Tech Firms Defend Moving Jobs Overseas

bobcows writes "Yahoo is reporting about leading technology companies urging Congress and the Bush administration Wednesday not to impose new trade restrictions aimed at keeping U.S. jobs from moving overseas, where labor costs are lower. 'There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore,' Carly Fiorina, chief executive for Hewlett-Packard Co., said Wednesday. 'The problem is not a lack of highly educated workers,' said Scott Kirwin, founder of the Information Technology Professionals Association of America. 'The problem is a lack of highly educated workers willing to work for the minimum wage or lower in the U.S. Costs are driving outsourcing, not the quality of American schools.'"

Comments

Translation

[DrunkBastard]

"We've found a way to line our pockets with more money, so why shouldn't we use cheap, hard to understand overseas techs? We're greedy, plain and simple."

It's not just tech.

[jtilak]

Lets face it. If you're a multi-billion dollar corporation and you can get labor dirt cheap in another country wouldn't you do it? Yes there are plenty of qualified, educated American workers. So what? They work for $3/hour in India instead of $20/hour in America.

We need some kind of regulation to discourage these practices or our entire economy will go to shit. George Bush wants to help ILLEGAL immigrants out by letting them work? Because he is so compassionate?? Give me a fucking break. It is about exploiting people and getting cheap labor so the rich get richer.

Outsource expenses - CEOs

[Embedded Geek]

I've heard this joke beofre, but it makes sense if you look just at the numbers. I can't find her current salary, but Carly was on track for $115M/year.

If you reduce her salary to $500,000 (ten times what a sacrificing $50K engineer might make), you can save 2290 well paying (50K) jobs.

For the life of me, can you imagine any CEO contributing as much to a company as 2290 rank and file workers? Unless they can literally print money, I have trouble imaging how an executive can make that kind of contribution compared to the employees they lead.

An interesting article

[mpath]

This was posted on /. before and there's a great analogy that we should all read & understand:

Recently, I bought some chocolates as a gift for some friends from a specialty shop. These chocolates are remarkable. Owner Jean-Marc Gorce makes them by-hand and his small shop has been rated as one of the top ten in the United States. In addition to being a chef, Jean-Marc is also an entrepreneur and an innovator.

Jean-Marc recently started selling his chocolates in gold and blue boxes. I told him I liked the new boxes. He explained that his wife designed the boxes and he found a company in the Philippines that could produce the boxes in the small volume they needed for a good price.

Jean-Marc's gold and blue boxes are an example of successful outsourcing. Jean-Marc sells chocolates, not boxes. The design and production of chocolates is his core competency. Jean-Marc can outsource box production to improve his operational efficiency without sacrificing his reputation as a maker of superlative chocolates.

While outsourcing boxes improves chocolatier Jean-Marc's operational effectiveness, he would never consider outsourcing chocolate production because he would lose his core differentiation advantage. Yet, in their enthusiasm for cost savings, several US technology companies have done precisely that-- outsourcing their core technology and key strategic differentiator.

Offshoring Programmers