doubt the trend is big enough yet to disrupt the broader U.S. economy. Imports of business services account for less than 1/20 of 1 percent of gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the nation's economy. At the least, it's not doing much to end the longest U.S. labor-market slump since World War II. More than 9.3 million people are

The phenomenon has created major suffering for many American and as this outsourcing continues to spread, Americans will demand action (R. Hira 2008, p-95). The book also adds that scholars Ralph Goory and William Baumol have shown that even when the basic model of the economics are used trade does not make both the trading partners better off. The trading in one country will have a negative impact while trading in other country will have a positive impact. The country with negative impact will definitely affect its economy. United States economy being the world’s largest economy; historically, it has maintained a stable GDP growth, a low unemployment rate, a high level of research and capital investment funded by both national, and because of increasing saving rates, increasingly by foreign investors. But offshore outsourcing has increased the unemployment rate dramatically in the decade. And so the economy worsened day by day.

As the world has gotten “smaller” in terms of trade, outsourcing has become a hot topic in much political and economic debate in the United States.

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

Not only is this outsourcing causing companies to lose their best employees, but also the consumers that buy their products. "Employees displaced by foreigners and left unemployed or in lower paid work have

Many people may compare outsourcing to hashtags or selfies, a waste of time and pointless. Also, people may say that outsourcing hit America in a huge tidal wave that is now uncontrollable. Ehrenreich exemplifies this when she writes,”I should’ve seen it coming. In the eighties, US companies began outsourcing the manufacturing of everything from garments to steel, leaving whole cities to die” (609). Basically, Ehrenreich is saying that if outsourcing ruined us then, it will ruin us now; but clearly outsourcing has not ruined us that much because, of all of the jobs that we have outsourced in the last decade, we’re still standing strong. Zakaria contradicts this by saying,”Over the past twenty years, as globalization and outsourcing have accelerated dramatically, America’s growth rate has averaged just over 3 percent” (619). We’ve outsourced all of these jobs and yet our population has grown. The fact that we’re giving opportunities to other countries has not taken

Globalization is the integration of markets through the cooperation of internalization, federal, and state governments with corporate companies to provide low-cost products. Subsequently, outsourcing is an essential part of this globalization. However, what exactly is outsourcing? In its broadest sense, outsourcing is simply contracting out functions that had been done in-house—a longtime U.S. practice (“Globalization: Threat or Opportunity”). When a U.S. manufacture product, and buys material from an intermediate supplier from out of the country rather than producing them in-house, that is what is called outsourcing. Also, when U.S. corporation hires outside contractor out-of-the-country to do U.S. call center services for less labor cost that is outsourcing. When a company deals out its operational task, such as payroll, accounting, and software operations that is outsourcing. To get the clear understanding of outsourcing, I have interviewed IKEA’s U.S. Deputy Retail Country Manager Rob Olson about outsourcing—Swedish goods. Olson stated that IKEA’s outsourcing utilizes the unique talents of different countries and their labor markets to increase trade, which helps better allocate resources in their own countries while getting goods cheaper from others.

American companies and their products, have increasingly been pursed to be manufactured abroad. This however is one of the biggest discrepancies we confront within our economy. Although many businesses argue this is beneficial in order for them to turn a higher profit and be successful, the National Labor Committee thinks otherwise. Outsourcing has become one of the leading factors in product recalls, exploitation of workers, and a major contributor to the unemployment statistics in the US.

Second, both author discuss what is the effect in the changes of job because of outsoucing. According to Friedman, some jobs are lost to the outsource (some to China, some to India), he said “Not only does my work have to fit into somebody’s global supply chain, but i myself have to understand how I need to compete and have skills sets required to work at pace that fits the supply chain and I had better be able to do that as well or better than anyone else in this world”. Hudson Analysts show that 20% of U.S manufacturing workers now have jobs that depend on exports. So the workers will not only compete with their counterparts across town or in other parts of the U.S, but also with workers around the globe. Then Employment growth, meanwhile, will remain concentrated in services, which also will benefit increasingly from export markets and will offer high salaries for skilled workers. And For those who maintain and improve their skills, the changes should bring increasing rewards, but it will be traumatic for those who fall behind the skills curve and resist retraining.

Many argue outsourcing takes jobs away from the American people, which would be true in high skill situations, but if they are low skill jobs that Americans do not want to work regardless, then that argument is rendered invalid. If America were to outsource their low skilled jobs, the jobs would get done, likely at lower costs to the developed country, and at higher benefit to the developing country being outsourced to. Authors of “Immigration Versus Outsourcing; A Developing Country’s View”, Simontini Das, Ajitava Raychaudhuri, and Saikat Sinha Roy, concur that for the developing country, outsourcing is in fact more beneficial. They claim that the establishing trade deals via outsourcing between countries will aid in the development of the country as a whole, while keeping workers at home. Das, Ajitava, and Saikat conclude that if the outsourcing market were to expand, the need for workers to migrate would be substantially lessened, all the while filling jobs and improving the

Outsourcing has become a very popular issue, and it has reached an all-time climax. Firms are starting to do this a lot more than than in the previous decade. What is outsourcing? Outsourcing is defined as “The procuring of services or products, such as the parts used in manufacturing a motor vehicle, from an outside supplier or manufacturer in order to cut costs.” And it has become a big issue in our country. There are thousands of articles and books written on it, and you can attend numerous classes and speeches on the subject. The use of outsourcing is quite simple really… Either pay an American worker $15 an hour, or pay someone in India to do the same job for $2 an hour. There are lots of other advantages and

In the past decade the topic of outsourcing has become a heavily debated subject on if it is ethically correct to outsourcing jobs to foreign countries. Outsourcing has become more and more an option for many companies and not just an economic fad. The decision to outsource is a difficult one for any company to make because there are many advantages and disadvantages to consider. The decision to outsource affects many people, communities, and industries so if a corporation decides to outsource they must consider how it will affect human dignity, the common good of the economy, and subsidiary.

Outsourcing has become so prevalent in recent years that one can say that we are living in an age of outsourcing. Outsourcing have grown globally on such a scale that many companies and organizations have uprooted their entire workforce and moved them to across nations for various reasons. The global outsourcing market has continued to grow exponentially within in the past decades which would explain why many companies flock to it. According to Chamberland (2003), the global outsourcing market was estimated at 72 billion dollars in 2002, estimated to rise to 100 billion dollars in 2005 and to increase exponentially in the coming years. With such enticing figures, many companies flock to reap from the

Over the past decade as globalization has “shrunken” the world, outsourcing, as opposed to insourcing, has become more profitable for large companies.

With growing competition and growing workforce costs, increasing number of organizations are turning towards outsourcing - wherein the key functions like marketing, finance, sales etc while the secondary functions like IT, accounting are distributed to economies which are driven by lower labour costs. Thus because of outsourcing there is a complex and complicated web of employees, customers, vendors both collocated and dispersed around the world. Outsourcing has both positive and negative impact on the way organization works and its affect is going to increase in future too.