Slashdot Mirror
Offshore Outsourcing Threatens Offshore Outsourcing
theodp writes "India offshore tech support companies may soon face job losses as U.S. companies such as IBM, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and PeopleSoft explore countries with even cheaper sources of technical labor, including Romania, Russia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Concerned that outsourcing might be outsourced from India in the near future, a Bangalore call center owner said 'It's hard to know where it will all end. Is there a country where people will work for free?'" There's a Newsforge story about the same subject.
Yes. They're doing it now. But not for long.
Even slaves get food, shelter, clothing and medical care -- which is more than a lot of tech workers are getting these days.
Someone will figure out that slavery is a superior system to the current con-game and also figure out a way to use the military against their own populations to enforce it. I think its already started in privatized prisons and their prisoner-labor programs and the exploding rate of incarceration in the Unted States -- however they really do have to figure out what to do about the prisoner rape problem before they can be considered good massah's.
There are alternatives of course, but they require revolution.
Seastead this.
Is that Joe CEO or Joe Gullible? Can't be that hard to test software out yourself, can it?
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
There's no country where people will work for free - which is why we'll all be better off in the end. India has already moved up in terms of salary, and now Eastern Europe will get the same boost. As jobs overseas become more expensive, they'll move back to the US and Europe.
End result? Everyone's richer. That's what gloablization is all about.
jason
So stop competing on price and start offering a good, high quality, reliable service that people will pay a little more for.
You're starting to think like Microsoft now.
No, only half like Microsoft. Microsoft stopped competing on price a long time ago, but never started offering good, high quality, reliable products or services. They never had to.
My journal has hot
- Automatization leads to fewer and fewer workers being needed to do the same amount of work, meaning higher profits for the producer.
Or lower prices for the consumer. Or research and development into new products. Or all of the above.
- Outsourcing leads to those workers being paid less and less , meaning again higher profits.
Or lower prices. Or R&D
- This, in turn leads to higher unemployment rates and a higher number of workers with low wages.
You missed some logical step there. How does outsourcing lead to unemployment? By definition, outsourcing leads to a shift in employment. Automation also does not, in general, lead to higher unemployment. If it did, nobody would have jobs today because we've been progressively automating the Western economy since ... I don't know ... the invention of the printing press? The loom? The cotton gin? The axe? Think about it. Automation creates new jobs just as it destroys old ones.
Oh I definatly agree, and so do most countries outside the USA. Since George Bush turned America into a facist war mongering empire, it has become even more dangerous than ever to rely on Microsoft software.
Setting up a back door in Windows is definatly something I could see the Bush terror regime setting up in its fight for world domination.
Yep I am glad countries around the world are switching from Microsoft to Linux.
I mean, I am all for Windows, but when it comes to developing applications for Government agencies, we really want to avoid American products.
Was there a "race to the bottom" in America after the NAFTA and WTO treaties? No, incomes rose in every quintile.
Here we are in the worst recession in a long while and unemployment is: 6%. Not great, but better than most past recessions and better than most European countries even during the best of times. Meanwhile, wage growth has continued in the U.S. even during the recession.
Yes, jobs in the IT sector are hard to come by, but that has more to do with there being hugely inflated demand during the late 1990s, with the confluence of the dotcom bubble and the Y2K "crisis", than it has to do with world trade.
During the last 15 years, inflation has been noticeably low.It should be illegal to do what these companies do.
If you are an US company, be a US company, or leave. Go away and do business in the cesspool of your choice.
These offshore support places can't be trusted with personal information, they will screw you.
They can't speak English well enough to be understood, and they are too stupid anyway to understand how anything more advanced than a cow or a mud hut operates, god forbid them consider understanding something like a computer..
GREED is why jobs are leaving the US at the speed of light. Only the big wigs at the very top of the food chain get rich by screwing everyone under them. Then when it begins to catch up with them they cash in their options and head for the border.
GREED... Nothing less than pure greed......
Of course your assumption is there is a fixed number of jobs and automation and outsourcing will only reduce the number of jobs available.
History has shown otherwise
If the income for a large percentage of the population were to drop, as you predict, this would lead to deflation, which the government desparately wants to avoid. So the government/central bank would take steps to avoid deflation, such as letting the value of the currency slide (which the US is now doing to help stimulate the economy, but won't admit it). This makes foreign workers more expensive comparatively.
The paradox though is offshoring labor to cheaper countries tends to raise your standard of living instead of lowering it, because you end up paying less for those goods and services, and new jobs spring up in new industries to replace the ones lost.
By reading this sig, you agree to the terms of my sig license.
That doesn't matter--what Smith was describing were the fundamental rules of the universe. Newton's mathematics still hold, despite the fact that we have satellites, automobiles and television. Like Newton, Smith's system is incomplete and a mere approximation, but it is essentially correct.
In particular a purely market based system, which you would appear to be advocating, is by its very nature undemocratic.
First, I don't give a fig for democracy--I care about liberty. They are related but independent. Second, a market is extremely democratic: everyone gets 24 hours a day in which to work, spend and sleep. It's when the market is interfered with that it becomes undemocratic: when false incentives and disincentives are created; when false demand is instilled; when false supplies are produced. This is among the great problems of socialism: it causes to be done what no-one wants done (if they wanted it, they'd pay for it in the first place).
That's not a right--that's a state guarantee. Rights are inherent in being a man: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. One has a right to believe in one's God; one has the right to speak one's mind; one has a right to property; one has a right to bear arms; one has a right to be free. One does not have a right to steal (which is what welfare is: thieving from the rich and giving to the poor). The difference is that rights cost others nothing: I may not like your religion, your thoughts or the cut of your suit, but it hurts me not a whit. Entitlements do cost others: if you are guaranteed a minimum living, then someone's got to pay for it.
Now, this does not mean that I'm some sort of crazy Randian loony. Charity is a vitally important thing, and it is quite immoral not to help out those who are worse off. It is good for me to give $20 to a beggar; it is bad for me to clap a gun to your head and make you give him $20. The former is voluntary; the latter is compulsory. The former is charity; the latter is socialism.
Being paid more to work less, is essentially what economic progress is about. I no longer have to grow my own food and till my own fields, arguably I have it rather easy, yet I can afford a nice flat and technology beyond the wildest dreams of somebody only 50 years ago.
That's not it at all. Economic progress is driven by this simple engine: in every free exchange, each party is better off than before. If I purchase a pack of gum for a quarter, I have gotten something more than a quarter's worth of gum, satisfaction & chewing enjoyment--otherwise I wouldn't have bought that gum (if I got but 24 cents' worth, I'd be stupid to pay 25). So if I got more than a quarter's worth, then the seller must have been cheated, right? No--he's better off too. That gum was worth less to him than it was to me; he would rather have the quarter than the gum, and I would rather have the gum than the quarter. Both our lives are now better.
Now, multiply this effect over the billions of transactions going on every day between billions of people. Everyone is constantly becoming better and better off. Slowly but surely each of our lives is improved. Due to steadily increasing economies, we are each able to command resources the greatest emperors of the past could not even imagine doing. Food from around the globe; raw materials to make computers, clot