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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."
People want lower prices, better pay and competition. Now these same people complain when they lose their job.
"The difference between pornography and erotica is the lighting" - Woody Allen
Turn blue, holding your breath.
The U.S. has re-modeled itself on an econoic and political model borrowed from Argentina in the '70's, and the rest of the world is charging along behind. E.U.? wants to be as big a Banana Republic as U.S. and China...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
How dare countries outside America try to compete! It's so... un-American!
Computers are useless: they can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
This is regulation. I thought regulation was bad for the Internet... and in any case, merely saying that the government should do "something" about it is inviting vague foolishness down on our heads to the detriment of business. Any "solution" implemented on a vague platform like that would probably be worse than the problem, and at best a marginal improvement.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
"Andy Grove, of Intel fame, "spoke out" at a recent technology summit in Washington about the current trend towards offshore outsourcing"
And where are Intel processors manufactured again? Or is it only a problem when it effects white collar workers?
I made this arguement to a senior manager of mine a while ago -- we're a health insurance company, and I pointed out that if we were to spend a few million to lobby and get heavy tarrifs passed on outsourced labor, the number of new customers we'd gain/save in the next few years would *far* outweigh the money we save outsourcing our QA (and we don't save that much... We would save some money if it didn't need to be re-QA'ed in the States, but that ain't the way it works in reality).
He didn't get it. Why? Because he couldn't see past the next quarter's budget. Asshat.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
China #2
India #22
As the IT mgt books say, "Don't outsource your strategic intellectual capital!". Unfortunately, most corps don't seem to think of this and they're outsourcing everything they can just to save a few bucks.
I saw an article a few months ago, I think CIO.com, that mentioned how United Technologies saved a whole $7 million (US) on their IT budget by sending some work over to India. I thought, "Wow! Seven million dollars US!". Then I looked. Their IT budget is over a billion dollars. So they saved a whole 0.7% by going overseas. In the meantime, their employees are demoralized for having seen their buddies lose their jobs and some poor bastard(s) have to stay in the middle of night to deal with people on the other side of the world, because if they don't - it's their ass too!
There I go again, ranting!
There is no spoon or sig.
I'm currently unemployed and directly due to off-shoring. It sucks to be unemployed - trust me. However I think that it is really silly to put barriers in place.
No 1. You inevitably get what you pay for. After having lost my job, the company I worked for now has a team of people in asia and they cost far more than the team we had here in the valley and they have yet to deliver squat.
I think that these off-shore arrangements only work if you have a very strong cultural match between off-shore supplier and local organization or if it is managed very carefully. Very few US organizations are capable of pulling off such a feat and it is inevitable that most of these off-shoring relationships will result in huge craters.
The US tech recession is the result of the "perfect storm", a) Bubble pops, b) oversupply of skilled immigrants c) Oversupply of "cheap" skilled workers. So, a) the bubble popped and it's now starting to come out of recession, b) immigrant quotas have been curbed, and c) there is only so much you can outsource.
It will recover, just be prepared to hold out for a few more months (up to 12 months). Keep abreast of the skills you need with your spare time.
Governemnt interference with the market is bad. Huge subsidies that distort thetrade in agricultural products is bad, and it is killing Africa (literally).
/. terminology: Protectionism is proprietary; free trade is free.
Tariffs or other protectionism would not work-- what would we do? demand that XX% of code is written in North America?
The software sector is simply waking up to something that has happened to every other sector: as the segment matures, labor becomes portable, and therefore companies will seek the cheapest labor possible. Trying to stop this only costs consumers, and-- perversely-- the very segment they are trying to protect via regulation compliance costs, taxes, and loss of overseas marketshare.
You want a job? innovate. Become efficient. Figure out howto make money by "exploiting" all that cheap Chinese labor yourself. Find something that those rising Chinese and Indian middle-class consumers want.
If you want action from the government, demand that they stop supporting 19th century industries and that they demand open trade with other countries. Protectionism is going back.
Let me voice my opinion in
davejenkins.com |
My roomate was one of those laid off at Intel, it now takes 3 people at Intel's Aloha, Oregon Campus to do his job (Software QA Engineer). He is now having to work two minimum wage jobs (18 years experience, 7 at Intel, and thats all he can get) to afford living, and ironicly, he now makes just a hair shy of what he was making at Intel, and has less work hours than at Intel.
The Portland area economy is in the dumps, people cant get jobs because they are "overqualified," I would gladly work at Comcast Cable, but Im "overqualified" to man a phone for 8 hours a day and answer people's questons about cable TV.
Thankfully it looks like Ill be working at ACS (formerly Cyberrep) as either a Boost Mobile or Nextel rep.
- Kay
the USA should reconsider the software patents that have crippled American innovation for decades, and also the DMCA which has effectively denied Americans their fair use rights.
just like the humble blood clot... turboporsche@telus.net
Humans have social structures which circumvent it. Things like inheritance, family ties, friendship, traditions, religion, etc., etc. Emotions and the ability to reason routinely prevent the best from suceeding while allowing the worst to prosper. That's one of the many failures of capitalism. A small group of people monopolizes wealth and power to the detriment of the rest; and they use social structures to hold onto that wealth and power inspite of anything Natural selection has to say on the subject.
Oh, and the people with power in the U.S. don't care about keeping America in power. They're global, meaning they operate on a global scale sans petty concerns like patriotism. Nationalism is just something to keep the rubes in line. That's the major failure of capitalism. Adam Smith assumed small shop owners who had a stake in their community, and who themselves suffered if the community went to hell. Now global capitalists just move away from their rotting comminities. The slums are exported to poor countries, and the rich live where they don't have to worry about the crime, violence and polution they're creating.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Just let those outsourced projects fail (most of them do) and see those "bright minds" who came up with the idea of outsourcing getting fired without a severance package.
I've seen the results of several outsourced projects. These projects are so fucked up, it's unbelievable. This must have to do something with the management there, because I've seen some very impressive Indian developers over here in the US (not that many, either, but then I'm hard to impress) and I don't believe they can't find any good developers there. It's just that the results of the outsourced work are often unmaintainable piles of horrendously written spaghetti code.
I have yet to see one single exception from this.
Now, how to stop it? I favor use of tariffs to force up the price of offshore workers
Nice idea, except that the US economy's success is predicated on open trade and open enterprise. Your attitude doesn't surprise me much. Free enterprise and trade is great until it effects you, and the average American has no qualms about being hypocritical when it serves.
The fact is that introducing tariffs will make the situation worse, not better. More industry will move offshore because the cost of doing business in the US will rise. Countries will retaliate with their own tariffs and the amount of business going to the US will fall.
The fact is that most IT jobs are commodities: system administration, building web pages, support, most programming (visual basic, etc) and the like can be done by anyone. The only solution is to innovate, become more efficient and smarter in how you do things.
I live in a country with a relatively small, export oriented economy. Reform and increasing exposure to international competition has made the economy more robust and efficient.
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Intel has been one of the worst offenders. Have a look at http://www.faceintel.com/
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
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
It isn't unions or professional organizations that prevents lawyering and doctoring from going off-shore. It's the fact that to perform the duties necessary to those professions, you actually have to physically BE THERE.
In law, local variations in law make it such that it's utterly impossible for lawyers from other countries to just practice law in the US from far away. Plus, you actually have to show up to court sometimes.
In medicine, you actually have to talk to and physically examine the patient to perform most duties in medicine. Tele-medicine and such are interesting experiments, but there's only so much you can do from a 2-D TV quality image. You have to be able to put your hands on the patient, poke and prod, smell their breath, etc. You can't do that from the other end of a telephone line. Plus, again there are regional variations in the standard of care such that doctors from other countries won't be practicing in concordance with those customs. Diagnositic radiology, however, is one field that you can perform largely from afar, and some of those jobs are being outsourced to other countries via high-speed telecom lines (primarily for middle-of-the-night needs).
"No, no, no. Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."
Grove pointed to steel and microelectronics as historical precedents but there are others: textiles, televisions, and cars to name a few. Our leaders need to examine what we did before when we lost and try something different this time. The article also said, 'He [Grove] said he had detected no recognition of the problem from any of the presidential candidates.' There is one candidate who has recognized the problem. He brought it up at the democratic debate a few weeks ago. Dennis Kuncinich is the only candidate I have seen who doesn't just say what the latest polls seem to suggest. Check out his 10 key issues. Also note that he specifically offers a plan for the steel problem that Grove talked about. Want to know how he feels about any other issue? Look to the right column. It is all spelled out in black and white. I know we will end up with another Washington insider in the White House next term but the man we need there is the one who already understands the problems the industry leaders like Andy Grove are seeing and has already formulated a course of action.
Quoth Michael: from the learn-to-speak-indian dept
Indians don't speak Indian.
If I hear another stupid fucking comment about how I have to innovate and work smarter to out-perform my Indian and Chinese counterparts I'm going to scream.
.001% of the world's population in IQ.
It's not about being innovative. It's about being cheap.
I can't compete with 3 people who are just as smart as I am and work for 1/10 my wages. And I'm not so fucking arrogant as to think that I am in the top
So I guess that means I should just work at the Gap for a living right (if I'm lucky) ?
The only answer is a rebalancing of the capital flow. The standard of living in this country country will fall, and it will fall, while it goes up in other countries.
That's fine with me. A higher standard of living for those in less developed countries is a good thing (there is an environmental cost but that's a nother discussion).
What I object to is MY government helping the process along by the ridiculous visa system, and by providing incentives for companies to move overseas. I also seriously object to the fucking hypocritical CEO's (like CRAIG BARRET OF INTEL AND TJ ROGERS OF CYPRESS) claiming they can't find the right people when really what they mean is they can't find the right people and pay them what they want.
Everybody loves capitalism until it works against them.
Let them send my job overseas, just don't use MY fucking tax dollars to help them.
The dipsticks who claim they're just going to out-compete the millions of educated people in other countries obviously have secure jobs.
There is no such things as free trade.
Think about it.
Absolute statements are never true
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
What you are saying is wrong because the following flaw:
This is falacious reaoning. Most of these workers are taking the jobs because they are the best paying jobs available in their local economy...
Although it is true that these jobs in the developing countries are the best paying, that point is moot. Why? Because people will work, not just in those "high paying" jobs, but also in practically everything else. The crux of hte problem is that the majority of the workers in the world are underpaid and exploited. You can literally go to any one of a hundread countries and find workers to do WHATEVER you want.
That's why I find it interesting that capitalists are all in favour of a global (capitalist) economy. But they never explain what is going to happen. I claim that Western wages will have to be dragged down significantly but capitalists don't think so...
BTW, you are wrong in saying that you can't oppose a global economy. There is no such thing as a global economy. It is a bogus concept cooked up by neo-liberal economists. If free-trade agreements fail, that's the end of the global economy. Also, you will never truly have a global economy because countries will always value themselves--their sovereignty--more than a global economy. This isn't happening right now but it will once things get a little bit worse. How much do you want to bet that traditional conservatives (like Pat Buchanan, who are nationalists) will gain power at the expense of neoconservatives (who are mostly neo-liberal economists and are against US protectionism)?
RAM
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Stop beating down bright, but anxious boys in school. Let them do what they love instead of forcing some idea of "social adjustment on them". Allow them more time for science and engineering. Devote less time to "teaching" them how to bullshit their way to a 6 page term paper about nothing. Give them less Ritalin.
Some may not like to hear this but boys are the primary source of young engineers and right now, public education is taking a big dump on them.
I have several friends in the industry that are good engineers, but without degrees. Public education pushed them away. They are the kind of people I'm talking about. What's a PHB going to do when he compares them with someone from another country that has his degree?
There's some other stuff here:
The War Against Boys
>Michael is once again using slashdot as his personal platform to advance his own pet issues.
Just as you are doing now. I gather you see yourself as the opposition though.
Constantly moving jobs to ever cheaper locations is a no-win scenario. For one thing, there will always be somewhere cheaper -- one day Mexico is the place to manufacture, then it's various parts of Asia. Today software engineering is being done in India -- but wages are already rising and India looks a lot like the U.S. 2-3 years ago; tomorrow China might look cheaper. Eventually, and quite speedily, you burn down every bridge to cheaper labor. The marks have wised up and nobody wants to give the multi-nationals a free ride anymore.
For any economy to make gains workers must be able to afford the goods being sold. For the workers to be able to afford the goods they must make a wage that allows for the purchase of those goods.
Profit!
What we have today is a situation where people have spent time and money to earn degrees to gain employment that the U.S. has allowed to go offshore. People in many other countries do not have to hock their futures the way we americans often do just to make a decent day's pay. Of course, their labor is cheaper!
No I know some jerkweed is going to blather on about free market economics, but you know what? Free markets do not exist. They probably never did. I have no problem instituting laws that regulate corporate activities so that everyone can bring home the bacon.
But hear this well: I don't love corp. execs so much that I think they should be the only ones to profit from the unfair way things are set up.
FWIW, I do think there are real economic and security issues in having everything go offshore with hugely important technologies. The people of the U.S. shouldn't stand for it. Those are important issues that we should look at -- that said, I also don't mind letting my own self-interest speak my cause as above.
I don't know that business owners really control their business as much as we imagine they do.
For one thing, when businesses get really really big and complex, I suppose the left hand doesn't know what the right hands doing, and the business "owners" don't really know what it's doing either. It just sort of runs, but they don't really know how.
Maybe, theoretically, they could issue an order down, like "Hey, only package your chips over here," right? But could it actually work? Maybe not! Maybe that'd cause all these huge social uphevals.
Maybe businesses, once formed, are like parts of a gigantic organic system. You might not be able to just suddenly uproot a major artery, and move it somewhere else, without having major effects on yourself, your environment, and whatever else plays a part (who really knows what, right?).
So, I don't know. Is it really hypocracy? Maybe powerful people aren't really as powerful as we imagine them to be?
I've read some things by some very wealthy people. I can't understand it all. But some of these people seem to me to be pretty sincerely interested in doing what's right.
Now, granted, the vast majority of these people seem pretty skanky to me. Enron? Right? I suspect that most big business is like that.
But when I read about people who really seem to be trying to do good, like O'Rielly, I just don't think it's a PR thing. I think these people are serious.
I don't know; Maybe someone who knows better can reply to me.
I believe that one of the reasons that labour is significantly cheaper in India is because the socioeconomic system is vastly different. India has government sanctioned bonded child workers. And whenever you can introduce virtual slaves into an economy, you can dramatically drive down the price of everything else.
Bonded child labour? Slaves? In India?
Yes:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/1999/11/22/60II/mai n71386.shtml
http://www.hrw.org/reports/1996/India3.htm
http://www.anti-slavery.org/global/india/
The argument that we should be more efficient, smarter, better, more competitive against our foreign counterparts -- that's just a red herring until more fundamental human rights issues are addressed.
I'll consider outsourcing to another country economically fair and ethically legitimate when that country meets some minimum (I admit this to be somewhat fuzzy) world standard of human rights.
Western Europe has the same problem to a certain extent but not as badly as the USA. The reason not so many European IT jobs have gone to India and China is partly because of the language barrier. There are tens of millions of Indians and Chinese who can speak English but almost none who speak German, French, Italian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch etc. (I assume some Spanish and Portuguese IT has gone to South America) This doesn't prevent IT companies trying to outsource call centres to Germany from Switzerland for example (although the language spoken in Switzerland is a dialect of German that Germans don't understand).
Apart from this a fair amount of manufacturing, production (and coding) has been flowing towards Eastern Europe as those countries join the EU. The EU hopes that it will somehow balance itself out in that very large companies in Western Europe will have branches in Eastern Europe and that that way cash will flow backwards as well.
I think one thing that can really stay local in the IT world (and this applies to the US as well) is for people to start their own small companies specialising in other small companies in other sectors in the local economy. Programmes such as Tax or local business oriented stuff as well as doing consulting and support on a small scale are a good answer.
Another answer is to start a local company that adresses the problems that the people's previous companies cause by outsourcing coding to people who have low QA and communication skills in the local language.
As an example, let's take, for example a certain Desktop publishing layout software from a company in Denver Colorado. This company's product has had a virtual monopoly in DTP for more than 13 years. About three or four years ago, IIRC, that company (use your brains as to who that is) outsourced the entire software development to India. About six months to a year later, Indian developers from this company started popping up in developer mailing lists asking really basic C/C++ questions and acting very arrogant when they didn't get immediate answers. Aparently those Indian developers were so bad (relatively speaking, probably more a management problem) that it took them almost three years to port that DTP programme to Mac OSX, where it finally turned up a few months ago.
That would have been and was an opportunity for competitors to step in and develop alternatives.
Think about it. Tarifs and high import taxes will not solve anything in the long run, as the USA is no longer in the position to be able to simply dictate economic terms to the EU, India or China (or SE Asia to an extent), and if such measures are taken, sonner or later they'll reply in kind, and then you truly will be f**ked.
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.
You're 100% right. I have seen overseas outsourcing in action twice. Both times it was a *MEXICAN* company outsourcing to India. Both times the project just dragged on, drained money, and honestly didn't produce results. In one case, what was supposed to be a $500k contract in 6 months dragged on for a year and a half and they doled out $2 million as the Indian company kept asking for more and more time, more and more money, etc.
Once you sink $500k into a project it's hard to write it off as a loss--so they just kept spending more and more money on it. Eventually, they just cancelled the Indian outsourcing, brought it back home to Mexico--and even had me (an American) on board as a consultant to help them!
Andy Grove says that all the telecomm infrastructure makes it as if a guy in India was in the next cubicle. That's the simplistic promise of outsourcing that tempts companies to do it. There may be some industries where it will work. Software development is NOT one of them.
I'm a software engineer and I'm NOT worried about outsourcing at all. Yes, we'll have some short-term pain as many companies experiment with it. But the two cases I've seen of MEXICAN companies trying to save a buck by outsourcing to India made it very clear that it just won't work long-term. I completely believe many jobs will be outsourced to India and China, but many (if not most) will bounce back to the U.S. after the 1-2 years it takes to realize it has failed.
Not to mention incentives to become educated. Unionized garbagemen are now making more than formally educated and experienced professionals. While that may be amusing, if the wage gap between professionals, under global competition, and service industry workers, gets smaller and smaller, it will be a tremendous dis-incentive to young people to go to school and take out massive loans.
These are some very serious concerns... we will all certainly be fine in the short term, this economic malaise will pass, but longer term the structural issues in global competition between the western world and the developing world are going to be, well, scarey.
Larry
I live in New Zealand and work (embedded firmware etc) for a company owned by an American corporation. My salary + overheads are a third of what it costs to put an American behind a desk to do the same job. OK, we're not talking complete sweatshop, but the basic principle is there.
It is easy to say that the American engineer is getting screwed becasue he can't get a job. In many ways, the NZ economy is also getting screwed (at least in the short term) because my skills are going into building the American corporation rather than some New Zealand company.
In reality I think we're only seeing the thin end of the wedge. Countries like China, India etc have the potential to become stronger and stronger. As these countries get upskilled in all areas (manufacturing and engineering), the value added that comes from America is diminished. What's left for the American corporation to do? Marketing. How long before marketing etc also get commoditised and go offshore along with service organisations (tech support etc which already have)? Eventually there are likely to be full Chinese etc corporations with the capability to do everything better and cheaper. Where to then?
Bottom line: American corporations are so driven by quarter-by-quarter profits that they do not invest in the future. This will fail not only those corporations, but the economy on which they're based.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
If you can tell me the difference between the government owing the corporations and the corporations owning the government I'd like to hear it.
Then we'll take up what the possible difference between these states and fascism is. It isn't a pleasant subject.
You make one fundamental assumption that is false though. Capitalism and Corporatism are not the same thing. Free trade is the natural human state. Modern corporations are government contructs upheld at the point of a gun.
They are serfdom, not capitalism.
Capitalism is simply the right to mind your own business.
Corporatism invokes you to mind their business under the promise of the protection of the liege lord.
Note carefully the difference between the two.
Read Thoreau's "Life Without Principle" (in this case principle is used in the economic sense. We'd probably say capital instead).
On it's surface it seems to revile business in its every word, but this is misleading. Thoreau was actually a capitalist and businessman. Every rugged individualist is really. It simply goes with the territory. If you insist on being your own man you must, of necessity, take care of your own business. Or retire from the world, which is what Thoreau did not do.
It is, at its heart, one of the most stunning paens to capitalism every written.
You'll find it a refreshing alternative to Ayn Rand and much better literature, especially since it's only a handful of pages long but says more of real value.
KFG
For various reasons I've been to the "urgent care" clinic a few times in the past couple of years. Usually it was because the ailment was too trivial to deal with the appointment/timeoff process with my regular doctor.
Each time I've been there, I've been treated by a doctor who was foreign born and in one case, had been in the US less than a year (I asked). One doctor was from Egypt and the other was from Romania. Both appeared to be what I'd call "awkwardly competant" -- they treated my ailments, but their whole interaction with me was really odd. It wasn't exactly confidence inspiring, and was markedly different from the experience I've had with foreign doctors when I've been at the University Hospital.
Anyway, this urgent care clinic is part of a corporation, and urgent care medicine is a lot of schlock work (colds, cuts, burns, etc) at bad hours that a lot of doctors don't like to do...for less than a 'normal' salary of $150-200k.
So why not start a program of importing doctors from overseas? And I think that's exactly what they've done. And it wouldn't surprise me with the cost pressure on the medical system in the US if this didn't become a lot more common, with the lower end of the medical practice getting filled with foreign doctors.
I don't know what country you live in, but in my country the cost of housing has consistently increased (by at least 5%) every year for at least the past 14 years and is showing no signs of slowing down any time soon. How is cheap foreign labor going to help with this?
It may amuse some countries to see the citizens of most first world countries squatting in the streets because they can't afford a place to live on world wages, but I won't be too happy about it. Other than housing costs, however, I would tend to agree with your premise. Wages are always relative to what you can buy with them.
I haven't noticed this prices-falling-faster-than-wages phenomenon you refer to though. While the prices of some goods have fallen, mostly due to Chinese labor, the prices of most non-technological goods seem unaffected. I have not seen any drop in basic cost of living goods. If anything the cost of food, electricity, water etc have increased.
I don't know how much I'm going to enjoy my new $5 70" plasma HDTV television with Blueray DVD player (built by 10 year old kids in Port Moresby being paid in fishing hooks) while living in a tent on public land. Where am I going to plug it in?
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.