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Is Setting Up an Offshore IT Help Desk Ethical?
theodp writes "Except for a few odd jobs,' wrote an advice seeker to The Ethicist (NYT, reg. may be required), 'I had been out of work for nine months when I was offered a job setting up an [IT] offshore help desk. Would it be ethical to accept the offer?' Randy Cohen, who pens The Ethicist column for the Times, not only advised the job seeker that it was indeed okay to help co-workers lose their jobs, but also seemed to suggest that it would be unethical for him not to offshore the jobs, saying: 'Some people feel we have a greater ethical duty to those closest to us — our neighbors — but in an era of global trade and travel, that is a recipe for tribalism and its attendant ills.' The job seeker, who noted his father's auto-industry job was outsourced, chose to ignore Cohen's ethics advice — as well as his own wife's — and declined the job out of principle. He continues to seek work. Comments?"
Any time you ask Randy Cohen, the answer is questionable.
He's a total sleaze who will use lofty-sounding logic to support his whatever position he happens to prefer today, even if it completely contradicts the position he took yesterday.
If you're talking about doing something illegal that he favors (say, hiring an illegal immigrant as a maid), he'll take the "higher calling" route, and tell you that you have a moral duty to ignore bad laws. Just like the nazis should have ignored their laws.
But if it happens to be something he's opposed to, he'll tell you that following the law is the foundation of ethics. You can try to change the law, of course, but if everyone were to simply ignore laws they don't like, the result would be total anarchy and the collapse of society - so of course any action leading in that direction would be completely unethical.
If he's doing a better job than somebody else for the same or less pay, then it is ethical.
What is NOT ethical is what the current worldwide corporate managers do. They get paid more than anybody else in the company to produce absolutely nothing. What they call "leadership" is worth nothing, do they think it requires any talent to say "hey, you! make this thing work!"
I believe in Leadership as it was in the old days, the leaders were the people who had worked in the factory floor and had showed their talent there. They understood the processes, the technical details that made the company create the products people would buy.
Today, the MBAs know nothing about that, all they do is bullshit.
On what basis is it unethical?
The potential employer is starting a business. He is seeking help doing so. The business happens to be overseas.
Is any of those things - starting business, hiring people, or doing business abroad unethical? I don't think so.
What we're really talking about is not ethics. It's our feelings - we are unhappy about facing competition. We're particularly unhappy because the competition can work for much cheaper than we can, because we are used to a very high standard of living. This feeling is natural. However, that's not the same as our competition being unethical.
Instead of trying to claim it's a moral flaw in our competition - who after all are people with families too, trying to make a living just like us - we should be finding a competitive advantage. If we want to be paid more than them, we need to be better than they are.
I think the gentleman made a bad decision. Either we adapt or fail.
On the other hand, I happen to be a senior IT manager in a company, where I know personally in my department we will be replacing about 30 jobs over the next 12 months that had been outsourced with direct employees of the company. We are learning that it doesn't give us the quality or the flexibility that we were really looking for. In addition, our customers services is going through a process of insourcing large parts of its contact centre, because at the end of the day, direct employees have a greater stake in the satisfaction of the customer and we manage our people better than our partners.
But eliminating yourself from the mix ensures that your views and thoughts will never be heard. If you really wanted to change things, you would jump in with both feet and see where it goes.
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
If the people in another country are willing to do the same job for less money, that means they are using less resources than you to have basically the same life. Is it ethical to go out of your way to maintain your wasteful life?
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Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Personally, I dont see how this could be a question of ethics. It is, however, a question of economic nationalism. We are quickly removing ourselves from economic competitiveness. Most of our industry and manufacturing jobs have already left the country, to the point where we are primarily a service economy. And now even services are beginning to be exported as well. We consume more and more, but except for our agricultural industry and military-industrial complex, we really do not produce anything. Competitive advantage says that states will inevitably focus on those industries they are best suited to (stones/minerals/oil in Africa, manufacturing in China and SE Asia). It seems what we do best is consume. The problem is, manufacturing brings in money, consuming loses it. Even if these companies are based in America, their profits are not being recirculated into the US economy. The dividends are going into the stock market, and we all know what a mess and drain that is, and what wages and infrastructure/construction they contribute to is invested not in the US, but in whatever state their suppliers are located in. While this drives the costs down and increases profits, it gets to the point where more and more people in the US are unable to afford to purchase these goods. It's a cycle. People are forced to buy cheaper and cheaper goods, so companies reduce US jobs that cost more to drive down costs to keep or improve their profit margins. This causes more people to be able to afford less, meaning an increased demand for cheaper goods. If we want to improve our economic situation, we have to bring industry back to this country, to become competitive again. There is a reason why it's called "making money". The best way to make money is to make something. Until then, more and more of our money is going to go oversees or in corporate coffers, and states like China and Saudi Arabia will have more and more control over us.
So, the question isn't is it ethical to help your fellow employees get laid off. The question is it ethical for a company to bleed a state dry all in the name of profit? We said no when it came to states bleeding dry colonies. How is it any different now, except now it's companies doing the bleeding?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Indeed - the point Cohen seems to completely ignore is the morality of engaging in a race to the bottom.
True - rampant outsourcing has, and will definitely help a lot of professionals get their start in India - and that IS a good thing - but the net effect is to minimize the value of human workers in any role of employment. Your function will be to further shape the role of "support" into a set of blind scripts, minimizing the actual help provided to a voice reading a small set of webpages to someone.
This wouldn't be such a bad thing if money weren't such a critical divider between people - rich and poor, death and survival. But it is - and your function would be, at least in subtle way, to inconvenience everyone so that a small rich group didn't have to spend as much money on professionals, diminishing the value of your own profession along with it. You'd be tearing down tools used to help people so that there is a cheaper replacement that does less.
The whole thing is a bit of a red herring before larger issues though. Not too long from now, creatively programmed automation will take even more of these roles - and jobs might not be something everyone can be expected to have in order just to make things work anymore. Due to economies of scale, the cheapest automated tools will still be cheaper than the cheapest people eventually.
What will happen to those without the means to sustain their wealth without access to jobs? What happens when companies simply don't need large masses of people, and most people don't have access to methods of gaining money? How much longer can we run our economy this way? How valuable is the role of a human, in a society ostensibly built for human freedom?
Ryan Fenton
I would do it because I have a family and taking care of my daughter is more important than anything else. Of course it would be different if I was single with no dependants but everything changes when you have kids.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
It's not about technological progress and buggy whips because sufficient new jobs are not replacing the ones that go overseas. That's why our wages and/or jobs have been slumping for a decade.
Other nations "adjust" their currency and laws to create jobs at the expense of consumerism. We do the opposite in the US. It's great that you can afford a China-made iPod with an unemployment check, isn't it?
It's a lobbyist lie that we can maximize BOTH consumerism and jobs, and Asian countries know this.
Table-ized A.I.
So it's not ethical because it inconveniences people near you?
I don't think you're really taking about ethics. You're talking about the position that's most advantageous to take. But that wasn't the question that was asked.
I see nothing wrong in setting up an offshore IT shop. I fully believe in Capitalism, and that means that if another country can provide the same goods at a lower cost, then so be it.
The real question someone should as is, "do I want to set up an offshore IT office." That's more important.
No, I will not work for your startup
What you did was IMPROVE a process. You made a superior product, and most likely made it safer than it was before. Offshoring job does NOT improve the product, that product being service. I know what I'm talking about here, at least at the company I work for. I worked the help desk at this company, and if we hadn't been bought out and had all of our management replaced that help desk would have been used to service the now global company. The new company canned the whole help desk and offshored. I had already moved up out of the help desk at that company into a site IT position, so I was in a unique position to observe before and after. It's bad enough now that I can't MAKE my people call in a ticket for help. The last client at work actually said 'never mind, it's not worth it' when I asked him to call in the ticket so I could work his issue. That's policy btw, I'm not supposed to just FIX things any more, they have to call in and go through the endless useless gyrations and wait a day or so for the ticket to finally circulate down to me. I've worked at this company for the last 11 years, 3 of them on the now defunct help desk. Not once, not from a manager, or a supervisor, a floor worker or office staff have I ever heard 'wow, that new help desk is amazing!" They are not better. They just allow some middle manager at a corporate level to show how much money they are saving so they can get a bigger corner office.
That whole freeing up labour making everything better argument is so much horseshit. If it were true then wages and standard of living would have skyrocketed in the last 30 years in North America. The fact is, both have been flat to negative since 1990 and the only "other things" that get done are part time retail positions. But hey, I guess no one really "needs" to have a family, right?
Nice use of euphemisms. You speak of "labor" as if it some mythical, fungible pixie dust instead of twenty two people with mortgages, car payments, food and diapers to buy...
Does that mean that once a person has been trained and hired, their employers (and ultimately, all of society) should be compelled to continue to employ them forever in the same line of work doing the same tasks, however useless or irrelevant those jobs might now be?
If a company performs a task one way, is it compelled to perform it in the same way with the same number of employees for the remainder of its existence? Is the automation only unethical for existing companies, or can a new competitor starting from scratch use new methods and techniques and drive the old assembly line out of business?
~Idarubicin
This is probably an unpopular idea around here, but some people here really have to embrace the inevitable. Globalization is inevitable, it's just rather challenging for individuals at the moment because of the draconian ideals of the world governments. The future of work in IT, and probably in most industries is dependent on the individual's ability to be mobile and flexible. Instead of tying oneself to a single place in a single country we must as individuals be willing to move to where the work is. Just as the idea that we could start working at 18 for a company that we would then retire from at 65 with a full pension went by the wayside, so must this idea that we can expect the jobs to follow us. Get over yourself; you are not the only person in the world who can do the job and you're not the center of the universe.
So you might think from the above that I have been untouched by outsourcing, that I have stood apart from it all this time and have some agenda. No. I have had my job outsourced and lost it. I have a house with a mortgage and kids... all things that I did when I too was selfish and self-centered enough to think that there would always be work where I am looking for it; in my own back yard. Even recently in my full-time job I've seen parts of my job handed to third-party outsourced vendors, though I continue to keep ahead of the wave of outsourcing enough that I have been able to "surf" so far. However, I don't expect this to last and within 10 years my ability to get a job will be partly dependent upon my ability and willingness to uproot myself and move to where the jobs actually are. The funny thing is; I've done it before when I moved myself from the UK to the US, 16 years ago.
I am already preparing. I have paid off all my credit cards, I have just purchased a car with cash and am getting ready to sell my big fancy BMW that I purchased in hubris. I have already budgeted to take the saved money and use it to fix up my house over the next 18 months, and market-willing I will be able to flip my house for at least what I owe in about 2-3 years. Once I do that, I will stay roughly where I am for a few more years living in more transient housing... apartments for now, though I do feel that even a 1 year lease severely limits my options. However, my son by that point will be 14 and getting closer to the point that he can get out on his own... and I'm not having any more kids. Once he is independent I will be free to follow the work, and since I already have dual citizenship of UK and Ireland (and therefore Europe) and am a legal permanent resident in the USA I already have some modicum of flexibility there.
The only down side to what I foresee is that the current draconian and "tribalist" ideals of world governments mean that there are hoops to jump through in order to work in these other countries. However, even these are not impossible to overcome... all it takes in most countries is to make yourself valuable enough to companies already embedded in those countries that they will do most of the leg work for you.
If this scares you, it probably should... but change is always scary. We as a species will overcome and survive, we always have. However, the notion of national identity will one day be viewed as a rather quaint notion. Worlds without borders is the way of the future, and we either embrace it or perish.
My 2c. No change given.