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Andy Grove Speaks out on Offshore Outsourcing
molarmass192 writes "Andy Grove, of Intel fame, "spoke out" at a recent technology summit in Washington about the current trend towards offshore outsourcing and how it's causing the US to slowly but surely lose its edge in the tech sector. He states plainly that the US government must step in to restore balance between the need for profits and the lure of offshore outsourcing. There are also pokes at the patent system and slow adoption of broadband internet access. An interesting insight into what's going on inside the heads of the US's tech leaders."
With global worker rights then workers all over the world will have rights.
.work.
That would include those to whom the offshore work is going, who have right to. .
You will also need monocultural global economy for it to work. You are perhaps thinking that that the reason jobs are going overseas is because workers are being exploited by being underpaid, i.e. being payed less than you are ( and thus being able to outbid you on your own job).
This is falacious reaoning. Most of these workers are taking the jobs because they are the best paying jobs available in their local economy where prices on life's necessities are quite divergent from our own. As are their ideas on just what constitutes a necessity.
Poor countries are not, I repeat not analogous to poor sections of rich countries and cannot be treated as such.
Paying someone $40/hr in a $1/hr local economy isn't treating those workers "fairly." It's totally destroying the local economny with runaway inflation, bringing misery to those that can't get those jobs, must pay $40/hr prices, but still make $1/hr. Revolutions have been fomented over much less.
The fact of the matter is that the rest of the world loves being thus "taken advantage of." You earn your $40/hr in a rich local economy that has become rich, at least in part, by taking advantage of poorer nations who now find themselves in a place to compete to get some of that back.
Your job will come back when all nations are equally rich, or all nations are equally poor, and thus share a common economy.
And you can't mandate that. It has to evolve. Or hundreds of millions will suffer. Even die.
You'll also find that most people who wish to protect American jobs think they can do it by opposing a global economy. I can't but feel that most of these people are fairly well off, always have been, have never lived extensively in a third world nation as a local would and thus generally being somewhat clueless as to how things really work, here or there.
Do you want to preserve American jobs and promote global worker's rights?
Go to Mexico. Build houses for the poor while earning a local wage for it.
You might learn something.
KFG
Absolutely correct, and rather frightening, actually.
Capitalism is about driving towards economic efficiency, and that means Walmart devouring everything in the American general retail market and countries with cheaper cost structures providing whatever labor they possibly can, to maximize corporate profits.
I'm starting to see a lot more pro-tariff proposals in reaction to this, but in the absence of that sort of trade policy, it seems inevitable that wages will eventually reach equilibrium, corrected for education and technological resources.
Which wouldn't be bad, but it suggests a dramatic reduction in the absolute standard of living in the United States.. or perhaps just a reduction in the rate of growth of standard of living. 21st century middle class Americans enjoy in many respects a far higher standard of living than the absolute richest did in the 19th.
There are things that could preserve our higher standard of living, though, potentially.. the biomedical industry might do it, if American companies can extract enough wealth from the rest of the world for a cure for AIDS or malaria or antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis or the cancers. The technology industry might do it, except we really are giving away the store when it comes to open source software..
Anyone know of any good science fiction or speculative non-fiction that deals in detail with what such a move towards economic equilibrium might look like in this country, say 20 years out?
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
FYI, Indian companies already outsource to China, today. China, Eastern Europe/Russia, Vietnam, Mexico, etc. In fact, so called "daisy-chaining," where an Indian company gets a US contract due to its relationships and reputation, and promptly outsources it elsewhere, is the new buzzword. Computerworld calls this "a trend to watch."
You want to talk about China? The Sept 15 Computerworld had an article about outsourcing that profiled a number of different countries. Here's some fun quotes and facts about China:
Get your raincoats, storm's coming.