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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?"
...then the answer is no.
I saw that movie. You'll get to nail a really beautiful Indian girl. Ethics smethics.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Of course it's not "ethical", but that's not the point. It's legal, and that's all that matters.
And this "Randy Cohen" individual is an ass, or a shill, and I hope he gets outsourced by his employer at the earliest opportunity.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
at least he has principles. I wish there were more people like him in IT.
Just a dude. Stuck in IT.
If the ethics are bothering you, perhaps you should look at practicality instead; what you see may eliminate your ethical quandary. Offshore support desks may be less expensive per call received, but the total expense difference is a smaller gap, as people have to call back when they don't receive proper care, or have to be transferred to 2nd and 3rd level techs in the US. You also have to worry about losing customers who get angry at having to deal with foreign techs. Overseas tech support quality is a long-standing joke, and the joke is firmly based on reality. I recommend you do some more due-diligence before considering this move.
I find it amusing that people are in favor of giving poor people in foreign countries food and money, but are horrified at the prospect of giving them jobs.
In fact, you could make the argument that it would be unethical to turn down the job because your family would suffer due to the lack of income.
I see this tribalism is wrong argument popping up quite often but really what is this based on philosophically. I don't know them and they don't know me. I can only assume they are going to look out for their best interests, I therefore must do the same. This does not hold true for my friends and neighbors who I can expect to consider my interests, at least to a degree.
I don't turn on the even news and see a whole lot of evidence the rest of the world is filled with altruists, who only want what is best for everyone. The other issue with this argument for outsourcing is, I think its users should be required to prove its not a zero sum game. "Because they deserve to benefit from technology and have good jobs too", is only a sound argument if those jobs are not being taken from people here. Where countries like India are concerned they are competitors, it might be a mostly friendly competition right now.
I don't know what I would have done in this guys shoes, I suspect I would have been even more tribal and decided to do what is best for MY family, and taken the job. I applaud him for standing on principles though which I feel are sound.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
...it probably isn't.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
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.
One of the beautiful aspects of capitalism is that it assumes everyone is inherently greedy and therefore the system is constructed so that even the greediest of society's members cannot abuse the system.
One of the horrible aspects of capitalism is that if someone is not greedy or negatively greedy (like the man in the example) and looks out for others, they're eaten like a sheep among wolves. Of course it is not society that is harmed but merely the perceptually insane individual.
In an age where lawmakers are trying to strike down healthcare for all of your fellow citizens and Social Security is just a cookie jar to be raped by fiscally careless politicians it's unfortunately pointless to pass up this job. You're just ensuring that you're the victim instead of someone else. Sadly, in a capitalistic society, that's not a sound plan to ensure your future and survival.
I respect the man for his decision but as someone who has watched my father go on and off unemployment, I implore him to adjust his attitude to just consider legality and not ethics. We live in a world today where all politicians and businesses lead by example in this department and playing the game optimally means that capitalism rewards them.
My work here is dung.
Ethics isn't an issue here. Life isn't set in stone. Things evolve and change. People who helped install electric lamps and put gaslight lighters out of work weren't unethical. People who built cars and put buggy whip makers out of work weren't unethical. Progress happens. I find off-shore call centers to be substandard. I am always having problems with them. Companies will realize the false savings in them and bring back home-based centers. Customer support is a form of sales and advertising. Savings in off-shoring them is penny-wise and pound foolish. I wouldn't give it a second thought. I trust cream to rise to the top.
Screw everyone else.. Get yours!
It is the american way.
Yes and no. We used to screw everyone else for a buck, but now we're screwing each other. I don't see that as an improvement, personally.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Hogwash. The US grew largely under the prospect of heavy tariffs. Further, many of those nations keep their currencies artificially low to encourage jobs at the expense of local consumerism, afraid it would spoil their populace.
Table-ized A.I.
I've heard the same sort of arguments made about investing in evil companies in the stock market. Couldn't the same line of thinking apply to drug-dealing opportunities in your neighbourhood? What about blackmailing? At what point do people say "no one should be doing this, period."
Wally? is that you?
FGD 135
Do this as ABSOLUTELY CHEAPLY AS POSSIBLE with regard to off-shore labor cost!!! Any business person stupid enough to do this only sees costs, not quality. This will help fail fast and dramatically, since as the saying goes: "Good work aint' cheap, & cheap work ain't good". Anyone in the offshore economy who has good skills won't be working at the cheapest rates. Offshoring any type of knowledge work is only about saving cost at the risk of sacrificing quality and dedication to the work for both the individual and the company. The more business people get burned by this, the quicker at least some of them will learn that this practice is unsustainable and hazardous to future business plans, the local economy, and job prospects of the future.
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
It doesn't matter that somebody else will take the job, at the end of the day we all have to answer to ourselves. I admire somebody who knows what it takes to be able to look at himself in the mirror the next day.
and Bangladeshi. Even with illegal Visa
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.
Employers go offshore for one reason, the cost of hiring people and the subsequent saving in wages. Why go to the expense of hiring someone that costs $xx per hour when you could pay someone in a different country that much a month. It is the customer that ultimately loses out. Speaking to people in other countries that are simply reading a sheet of paper and not listening to the customer, often in an accent the customer can't understand makes both ends angry and in some cases the operative commits suicide. What is a life to the faceless employer? - one where the workers will never meet anyone who works for the company. The company doesn't even know how their customers feel because they have become insulated from the customer since every call is handled by the call center. Personally, I can't wait for the automated system that radically replaces call centers with a small box in the company, it means jobs will be lost but the customer will finally be happier. After all, which employer really cares about their staff and not about how much money they make?
ethics and legality are not the same. If you happen to be in a country where torture is legal and disappearing people is also legal, it is still unethical to take the job of torturing people whose relatives disagreed with the government. When slavery was legal in the US, I'd still say it would be unethical to take a job hunting down escaped slaves.
Of course I see nothing unethical with the actual job in question here.
To me, the answer depends quite a bit on the labor and political conditions in the country to which the work is being outsourced.
If this was a factory job being outsourced to a country that's politically repressive, then outsourcing could mean forcing US workers to compete with workers in a country where there are no child labor laws, workers put in 16 hours day and sleep in a shack on the factory grounds, or where trying to organize a labor union means that the police come, shoot you in the head, and throw you in a ditch.
However, this is an IT job, so most likely it's not going to be done by child labor or under sweatshop conditions. Is it being outsourced to Ireland or India, both of which are democracies with real labor laws? If so, then I'd agree with Cohen, with the caveat that a lot of India's problems are caused by Malthusian issues, and no matter how many jobs you send there, it won't do jack for the vast majority of the population.
In fact, a lot of the world's problems have lack of birth control as their underlying cause. Global warming is an overpopulation issue. Poverty in places like Mexico and Egypt is an overpopulation issue. Deforestation is an overpopulation issue. Air pollution in the US is an overpopulation issue. India's inability to provide education at the same level as China is an overpopulation issue.
Find free books.
I have a friend who uses an Indian company for his tech support.
Its $2000 a mo for someone to be answering tickets and fixing accounts 24/7 365
Or he could hire in the states, which would be like $3000-$4000 a mo for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, no holidays
O.o
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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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
...but his premises are suspect. If one accepts that an American should have no more or less concern for the job-seeker in Mumbai than the one in Seattle, then it is certainly not wrong to help set up an offshore help desk.
However, the idea that the only reason one would have more concern for the American than the Indian is "tribalism" is suspect. Consider the end result of offshoring helpdesk jobs. We'd end up with no such jobs in America. Then where would this job-seeker be? Unemployed and with no prospect of future employment. He'd have helped fashion the rope used to hang himself. Is pursuing short-term gain at the cost of long term harm to oneself unethical? I suppose there's disagreement on that subject, but I think it's an argument worth considering, one more sophisticated than mere tribalism.
You can't discuss ethics on an empty stomach.
Hope that guy drops the job and lets someone else take it, who appreciates the income, when so few jobs are available.
Take the money and run:) Give them the tools to cover all the basics that a business person would understand. Just enough to run at a sub-standard operational level that might work under the heroic efforts of local labor, but fail miserably given the infrastructure, cultural differences, and adversarial role of contract negotiations (e.g. contractor does what's in contractor's best interest because he's not a long-term employee). Also, do this slowly so as to extract as much money as possible. When this fails, be there to offer a "fix" with mix of on-shore help. When things improve dramatically, slowly shed the contract offshore labor or relegate it to menial crap work the local labor force doesn't want to deal with. We've been doing this rather successfully in the software world for a decade now:)
OK, that would be unethical.
You should do your best job once you accept the job. If you plan on behaving like an asshat because something about the job offends you or seems unfair, pass on the job.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
I worked for years as a mechanical engineer in the automation industry. All we did was put people out of work by automating routine tasks. That is how we become more productive. Engineering is all about using your mind to improve the way things are done. This inevitably means putting some people out of work. The beauty of a free market system is that labor can move to where it is needed the most. For example.
I helped build a machine that assembled carburetors for Briggs and Stratton. Before there was an assembly line that ran 2 shifts with 12 people each shift. The machine allowed 2 technicians to build the same number of carburetors with less scrap in one shift. So 24 people were out of a job. How can this be good? Because it frees up those peoples labor so other things can be done. When someone first starts making something it usually isn't beneficial to automate because of the capital costs. But if the product is successful and the demand it there it makes sense to automate. Then free up the labor to go to where it is needed more.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Asking an economist to side on a politically charged issue, is asking the wrong person. All you would get is their political beliefs.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
It is ethical for someone to take an offered job - if they agree that the output of the potential employer is ehtical.
In Other words, I feel it woule ethical for me to take a job in another country for a company that made low power lightbulbs, but I would not feel it ethical for me to take a job with a company in my own town that made its money from gambling. (Examples picked randomly)
There are, of course, other matters to consider. Would it be ethical for me to move my kids education to another country? Would it be ethical for me to move so far from elderly relatives?
Ethics is only part of it anyway. Would I have to learn another language? Am I going to be safe from an ignorant tax authority that feels it owns me wherever on the planet I go? And lots more.
It may actually be unethical for me to chose to withhold my potential labour from a company just because it would be in another country. Some of the biggest problems in the world today are caused by people who say "my country right or wrong". That is unethical.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Who moved my cheese? is a great story to read regarding this. While I could go a lot into my personal preferences, basically moving the job is like moving your "cheese". The article has a really good synopsis of it.
Turn the question around. Why wouldn't this job be ethical? It's not a case of "exporting the pollution". It doesn't enabling some harmful activity overseas. It doesn't meet the criteria of dumping or other "unfair" business practice since the operation is almost certainly fairly priced for the country it's getting sourced to.
And finally, it moves work that can't be done well for the price to a country where it can and is more desperately needed. The local labor can then be moved to some other need. That's how comparative advantage works.
What a pathetic response....
Hey, everyone is stealing so just go along for the ride? Who cares that you're taking the bread out of your neighbor's mouth? Well, I, for one, do care. It's a lack of ethics that got this country into the financial mess it's in. Unethical politicians created, and continue to create, bad laws because they have agendas rather than the best interests of their own constituents and country at heart. Unethical government bureaucrats take paychecks when they're not doing the jobs they were hired to do, and the unethical unions make it impossible to fire them.
We need more, a lot more, people with the heart, the sense of duty, the sense of honor, that the guy in the article displayed. He put doing-the-right-thing above self-interest. He understands the principles our country was built upon, and upon which it prospered for an extended period of time. And, until we as US citizens get back to practicing those principles in our daily lives our country will continue to flounder and sink in a morass of debt and continue to lack in the political will needed to put us back on the track of economic growth and the moral authority needed for our country to fill its place in the world. If we don't start acting more like this guy we will continue to parallel the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Our own immorality will kill us, just like the Roman's own immorality killed them.
"while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." de Tocqueville
Unlike Ireland, India looks the other way when people misrepesent themselves for work. Never mind that you gloss over the whole issue of firms that defraud people(and the people that defend them).
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I do consulting and my last training session was with remote students in both the UK and France. Do any of you think I am being unethical because I am taking work from some consultant over there? So I think he should go for it and if the service can provide a solid value then it will grow and he will help a bunch of hard working people find jobs that they need. Does it matter that they live somewhere else? Not to me. If they make enough money they may turn around and hire me.
As background, I grew up in Flint, MI (ie "Roger and Me") and had a brother who worked for GM. He hated that every car I bought was a Honda. I bought them because they were clearly a better value - and still do.
That sort of attitude would certainly fail the "ethical test"!
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Seems like this would be the business man's Karma coming back to bite him in the ass..
In all honesty, I'm mostly being a joking smart-ass about this. The sentiment towards the company who wants to do this work however...
I don't think I could honestly take the work myself...
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
There's also the not insignificant problem of customers leaving your company if they phone up for help and can't understand a fucking word the person is trying to say. In the UK you fairly frequently see "uk call centre" mentioned up front as a selling point.
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
Just make sure that when the CEO has trouble with his laptop, he has to call the call center in Mumbai.
The problem with your analysis is that offshoring is done as a cost-saving measure. This means two pertinent things: that the quality of the help desk could easily go down, and that it is explicitly unstated whether the workers at the offshore IT help desk would be paid appropriate wages. If nothing else, when setting up such a facility in your own country, you have a reasonable understanding of the buying power of your own currency, relevant work laws, etc. If you don't speak the language in that foreign country, will you be able to do more than trust the local translator who tells you there's no problem? If you do speak the language, do you know enough about the country to know if the people will be taken advantage of?
That's a different part of the argument, admittedly. Does the company have a right to make mistakes that could potentially screw over its consumers, by outsourcing the help desk? Yes, they have a right to make mistakes. Is it unethical to take part in that if you disagree with their motives and means? Yes, I'd say that's unethical. Is the question of ethics really dependent on who gets the job when all is said and done? No, not really; if there were a slum in your own nation where it were legal to pay ridiculously little for questionable labor, or whatever the similar situation is, then the ethics question would stay the same regardless of which nation gets the money.
Over seas call centers sucks for costumes!
Many of these companies that outsource are also part of your 401k and IRAs for retirement. You get upset when they lose their value. Sure, we hear about greedy CEOs in the media, but they're not the norm. Besides, some places are starting to outsource to Detroit instead of India. It comes around full circle.
I don't think a real ethicist would say that there is anything wrong with wanting to improve your own neighborhood, or city, or state, or country.
Economics and ethics are not entirely separable. Outsourcing is taking from your neighbor (or even yourself) in order to help someone half a world away whom you have never met. How is that "more" ethical, in any way? Or, to put it another way: in what legitimate way is "tribalism" less ethical?
An objectivist would argue that what you call tribalism is the only natural state, and that outsourcing is immoral, to an extreme degree.
for trying to hire local work to set up their offshore IT desks. All this "ethics" this, "morals" that. Outsource that job too next time.
Many modern ethical theories allow for you to put more moral consideration towards friends, family, etc.
That's mighty fucking generous of them. Do they also allow me the quaint value of wanting to help my neighbors, too?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The day we can hire a offshore lawyer / lawfirm is the day the American dream truly comes to a end.
Seriously though I would make certain job types that can be offshored easily qualify for exemptions that would put the US worker on equal footing vs the rest of the world.
Such as: Exempt from Social Security Tax, Medicare, Workmans Comp, Unemployment, etc.
Just add the loss of tax revenue onto the lawyer, and doctor professions by raising their tax rates.
This would keep most of the jobs still in the US, keep the taxes relatively the same.
The thing is they should either make it illegal to hire a contractor who does not adhere to our work standards and codes.
or
Tax the shit out of contractors who do not adhere to our work standards.
I don't mind jobs going offshore it makes sense in the long term.
I do mind jobs going off shore mainly for the reason they don't have to provide unemployment, Medicare, workmans comp, or any of the other benefits imposed here.
It's one of the reasons why American jobs will suffer in certain key sectors that are vital for the US down the road.
Is he collecting unemployment payments? If so, he should have taken the job.
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
1) Is setting up a helpdesk in another building ethical?
2) Is setting up a helpdesk in another city ethical?
3) Is setting up a helpdesk in another state ethical? Even if they speak in funny language with words like "y'all"?
Oh? Really? Think so, huh? Come meet me in my office.
Thanks,
The CEO
My blog
Just to put in a bit of devil's advocate, there is the question of whether maintaining high levels of wealth in leading economies will eventually benefit all societies. It is possible that if in the process of "flattening" the world's economy that the leading economies fall too far then the eventual flattened world economy will be the worse for it. It could be the case that while it is relatively easy to move a few points one way or another in a national economy when there are significant differences in economic strength worldwide, moving the entire economy upwards is next to impossible.
The problem with your analysis is that offshoring is done as a cost-saving measure. This means two pertinent things: that the quality of the help desk could easily go down, and that it is explicitly unstated whether the workers at the offshore IT help desk would be paid appropriate wages.
Er, how does one leave something "explicitly unstated"? It was either stated, or it wasn't, no? That's like describing someone as being "aggressively uninterested".
/., keep retraining myself to move higher on the skill ladder, to remain employed. Yeah, that sucks, but who said we were owed these jobs?
Since you're arguing in a vacuum because the article did not include all factors, I'll join you there to make my point. It could just as easily be the case that the maximum amount of funding the employer will spend for help desk would buy the best of the labor force offshore, and would buy, at best, help desk workers with inferior skills here in the U.S. Therefore, from the consideration that you manufactured about the employer's ethics in regard to its customer service, it could be unethical NOT to offshore the help desk.
("Gasp!") Leaving the fact-vacuum to rejoin the oxygenated world, the question was in regard to the ethics of helping to take away jobs from co-workers to "give them jobs to furriners with funny accents." Since the rest of the world is developing skills and demanding a piece of the action, the lower level skilled jobs will continue to leave this country, and no amount of protectionism (and certainly not high-minded refusal to participate) will stop that. I, like many of the people on
Where will it end? I don't know, but we would have to change our model of competing with the world to get back the stability we had when the U.S., U.K.,and Europe were the part of the world that dictated to the rest. I don't see that happening.
Don't take it personally, but I'm not going to read your pithy response to my post.
People talk a good talk about being charitable to the poor people in other countries, but darned if they will truly give poorer countries something truly valuable -- and train those other people in other countries to make their own living. Because, darn it... it's just unethical to do that! This guy in his Utopian universe of social/political correctness just lost a good job because he preferred his dream world to real life.
People... Listen... this is not a Zero Sum Game. One job at least was created here... a high skilled training job... and one with a lot of opportunity. The guy turned down a really, really good opportunity to help people -- both people overseas, and -- believe it or not -- his friends. You see, his friends were obviously doing a job that wasn't valuable in his home country any more. The sooner they got out of that job, the better!
We in America tend to think that we should keep as many jobs as possible here, no matter how crummy. And yet we complain about the monotony of some jobs, and the poor pay of unskilled labor locally. And... the bar is being raised ever higher. Software Engineers, IT, Help Desks, and Call centers... It's tough... But we have to realize -- and quickly -- that we are "competing" in a global labor economy. If there is another group of people in the world that can do the same job for less money, and the government structure is more favorable to business... then we better be a lot more efficient, offer some tangible benefit that the overseas people can't, or be prepared to go to war. That's just life!
On the other hand, developed countries have a lot of opportunity, and people ought to learn quickly to take advantage of that. People ought to educate themselves or start a business (thus managing/directing the cheap labor overseas). If people want low skilled labor jobs, especially, the school of the world tells us that they will have to compete now with unskilled labor from other countries -- and that's tough, but that's it. Wake up, people & don't be a victim! Learn to take advantage of the cold hard facts.
For the ethics part... He should have taken the job, or he should have gotten out of the business and started another. He's got to feed himself and his family. He's got to slap himself in the face and wake up and smell the Coffee -- It's a dog-eat-dog world -- not some dream world utopia he's locked his mind in. On the other hand, he also has a responsibility to tell his peers as quickly as possible that their jobs will be outsourced so that they can plan for the future.
So substituting a global tribalism for a local tribalism is better? That doesn't fix anything, at best it just moves "unemployment" elsewhere.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
As much as we would certainly do well to have more jobs here, and as much as we may object to hiring people abroad, I don't know if this alone is enough to call it "unethical". We are a wealthier nation employing poorer ones. People living here don't like it, because it means less for them. Unethical? I guess it depends what you mean. I would not say the companies doing are doing it for pro-ethical reasons.
Assuming we are talking about "tech related" outsourcing, as opposed to things like call-centers... I cannot argue that it really is costing jobs here. I cannot find enough qualified people to fill tech jobs here. Past employers are reaching out, asking me if I can refer any friends that are decent software developers. All such friends are already gainfully employed. This "bad" economy. It's a strange one. I really do feel that it's disproportionately affecting the poor and the blue collar workers. People I know in Tech, aren't really having trouble finding work. Family members that have not been to or finished College? Forget it. It's rough.
To play as my own Devil's advocate. One might say, the exploitation of overseas workers is unethical, especially when we force them to specialize for our needs, and then jump ship when a cheaper bidder comes along. Also, I've found the quality of work with outsourced workers to be lacking. I'm talking BAD code. I'm not sure if the coders themselves are poor quality, or they are pressured to be "faster, not better". Communication is a pain, and turn-around time is poor due to time zone difference.
then setting up an offshore operation that provides for similar or superior standard of living to the same or greater amount of workers cannot be said to be unethical
Companies that provide outsourcing services profit, because their costs of performing the work are lower than the costs of hiring the employees.
Companies that provide offshore (overseas) outsourcing profit, because their costs of performing the work are lower than the costs of hiring a domestic outsourcing firm.
The reason that costs are lower for the offshore outsourcing firm, is that they pay their employees lower wages, they pay fewer taxes, and the governments impose fewer requirements on them, in regards to workers' rights, Unions, protections for workers' safety, liability for worker safety issues, environmental regulations, insurance, and lower costs of educating workers.
In other words.... there are more factors to be considered, then merely the "standard of living" of workers paid by the offshore outsourcing firm(s)
Including things like workers' patriotic duties to their own country, to freedom, respect for human dignity, respect for the environment.
Of course offshoring can be considered unethical.
He should just hire women... they'll do the same work, often better, for less pay. Can you see the ethical delimma now?
The Admin and the Engineer
So unless you are prepared to bear the overheads of your favourite software company running a helpdesk in every country int he world, the question is moot.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
And not in the way that you are the cause of unemployment for many of "your" people.
I have lived most of my live and worked all of it in a country that is not "mine". My parents, my sister and myself have 4 different nationalities and live now in 3 different countries.
From all this what I have learned is that borders are artificial.
Assuming you are American, would it be ethical to take away jobs from people in NY and give it to people in Alaska? What if jobs move from Niagara Falls USA to Niagara Falls, CDN? Mexico?
What if the jobs go from Japan to the USA?
So it is all YOUR perception of how much you believe borders are important and location of the job is a given right. I believe neither, so for me there would be and is no reason I would hesitate on the ground of ethical reasons, although there probably would be many others.
If pay AND living conditions are good, I would take the job. However living conditions are not always good (although they might be luxurious).
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
My ethics indeed make the wellbeing of people geographically closer to me, especially within governmental boundaries (town, county, state, country), more important than that of distant people. Because I am more likely to have a more direct connection to them, either knowing them, or someone they know. Their wellbeing feeds back more directly to mine. The economics are similar, despite globalism: the closer they are, the more likely I'm investing in my own community, therefore in myself.
Tribalism is when arbitrary group membership that doesn't actually influence your own wellbeing (including that of people you care about) still governs your decisions.
Not to mention that all the labor being exported out of the US is propping up foreign regimes that leave their workers and other residents exploited by labor and environmental abuse, which cuts costs. That's totally unethical.
Ethicist Randy Cohen is just another NY Times writer who's so bought into globalism that he doesn't recognize the actual dynamics within globalism, and whose interests are actually served. Besides, considering the kind of global whitewashes and outright lying campaigns the NY Times manufactures every day, an ethicist with time to address any subject outside accurate, relevant journalism is probably the most obvious wrongdoer in this whole story.
--
make install -not war
The basic problem with any sort of ethics question is that we really don't have a good definition for ethics. Is lying unethical? Is lying unethical if it is for a greater good (such as saving someone's life)? Is depriving someone else opportunity ethical?
The best definition I have seen is based on suffering: if your actions result in more suffering than currently exists, then it's not ethical. If it reduces suffering, then it's ethical.
Thus lying, and many other behaviours don't come under the definition of ethics. Lying is perhaps dishonourable, but it can be used either for good or evil.
People use the fuzzy definition of ethics in order to make you feel guilty and so sacrifice your own well being (and that of your friends) for their agenda (read: "greater good"). In the situation at hand, setting up a foreign call center pulls more people out of suffering than keeping jobs locally.
Those poor people! Anyone who thinks that they are more deserving of a job and comfortable income than poor people are just heartless and cruel! We should outsource *all* our jobs to people who will make better use of the opportunities!
Poppycock.
Your actions can reduce the suffering of 5 people, or 50 people. If you reduce the suffering of 5 people, you are still reducing suffering and so are acting ethically. If choosing the 5 over the 50 helps you out personally, then know that you are still acting ethically despite what some people say.
Do what benefits yourself the most, so long as your actions don't cause suffering. That's all it takes to be ethical - of all the actions to take, eliminate the ones that cause suffering. From what is left, it's OK to receive a benefit.
When the help in question vastly outweighs the harm.
It's hard to actually starve to death in europe or america, no matter how poor you are.
The same could not be said for many third world countries.
1 job leaving america likely means a temporary hardship for a family.
That families kids will still go to school, they'll still have food and they'll still have basic medical care and chances are good that the person in question will just find another job.
One job coming to a third world country can mean a family can send their children to school, keep them fed and get basic medical care, without the job chances are far worse that the person in question will find another.
so it's not just a matter of geography or nationalism.
a job can do far more good for one person than another.
At the end of the day, the real question is can you do that job and look at yourself in the mirror? The guy decided that he couldn't. There are plenty of jobs I would not do, in fact I'd rather change my lifestyle than make certain compromises. Sadly lots of people have very silent consciences... For instance, how can you design weapons and sleep at night? Or more mundane I think the people that worked on the London congestion charge are unhethical :) If curses can affect your after life, I have no doubt they'll have some nasty surprises...
Globalism has a deflationary bias ... debt has just covered it up in the last couple of decades, but the appetite for debt is running out.
Unguided capitalism sinks all boats to let a few own the seas all alone, and a government which can't make sovereign decisions because of free trade can't guide it ... outsourcing is unethical in that it's an extension of an unethical economic system which will result in a new feudalism (and this time the peasants won't even have nice view any more, since most farming is automated).
Only speaking out of personal experience, i'm having the worst time in the world trying to resolve an issue with Nokia and the workers in the US. Sure, i can understand their writing very well, and their speech as well (sometimes, i remember doing surveys in the states where i could hardly understand a word the 'white natives' were saying). However, they don't seem to be able to read nor respond to questions either (going on 44 days of back and forth).
I'm guessing the real problem is not the accent of the person reading the scripted responses, but that there are cheap labourers reading scripts that they don't understand. If you outsourced you could hire more intelligent people for less money to provide better service, but that of course would get in the way of the short-term profits.
I'm not sure whether to see people writing to an ethicist as silly or scary. As many people have stated, ethics is something beyond just what the law says. It is the idea that some things are intrinsically right or wrong whether there is a law against it or not. It has to have a basis in something real otherwise it's just someone's opinion. Treating ethics like it's equivalent to etiquette or relational advice is just bizarre to me. Who's opinion should really matter?!?!
Morality is normally backed up by religious writings of some sort. If you don't take your ethics reasoning from something like the Bible, Torah, Koran, etc. then it doesn't even CLAIM to have the authority of God behind it. The fact that all the religious writings have conflicting teachings is another issue, but at least there is some attempt at codifying the rules and it is faith that keeps you in line with them.
Writing in to a newspaper for ethical advice is obviously just a way to try and gain support for your ethical view in an argument with someone. If the ethicist agrees with you then you read the article to your spouse/parent/friend in an attempt to convince them to see things your way. If the ethicist disagrees then you label the ethicist a charlatan/idiot and move on to someone else who will see things like you. This might be a fun way to have an argument but a truly useless way to develop any real "moral compass".
"Meaningless!, Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless!"
Every 2.43 seconds someone who potentially could have invented something, come up with a great idea or been the next Edison or stephen hawking dies from starvation.
yes there is a decent argument that flattening things totally might do more harm than good but you can't say with a straight face that wasting such an incredible number of working human minds can be good for the economy.
When the top few percent of the worlds population spend more on pet food than on food for starving people something is terribly wrong.
I wouldn't worry even a little for the economy if the top few percent of humanity didn't get to have swimming pools so that the bottom billion could perhaps not have to spend their time worrying about starving or trying to figure out how best to pick grains of rice from passing trucks off the road before the other scavengers do and instead use those working human minds to build things, understand things and make things
As Adam Smith himself wrote, ideal markets are a dynamic between the drive of selfish acts moderated by ethical behavior.
The advice seeker is - within this model - a saint. Mr. Cohen is misguided, demonstrating the truth that a little bit of knowledge (of market economics) is a dangerous things.
Luke, help me take this mask off
As your gut is telling you, something looks fishy around here: Why hire (& train) you? They should be have someone in their existing organization who knows much more about their customer service and therefore could do a better job.
It sounds like they're planning a hatchet job and are too embarrassed/worried about it to do it openly and honestly. They want you to help them swing the axe suddenly. Beware, you will be next.
As for ethics, I'm not sure what ethical duty you owe to existing employees while you are not. Once you become an employee, terms of hire govern. I see no problem with "scabbing". But even then, you might have some ethical obligations towards customers especially if you see the offshoring significantly reducing (more than an accent) the value they paid for.
guess it depends if you're a glass half full or half empty type of guy (always thought that was a stupid saying, if you fill it up halfway, it's half full, if you empty it, then it's half empty). It could either be that the US has evolved to the point where they're starting to think of equal treatment, or that they've degraded to the point that they'll fuck over anything.
You can't discuss ethics on an empty stomach.
You cannot understand ethics unless you have lived for a while with an empty stomach.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
Elsewhere I gave an example that was quite different.
And I disagree with the idea that it is hard to actually starve to death in Europe and America. Or rather... maybe that is so. But not starving while living in a cardboard box and contracting pneumonia is not much better.
Tell your outsourcing justification to the ~ 9.5% of Americans that have been unemployed for the last 2 years. I am sure they will be falling all over themselves to agree.
Off-shoring is never done to improve service for the customer. It is always done on the basis of cost. Why is it less expensive? Because off-shored labor is so much less expensive that it is cheaper to set up the infrastructure and hire offshore workers than it is to hire workers locally. In short, it is less expensive because it allows companies to circumvent minimum wage laws.
Want to offshore labor "ethically" in your global market? Pay offshore workers the same as you would pay local ones. Suddenly off-shoring looks far less attractive.
I once worked for a company whose internal help desk was rated as being in the top 5% in quality and cost in the industry. The following year, it was off-shored, and all the local workers fired, because the company discovered it could save $1/hour per worker, on about 20 workers. Those who had to use the new "helpless desk" told horror stories about it for years - but none of that mattered. The company saved its dollar per hour (on paper), and the CIO got his bonus.
There was a time when managers and companies considered that they had a duty to treat their employees in an ethical fashion - not just the minimum required to satisfy the law. I miss those days.
(Or at least you didn't supply a principle stating why it was more moral for there to be help desk jobs in the US than offshore.)
What you supplied was an ecomonic argument. And one that's wrong, or at least short-sighted.
There is, in fact, a race to the bottom going on. Nations are presently fighting against other nations to supply the same products and services at lower cost. First, it was outsourcing to India and the Philipines. But they got expensive. So then eastern Europe, Indonesia and China started getting the jobs. Now those places are getting expensive. Over time, the low cost options are getting more and more expensive.
So this trend happens to have two implications.
First, it means that more and more countries have more and more discretionary income to purchase products that they would not have purchased previously. This means that globally there are more jobs because demand for various items is increasing. Families that were basically engaged in subsistance labor are now buying "luxuries." This increases the number of jobs total.
Second, eventually, the entire world will reach some sort of equilibrium. Even when the economy is this or that nation tanks, their wages don't get reset to the level of the Cambodias and Guatamalas of the world.
You may need to read up on Economics, unchecked consumerism, and actual US history.
Interesting how many 'ethical' cowards there are. Why is it that slashdotters are so afraid of saying what they think about controversial subjects?
One of my pet peeves since Randy Cohen started the column is that he's calling himself an ethicist when he really isn't. It's like calling yourself a doctor or lawyer when you're not, and giving people medical or legal advice that gets them into trouble.
It's part of the old newspaper mindset, "A good reporter can cover X even if he doesn't know anything about it, he'll just pick it up when he goes along," when X is a country where he doesn't speak the language, technology, politics, the drug war, health care, etc.
There actually is such a thing as an ethicist. I'm most familiar with medical ethicists, who are often employed by hospitals and academic medical centers. I've taken courses and gone to lectures on medical ethics, and I learned a few important non-obvious things.
An ethicist isn't like a doctor or rabbi who tells you what's right (according to God). The job of an ethicist (at least a medical ethicist) is to get the facts, figure out the logic of the situation, clarify the problem for you, and let you make your own decision. They also have to point out to you that different people would have different values and opinions, and you have to decide for yourself.
For example, back in the 1950s, when a pregnant unmarried woman went to a doctor, depending on who she went to, the doctor would tell her (1) you have to deliver the child and give it up for adoption or (2) You have to get an abortion so you can continue with your education/career. Later on, some doctors came up with the innovative idea that you should lay out the facts and options, and let the woman make her own decision what she wanted to do.
Today, medical ethicists help people decide a lot of Terry Schiavo-type questions about when a patient is hopeless enough to let the patient die, or whether to take a dangerous, unpleasant treatment like cancer chemotherapy when there's a very low chance it will do any good.
(There are corrupt ethicists, too http://www.globalhealingcenter.com/pharma-buys-a-conscience.html.)
The job of an ethicist is to clarify ideas
But Randy Cohen was answering ethical questions usually on the basis of nothing more than his own personal opinion or gut feeling. Up to the point where I stopped reading his column, I never saw a thoughtful consideration of the different viewpoints and options. Cohen just delivered his own opinion, as if he had a direct line to God.
What really annoyed me about Cohen was that he was taking a field with a lot of good, thoughtful logical and even scientific analysis behind it (for example, doctors did studies of how patients felt a year after deciding to let relatives die; for example, doctors recorded conversations between doctors and patients about fatal diseases and found out that the patients didn't usually appreciate the seriousness of their condition) and treating it as if it were just a matter of opinion, and entertainment, and his opinion was better than yours. It's like applying creationism to ethics. He's just a liberal version of those conservative Christians (or extremists of every religion) who think that they have all the answers and everybody should do what they say because they have a direct line to God. It's scientific ignorance applied to ethics.
As for local consumerism, good for them, anybody who see's what unchecked consumerism has done to the States would be wise to stay away.
So, helping set up an offshore call center is unethical. What about patronizing companies that have recently offshored a lot of their capabilities? Try going a day without giving business to such a company...pass up on the cheaper prices at Walmart, Target, etc. and buy only from local, American suppliers with no operations abroad that were set up as a cost savings measure. While you're at it, don't drive a car, ride a motorcycle or get on a bike.
I just find it unsettling that there's so much outcry about this on Slashdot when it comes to our jobs, but no mention of the fact that we're just the latest industry to have to face outsourcing. Where was the wailing before now?
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
These are not the countries these jobs go to ... outsourcing countries need to have a relatively well educated middle class and a large supply of peasants.
The true shitholes don't get any outsourcing, globalism does nothing for them other than giving them a lot of loans to buy and shinies and then foreclosing and taking the few truly productive assets they have (mines and farms). Hell, that's the same globalism is doing in the first world countries ... we just have a lot more assets to mortgage for shinies before we get well and truly fucked.
I wonder what his response would be if the question was not about outsourcing help desk staff, but rather about outsourcing newspaper columnists.
I meant in the 1800's and early 1900's.
Exactly. That's why Asia emphasizes jobs over stuff, and we get the opposite.
Table-ized A.I.
I think the position that all human beings have the same moral value and thus ought to receive the same moral consideration is a widespread position in modern ethics. If you accept that position, then setting up an offshore operation that provides for similar or superior standard of living to the same or greater amount of workers cannot be said to be unethical according to most modern ethical theories.
But ... that clearly wouldn't be the case. When you offshore most jobs, you provide a lower standard of living to a smaller number of workers who are forced to work ridiculous hours, often under physical threat.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
That last point of yours, I notice I only ever see that kind of "why don't you try telling that to X" when all reasonable arguments have been exhausted and the person is trying to justify something they know themselves is wrong.
Last time I heard it was when arguing that that vaccines don't cause autism and it ended with "why don't you tell that to the family next door with an autistic child"
it doesn't actually support your argument, it just adds emotional cruft.
Around 7.5 million people per year die of malnutrition in modern India.
Starvation rates in the United States are generally not even recorded due to the relative infrequency of the occurrence though in 2004 120 people total died from lack of food.
it is extremely hard to starve to death in the USA, the same cannot be said of india.
So to answer a ridiculous challenge with a ridiculous challenge "Tell your protectionism justification to the 10.8% of indians" .
He's going to National Public Radio.
Instead of just flipping the page, we'll have to get up to turn off the radio.
yes there is a decent argument that flattening things totally might do more harm than good but you can't say with a straight face that wasting such an incredible number of working human minds can be good for the economy.
"Intelligence has much less practical application than you might think" - Scott Adams
"It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value." - Arthur C. Clarke
Intelligence, indeed, human lives are cheap, on the global scale. That's the way it's been for a long, long time.
I wouldn't worry even a little for the economy if the top few percent of humanity didn't get to have swimming pools so that the bottom billion could perhaps not have to spend their time worrying about starving or trying to figure out how best to pick grains of rice from passing trucks off the road before the other scavengers do and instead use those working human minds to build things, understand things and make things
Your Robin Hood ideals sound nice, but in reality it's not the physical possessions of the rich that make a damn bit of difference, it's their control of a nation's wealth and what they choose to do with it. That's what matters. The societal effect of one's ethics grows exponentially as one acquires wealth and power, so I don't give a God DAMN if some rich industrialist has a swimming pool. It's how he uses his wealth that matters.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
India is the top country for outsourcing yet even in modern india something like 7.5 million people per year die of malnutrition in modern India.
So no.
Countries where people still starve in huge nunbers do get outsourced jobs.
true shitholes like Somalia or Niger where the government is unstable enough that you can't even set up a buisness are even worse off but then they end up having little to do with outsourcing.
First: the problem with outsourcing is a combination of greed and/or ignorance at the business level - the afflicted tend to think that it's the easiest way out of a tight spot with money, or (funnier still) a solid route to increasing their riches. It rarely is, and frequently ends up being quite the opposite.
Second: outsourcing makes PERFECT sense if and only if you can get the same (VERY close to, or - in rare cases - better) quality of workmanship that you would otherwise get, at a lower cost. And note that cost doesn't necessarily mean just money. You have to factor in communication difficulties, cultural rift, timezone shift, etc.
The outsourcing of a (set of) job(s) is NEVER unethical as long as the reasons are the right reasons (quality, cost-effectiveness, rare or hard-to-find skills, etc). The problem nowadays is that they rarely are, and the decisions are driven mostly by greed and/or ignorance (as noted previously) and justified by contrived excuses (poorly) disguised to appear to be solid reasons.
I've heard such nonsense as "for half the money, we can train these guys to do the same job this 12-year veteran can do", or my personal favorite "why should we care about the quality and maintainability of the work? as long as the bottom line is where it needs to be...."
So are you arguing that the massive and resource/money hungry status symbols, the expensive luxuries and the wasteful excesses that the richest few percent indulge in don't actually take any resources to provide or that they're trivial?
The economy isn't a zero sum game but you can still waste or destroy wealth on pointless things and divert resources from where they could be vastly better utilised.
no. And companies take advantage of it even though American Workers are more competitive in the global workforce if the US was to repeal giving money to companies for sending jobs overseas.
Something is left explicitly unstated when it is not brought to the table at all when discussing something where its relevance is not only obvious but paramount. The economics of starting an offshore business are "How much will it cost us?" which contains both the cost of the setup and the ongoing cost of the facility--in other words, the wages of the employees. Of principle concern to how much will be paid in wages is the relationship between how much you pay an employee and the resultant customer satisfaction, given that the IT help desk office is going to produce absolutely no other output.
Now maybe I've slipped into an alternate reality where IT help desks--foreign or domestic--have a substantially greater reputation than I've ever heard of, but if not, I'm fairly certain diminishing returns are going to set in awfully quickly, even with the best possible employer. However, a company that is hiring IT pros to "set up" IT help desks doesn't strike me as a company that has a vested interest in quality, which leads me to believe that the wage bar will likely be set at a 'conservative estimate' (meaning low) of where they believe that diminishing returns point to be. Considering that at the ideal point of diminishing returns, an appropriately educated worker wouldn't feel shafted taking the job, anything lower than that is probably unfair to whomever DOES take it--and, if the help desk setup company is, as I suspect, not entirely concerned with quality, the working environment could easily be hostile as well, which just screws with the people who DO take the job.
Now, admittedly, the discussion of how much the employees would be paid was left out of a second- or third-hand report, so it's not necessarily the case that it's not something the company itself cares about; maybe they're good samaritans, or hell, good businessmen with some integrity. Somehow I suspect it isn't the case. That suspicion, admittedly, is only preliminary, and I'll happily yield it given facts that suggest otherwise.
("Gasp!") Leaving the fact-vacuum to rejoin the oxygenated world, the question was in regard to the ethics of helping to take away jobs from co-workers to "give them jobs to furriners with funny accents."
You know, manufacturing quotes out of thin air is not "leaving the fact vacuum". (Oh look, mixed metaphors. Meh.) If that "furriners with funny accents" comment was supposed to be in reply to anyone, I haven't seen it, so it comes to nothing more than a strawman, and an irrelevant one at that, considering that my argument is pro-worker, not pro-local.
No, in the real world people compromise their ethics for economic considerations. This is not the same thing as the economical and ethical being connected.
I doubt any objectivist would ever argue from morality. Randians tend not to give a fuck.
Are relative.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
There are several things.
Personally I think people here should be able to get a better job than a help desk.
Nevertheless, it sucks when "they" take your job.
What bothers me more is the mentality "as long as I can afford it, it's ok".
Importing food from 3rd world countries for example.
Breeding 4 or more kids, so the above will be needed more and more.
World population keeps growing. Earth's surface isn't.
But back to the topic.
If you feel bad about offshoring, try to negotiate other jobs for the people here. I think that would be ethical.
Privacy is terrorism.
Realistically, that company is going to offshore jobs whether you participate or not. You have no influence in making the decision whether or not this will be done.
Given this set of circumstances, should you accept the job, you could actually have an influence in the ethical behavior of the company: do they provide adequate pay to the people hired offshore? Do they provide aid for the people whose jobs are being offshored?
The question, then, shouldn't be "is taking this job ethical?" The question should be, "am I capable of making a positive impact by taking this job?" I daresay the answer is an obvious "yes".
I'm from Norn Iron. My problem is with off-shored help-deskers understanding me, but in general they're better at handling it and make fewer "amusing" references to the IRA than English staff. Anyway, "UK Call Centre" is meaningless when almost 20% of the WORKING population has English as a second language. I've had few problems (beyond them understanding me) with non-native-English-speaking help desk staff, and many problems with snotty natives.
So are you arguing that the massive and resource/money hungry status symbols, the expensive luxuries and the wasteful excesses that the richest few percent indulge in don't actually take any resources to provide or that they're trivial?
{sigh} sorry you missed the point. Yes, compared to the operating assets of a large corporation a few mansions are trivial. My point is that if you run a multi-billion-dollar corporation, what's important to the society in which you live is not how many cars you have, or how many houses, but whether or not you direct your company to operate in the best interests of the said company's employees and their society. That's all.
What you're really talking about is excessive executive compensation, and that's another issue entirely, but you have to look at that rationally too. For example, Andy Grove (Intel Corporations founder) took in about 2.5 million in salary annually. Plus stock options, of course. He built that company into the huge organization that it is today, worth many, many billions. His pay was insignificant in real terms, and the toys he bought with that money less so. What is important is how he directed that company, what decisions he made, how that company improved or detracted from the lives of all the people into which it came into contact.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
IMO, there's never anything unethical about improving efficiency of a process. On the contrary, *sometimes* there are ethical questions that arise if the company that just improved the process feels it's better to eliminate jobs, rather than find other places to use the labor they have. That's one of the big mistakes I think many businesses make. The simplest way to show a "cost savings" is to reduce your labor costs. But then, you're really shooting yourself in the foot when it comes to doing anything additional or new. You eliminated skilled labor that was already trained and familiar with many aspects of your workplace, and presumably got along well with their co-workers too. The next time an opportunity comes along to start manufacturing a new type of widget for somebody? You don't have enough employees to do it successfully, so you're back to square 1, trying to hire new people, spend money giving them all the H.R. handouts and processing their paperwork,etc. And it's a roll of the dice if the new hires wind up better than the people you had previously.
So in essence, penny-wise short-term but potentially pound-foolish long-term ... and meanwhile, the churn contributes to reduced morale of the people you have left!
And they're right. Look at what consumerism has done to this country.
"aggressively uninterested"
"Dude, I don't care about your fucking problems. Get outa my face before I pop you one."
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Many modern ethical theories allow for you to put more moral consideration towards friends, family, etc.
That's mighty fucking generous of them. Do they also allow me the quaint value of wanting to help my neighbors, too?
No kidding. I wonder if self-defense is in there anywhere.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
His first ethical duty is to himself and his spouse to help support his family. His decision not to take the job did not accomplish anything yet
caused him to remain unemployed. An act is only ethical if it has a reasonable expectation that the ethical outcome outweighs the sacrifice.
So cost savings are *inherently* unethical? Reducing the price of a good or service is *inherently* unethical? I don't think you can make an absolute statement like that.
What if those cost savings from off-shoring a call center also create a dozen on-shore engineering jobs, because you can staff and run your call center for significantly cheaper than you could onshore, and thus have more money to plow into R&D, which makes the company stronger & more competitive, thus insulating employees from layoffs? Support is an operating cost - reducing those costs frees up more money which can be used for research, acquisitions, marketing, and other things that will make the company healthier, or allows the product/service to be sold for less, benefiting consumers. I don't think the net results are as negative (and therefore unethical) as you paint them, and you have to weigh this type of issue in context.
If the money saved is simply going to be put into the C*O's pocket, then perhaps it would be an unethical move, but these things rarely happen in a vacuum, where the money spent is zero-sum, and one country's gain is another country's loss.
no.
"There ought to be limits to freedom." -George W. Bush
in telecommunications era, it is indeed beyond stupid to attempt to remain closed, tribalist and protectionist. these all basically mean, division, discrimination, differentiation, walls.
whats more important, these walls are the exact things that create the differences in everything in between the divisions/countries :
think - cost of living in america is TOO high. despite it uses one of the cheapest oil in the planet, the price of living is way too high. that is precisely because the corporations there charge a lot for their products and services. DESPITE they are having them produced cheaply overseas.
there is the problem. these corporations are able to sell expensively despite producing cheaply, due to the walls. while, the customers cant.
basically, the wall works only one way, for the betterment of corporations. but, what would happen if it was otherwise ? imagine that, you could order medical care from any company/source on earth, through internet, and receive it through their local providers ? or, order a car from india, at indian prices ? complete lack of walls ?
right. in due time, every kind of price would equalize, and come to global standards. then, the customers would also be able to make use of the globalization.
actually, we should totally do away with corporations, and democratize the economy. in current situation, a global organization spanning hundreds of people can render immense services and produce immense number of products, but, decision making for what gets produced, and what not, and at what price, are still at the hands of 10-15 people owning or running the entire organization.
instead what should be is, bands of people collectively providing and using services, over a vast supply/demand network over the globe, coordinated by endless collaboration tools that internet enables. then, the promise and probability of a 'free market' happening can only begin to exist. an economy, by the people, for the people.
Read radical news here
actually I have little beef with executives.
The far less visible group are the old money, the ultra rich, the people who actually ended up owning the billions in question, the people who's worth to the economy would only be increased if they were to be replaced by a rock or other inanimate object which had been granted the legal right to own property.
You guys are so right. I've heard him a few times on the radio on some NPR show (the web says it's All Things Considered) dispensing supposed ethical advice, but i've been disappointed every time. I expected him to contextualize the question: maybe describe how the law and/or different philosophical, religious , cultural traditions look at the issue and then perhaps give his personal pronouncement. Instead he didn't even necessarily seem to get the root of the questions and dispatched them with like 2 or 3 sentences and a joke. Basically the same thing as what his column seems to do but even shorter because it's on the radio. It was all really disappointing and just didn't deliver. Maybe i'd think differently if I found him funny, but making fun of people who are asking earnest questions doesn't work for me.
On the point of the ethicists job being to clarify ideas, i definitely agree, HOWEVER, i have little patience for "experts" who just won't offer an opinion because "it's not their decision to make", etc. That's a cop out. They should lay out the options AND then if they have an opinion they should give it.
After seeing this happen at my company, I recommend jumping in with both feet or leaving the company. The schmucks have already won, and are firmly in control. If you stay, you'll do a lot better playing the game their way.
Not only did Randy fail the whether outsourcing is ethical question (it's not), but in the very next question he goes on this tirade saying the US justice system is "cruel" for putting a mother in jail for 5 years for ripping off people in a large-scale Ponzi scheme because it's "punishing" her family. Really Randy Cohen? So what would your suggestion be, no jails? No incarceration? Maybe we could just whip her or cut-off a leg? She won't forget that and her family will get her back faster. Oh no I got it: tattoo her forehead CON-ARTIST!! Hm, but she might be able to remove it someday...
Seriously this Randy Cohen has a sick idea of what "ethical" is. Apparently you can ship jobs overseas and not put con-artists in jail and still be ethical.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
I hate outsourcing as the next guy but if he does not do this job someone else will. It will get done and high paying jobs are going away whether we like it or not. It is just what we have to live with today.
Think about the customers and the shareholders? They do not want to pay more and you are doing a great service to them by lowering costs. The customer is king right? Grandmas and retiring old men need their 401ks up so they can retire. They too benefit and deserve a good return on their investment.
Unless we have a president who is opposed to NAFTA what can we do? Just except you will be broke and yes you need to compete with people paying $150 a month for rent for the same jobs.
Your family comes first and you need to look out for yourself first. It is not illegal nor is it immoral when everyone else does it. I will probably be flamed to death here but when you have a wife and kids who are hungry your opinion changes. Myself included
http://saveie6.com/
The question has been posed "Is setting up an off-shore IT help desk ethical?" Wouldn't that be as ethical as say, Honda or Toyota setting up an off-shore (from their native country) manufacturing plant, say in the US?
Nobody likes it, but companies, 1) aren't people, so really don't have moral or ethical base and 2) will shift resources to wherever they will result in the most profits. If you want to ask a real ethics question,then it would be better phrased as "Is it ethical to invest in a company that sets up an off-shore IT help desk?" Then you are talking about individuals making choices that basically are choosing their own personal gain vs somebody else's.
"here's a knife. Kill your coworkers, their children, and yourself. It's the globally ethical course of action. A whole village in southeast Asia will be enslaved^whired by your company as a result"
In order to have a coherent, sane definition of "us" or "our people" there must be a minimum of shared culture, values, and ethos. That happens gradually. It is happening on a global scale, but much, much slower than globalization of economy.
Most (not all) people "turn[ing] the corner" are deluded. They feel guilt for some of the bad things done on their behalf by their government and by corporations. This leads them to believe that other societies and peoples are, on average, equal or superior. They feel no need to push back against overreaching economic globalization.
What they forget is that other governments are often just as bad, or worse (especially in the "developing" world), and the worst of those evil corporations are international corporations. They'll do their evil regardless of whether it's here or abroad.
The trick is to prop them up as reasonably as we can without tearing ourselves down. The world isn't going to be a better place by weakening the economies of developed nations. The world isn't going to be a better place if local economies are over-homogenized. The world isn't a better place filled with planed obsolescence, disposability, and cut-cut-cut. I think our current path is good for foreign economies on the short scale, but not for the long haul. I know it isn't good for us over the long term.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
I faced a not totally dissimilar dilemma back in the early 1980's, when I was in the Survey Research organization of a major corporation and we were about to approve the consolidation of our contracted calling centers, including eliminating the one that mostly served my branch of the company, that handled a project that I directed locally. This would mean that a couple of hundred people I knew would lose their jobs. I was required, by my job, to make certain preparations that would aid in the orderly transition of operations from that center to one hundreds of miles away, while making sure that none of the workers became aware of the impending site closure. Local management, obviously, already knew. Their company ran several of the other centers across the country.
... I strongly suspect that it was one of the contracting company supervisors, several (but not all) of whom were moving to the (expanding) location in another state. But as a result (and as feared) a significant number of the operators left the site prematurely, requiring a switch of the remaining load to the new receiving center even though they were not yet fully staffed (or expanded) to handle it.
I do not envy anybody in that position.
As it turned out, word of the closure DID leak out about two weeks before the planned announcement, but not through me. I don't know who spilled the beans
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I've thought about this recently. I don't think it's true. The road to heaven is also paved with good intentions. So what is it about the road to hell that is different? Rationalization. That is the key, I think.
The road to hell is paved with rationalization.
The only problem with it, that I see: people traveling down that road rationalize that they aren't rationalizing! That's why the unmodified statement is much more effective. It hits those that need it by hitting everyone.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
actually I have little beef with executives.
The far less visible group are the old money, the ultra rich, the people who actually ended up owning the billions in question, the people who's worth to the economy would only be increased if they were to be replaced by a rock or other inanimate object which had been granted the legal right to own property.
Yes. I think there we can agree, people who's only real value is that they exhale carbon dioxide, which is needed by plants. I'm kinda curious has to how much of the nation's wealth is in such hands, and what exactly they do with it (other than buying mansions and luxury yachts.)
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Dammit, "whose".
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Your follow up doesn't help you any. It's pure speculation and prejdudice - and I do have experience with offshore staffing, traveling to work with companies in India and their staff based both in the U.S. and in India.
My "quote" was a humorous paraphrase which captured some of the tone of the post, and of some of the responses. Most neutral readers would discern that it wasn't intended to be a "real" quote. Don't like it? Sue me. Or delve into another branch of speculative judgment using facts not in evidence.
The juice is chewed out of this for me. Feel free to post a "harumphh!" response, but I won't read it.
Don't take it personally, but I'm not going to read your pithy response to my post.
The company I work for has both "on-shore" and "off-shore" call centres, in fact at any given moment when you dial in to the queue you could get either one and you won't know which.
I've had several customers complain of people they couldn't understand. Of the ones I was able to track down, every single one was in a domestic call centre, and not a foreign one. You see here it's illegal to hire based on ethnicity, so an inability to speak english is legally protected. The offshore call centres can hire only people who are fluent.
Regardless of this though, that's a seperate issue. That's not an ethics problem, that's a customer service problem.
Off-shore calll centres are competing directly with On-shore call centres, they are competing based on 2 major points, cost, and customer service. Some companies are more worried about one, some about the other. If all they care about is money, their customer service will be lousy no matter where the call centre is physically located.
Really it's no different from you picking any other business to deal with, you may pick the one that's cheaper, or the one providing better customer service. It's up to you. That's competition.
Why?
Dilbert RSS feed
The idea of putting a business off shore and causing harm to your own people is part of an evil disease called capitalism. In addition to being disease like capitalism is irrational with a fairly large congregation of believers making it qualify as another false religion. With a bit of education people might understand that any transaction should benefit an entire society and the fact that a business makes a profit for its owners is irrelevant. The disease of greed and capitalism march hand in hand.
OK I'm an out side observer and I decide to pop up 1000000 feet to look at this statement. So I can now see all parties involved.
What I see is you trying to protect this little patch of dirt in and effort to ensure a high local standard of living.
What I also see other patches of dirt with falling income levels and standards of living drop.
You see your apparent definition of ethical only involves those that you can see. AKA those that are on your patch of dirt. But ethical the definition doesn't include geographical boundaries.
So the real question is. Is the net impact of my work negative or positive for everyone. If I off shore the work will the world be a better place? That's a tough question to answer.
-----------
Instead of ethical maybe you meant patriotic. Patriotic would suit your statement better.
Harumphh!
Well, all I can really say is, if you're actually trying to convince or convey anything, you either have a very odd way of doing it, or we're simply talking way past each other. You're a bit well-written to be a troll, but as far as I can tell, we're really not talking about the same thing.
This is just code for the kind of world bank economic policy that's brought ruin to every nation it's ever touched.
Was it ethical for Benedict Arnold to try to offshore the ownership of West Point?
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Mussolini
I felt like I was reading an article back in 1997. (I actually remember where I was when I read a very similar piece.)
History repeats itself. I have lived my entire life, worked, and raised a family in the "Motor City". If for even a moment you think it's OK to send or create jobs outside the US then you really don't have a grip on our current economic climate or an understanding of the ramifications of that process.
What if the IT guy were setting up a call center full of robots as opposed to Indian people? Would he be so ethically outraged then? Or is this really more about brown people getting white people's jerbs?
I live in a third world country, work in the tech field (mostly remote freelance web dev work) and feel that we are all one big brotherhood of tech workers (I am naive like that I suppose). My take on this is that you should not. Why? because the cheap a-holes that are in love with outsourcing love it for more than just lower rates. They seem to love the abuse that they are in a position to dish out to tech workers in third world countries. Part of the abuse is feeling entitled to pay miserly rates simply because someone is in a third world country, sometimes DEMANDING such rates and calling a man's competence and integrity into question, belittling a man's accomplishments even when having direct evidence to the contrary SHOVED INTO THEIR FACE (Google search results as proof of good SEO work) so as to justify said rates. I have been subjected to this, when in fact I perform work that is just as good or in many many instances better than many people in industrialized and civilized countries. In other words, the FUCKS add insult to injury. Don't enable them to. Helping them set that up is helping them pay people (fellow techies someplace) miserly rates AND treat them like dung. I have had jokers get all flustered when I refuse to work for LESS than what people pay HERE (Colombia) . . . I rather see them types pay someone in America what the work is worth than to see them get away with paying a fellow techie somewhere one tenth if that for the same thing. I don't work for peanuts anymore, I did a few times, but, them days are over.
Maybe if enough people refuse to work for next to nothing, prices will begin to go up . . . wishful thinking, I know, but I am doing my part by telling them to FUCK OFF.
SARAVA!
Well said!
SARAVA!
If he had taken the job, he would have received a few dollars, then had to consider his regrets for perhaps many years, pondering whether the money was worth the compromise of his principles. I understand how hard it is to walk away from paying work. I have done it before. I turned down a contract at Autodesk when the chemistry wasn't good. We have to live by our values, and accept the results.
Take a situation of a person being in a fishing boat. The company hired him to drill a hole in the hull, because it is lower cost to let it sink than to keep it afloat. The passenger drills the hole and drowns himself. The company makes use of the fishing at the offshore location. Who is ethetical, and who is stupid. Back to this opportunity to do the work to kill the local department, I see it as the company having no loyalty to the country that gives it income, and it is almost immoral to send domestic work offshore. I would not take the job, even though someone else would.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Is globalization ethical? Does it create problems we should all have at least some responsibilty for addressing?
Why should people in your own country take precedence over those in other countries? Are they any less deserving? Would you have the same reservations if the help desk was setup on the other side of your own country? If so why?
That is useful data, but it doesn't really address the point of my post.
I suggest going back to read what I wrote, unless you were deliberately ignoring it and were simply offering these calculations for the sake of interest.
-FL
The second question in the same article was more interesting, or rather, the "UPDATE" to it.
A doctor asks whether it is ethical to sign on a convict mom's petition to delay her jail sentence for a couple of weeks while her child undergoes from surgery.
Then, the UPDATE says, that the dad lost his medical insurance, so the surgery was cancelled.
God, am I the only one seeing the irony in this?
A doctor is worried whether or not it is ethical to send mail to a judge on his patient's behalf (hmm, why wouldn't it?) and at the same time isn't at all worried about the ethical consequences of not treating his child patient who needs surgery (according to his decision), just because her dad lost his job while waiting for the surgery.
Disgusting.
> Giving money and food to poor people in a foreign country does not remove money and food from the poor people of my own country
Where does that money and food come from then - magic?
Ha! That cornered you!
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I, possibly like the GP, have a set of moral principles, and the topmost of them is survival of my family and close friends. This only kicks in when there is severe danger (not having means to support my immediate family, for example), but then it's an imperative. If that disagrees with your notions of right and wrong, well I really couldn't care less - but if your principles would result in your child not getting, for example, the medical treatment they need, or having them grow up in a shit part of town because the daddy is so noble and can't get a well-paying job, what kind of a father are you? Do you even have kids btw?
You keep your standards of right and wrong and I'll keep mine, thank you very much.
Too bad you'll never see the reply, being an AC:)
What if it's a straight loss? What if the net change is a downward one? That is, after all, the basic equation...Guy A being paid a salary of X loses job to Girl B paid a salary of (Small Fraction) * X. The net benefit goes to the corporation and thence to shareholders. The possibility is that each of those shares is then wasted on truly trivial things rather than on the net societal goods (home, family) that Guy A would have spent that money on. There is the possibility it will go the other way, but it pays to keep both scenarios in mind, because a net benefit to everyone is not a guaranteed outcome.
Until he has to worry about newspaper columnists being outsourced offshore, It's very easy for him to talk about "global trade and travel" and "tribalism."
What would be unethical about it? If you need work, find a job. If others are displaced by your actions, then they need to...wait for it...find a job. Yes, the rules are brutal, but they are clear. You cannot be responsible for everyone else on the planet, and it's amazingly condescending to think that you are. I assume that my neighbors can fend for themselves. If they ask for help, I willingly give it. If they ask for work, I help them find it, or I hire them if I need something done. When I look for work (many times in the past two decades), I've also asked my friends for help. When I've been laid off, I never even thought to ask if it was "ethical". My services were no longer needed, so I took my talents elsewhere. Trying to look at a free and open job market through the prism of ethics is farcical. When times are good and you have your choice of jobs, is that ethical? When times are poor and you have to hunt far and wide, is that ethical? No, in the first case, you benefit by being able to ask for a higher wage, and in the second case, you have to work much harder to find a job. I've been through both scenarios in my life. The situation is amoral, it is neither "good" nor "bad". It just is.
I agree its too disheartening to think about whether or not your actions will change the world. Its better to think about them changing yourself. Doing what you think is right, not because it will make the world better, but because it makes you better. My father taught me a simple rule to answer questions like the GP asked. "If everyone did as you did, would the world be better or worse."
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Yeah, just take the money and run.... Screw your children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. They won't care that you screwed them over. Who gives a damn about them? Not you.... You're one helluva human being.
"while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." de Tocqueville
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.
Unless you have a post-graduate degree in US history I most likely know more about it than you do. US history is one of my hobbies, and I've read hundreds of books on it.
As to the rest of your post, I see no correlation between it and having a sense of duty, love of country, caring about your fellow countrymen, and living an honest, moral life, as that was the entire point of the post you replied to.
"while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." de Tocqueville
It's all very well and good when everybody in your country has drunk the cool-aid, but when both your neighbours disagree with your self perception, something obviously isn't right.
Don't get me wrong i agree with the part that if they continue on the same path the US will go away, or the people will just become brains in bottles. I also think the pendulum has to swing back the other way a bit more from perceived individual independence to more interdependence. However, what worked in the past will not work today unless it's under the same conditions. Interdependence was in a way forced on us out of necessity and was blatantly apparent.
Todays global interdependence is hidden by the money. Anybody with sufficient money thinks they're independent because they can buy whatever they need with the money they have, not having to depend on anybody to help. Completely missing the fact that they usually belong to a company to receive that money, which rely on other states or countries for scarce resources or manufacturing or assembly, which also rely on consumers to buy their products. That same individual needs to eat, and it's either pre-packaged or grown by large scale agriculture or imported from other countries. It's almost cosmically funny how people think they're independent just because the have money when usually the only thing the person knows how to do is that one job that pays for everything else, in other words, they are totally dependent on the world around them.
Once this shift in perception occurs, that's when we're going to see big changes. The question is, what will lead us towards this.
Here's a little conspiracy theory. The government of the US isn't dumb. They are widely perceived as being the most arrogant, obnoxious, country that keeps making bumbling mistakes. All the US'ians whine and bitch because they think their country is going into the shitter with all the manufacturing leaving the country and becoming more of a service based economy. Not realizing that what their country is doing is stock piling their natural resources, getting other countries to deplete their non-renewable resources to make products for the States, and at the same time borrowing from those countries to purchase the same items. Lets face it, there doesn't seem any way in hell that the States can pay off their debt, credit loaners know when they see this type of behaviour that the person has no intention of ever paying it back. What the US does have is a large army and have already commissioned studies to see what to do when the shit hits the fan, part of which is annexing parts of Canada and Mexico for natural resources that the States doesn't have or has in smaller supplies. What country can stand up to the States militarily? Nukes aren't any good, especially since the states gets everybody to sign that non-proliferation treaty, gets other countries to destroy their stockpiles and holds on to their own.
The problem with conspiracy theories is they're collections of facts after the fact. It may very well be that the states has gotten here by stupidity and greed, but regardless they've restricted their possibilities of exodus to same as if they were planning it.
I've been making this argument for ages, but you state it much better. Most recently we've been receiving offers from our prescription drug plan to switch to meds by mail, and I use the same argument, that you're taking money out of the local tax base. And boy, our local tax base needs it! We only have four pharmacies, and one has already seriously reduced hours.
You deserve to be modded up and nominated for Post of the Year.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
In theory, we're eliminating the drudgery part of their work, "empowering" them to do more productive work.
I tend to agree, and don't know the answer.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
IT is about the destruction of jobs. Its about replacing two people with one person or better yet with software. Travel agents, bank clerks, secretaries, cashiers at groceries, and paper pushers of all stripes have lost their jobs because of IT, If it is unethical to take a job outsourcing IT work then it is unethical to work in IT at all.
"'Some people feel we have a greater ethical duty to those closest to us."
That isn't just an abstract philosophical position, it is a biological fact. You eat, your family eats, your neighbors, town and so on. Most people (that is, the non-insane) are hard-wired to prioritize that way. Unless you have some sort of messiah complex and infinite resources, that's just life. Ignoring the needs of yourself and those closest to you in favor of those half way around the world who to you are nothing but an abstract concept is, and I do not think this is too harsh a term, sociopathic.
So - work it out yourself.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
"That last point of yours, I notice I only ever see that kind of "why don't you try telling that to X" when all reasonable arguments have been exhausted and the person is trying to justify something they know themselves is wrong."
Well, congratulations, then. You have just encountered your first exception.
"it doesn't actually support your argument, it just adds emotional cruft."
No, I actually had a point: if outsourcing is so great, why is our unemployment rate so high? I do not believe that claiming outsourcing has nothing to do with it would be valid.
"Around 7.5 million people per year die of malnutrition in modern India."
Perhaps. But they also have well over 10 times the number of people per square mile as the United States. Don't you think that might have something to do with it? That is not our fault nor is it -- ethically -- our responsibility. They are solely responsible for the size of their population, and a large part of that was simply due to their traditions of inheritance. Nobody forced that on them.
If my neighbor next door has 14 children while I have decided to have only 2, and he can't feed them because he has the same job at the same pay as I do, am I morally or ethically responsible for feeding his children?
I rather expect you to argue with this, but I say "Hell, no!"
If my neighbor next door has 14 children while I have decided to have only 2, and he can't feed them because he has the same job at the same pay as I do, am I morally or ethically responsible for feeding his children?
I don't think so either, but we have a substantial number of lawmakers who have a vested interest in, and regularly buy re-election by making you responsible for those children, from the standpoint of taxation and the welfare state.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
He could also set it up to fail, and many others could to, joining an invisible group of people working together so that anything off shore fails, and then companies will stop trying to send it over there......had to be said....just sorry it had to be me.
I never get why IT and related companies think that off-shoring technical jobs to other countries is a really good idea. Sure maybe something like programming or the like if all your team is going to be overseas. However stuff like phone support and help desk functions, where the PRIMARY purpose of the job is speaking on the phone to customers, then you might want to take language into account when selecting where to offshore.
If your primarily selling computers or IT services to English speaking people, then for god sakes don't outsource to India, China, or whatever country it is where English is not the 1st language!
I don't know why it seems I am the only one that thinks sending jobs whose primary function is to talk English on a phone to countries where English is not the primary language spoken is retarded. I don't care how much of a cost savings it is. Sure if your primary business is selling IT services to India, then ya go ahead, that would make sense. I know as a customer I am sick of it and won't deal with it any longer. Quit wasting my time and hire more qualified people.
Good to know you're the kind of person who'd leave children starve to punish their parents.
(let me guess, despite having straightforwardly stated as such in the above you're now going to shout and scream about how you think you're a nice person yourself really so it's totally unfair to classify you accuratly)
And just to be clear, it's not someone with the same job at the same pay as you do.
It's someone living in a semi-third world country with little medical care, poor access to birth control, no social security (so if at least one of your children doesn't make it to adulthood then once you're too old to work you starve) and crappy infrastructure.
I don't think you even understand why families in the third world have lots of children.
it isn't some selfish mormon "I want to breed as much as possible" thing. if you don't have grown up kids to take care of you in your old age you die a begger.
If they could be certain their children would live to adulthood and had easy access to birth control then they'd have less.
It's not like the first world with at least a certain amount of social housing and medical care.
You need to have kids when you get too old to work.
Well, congratulations, then. You have just encountered your first exception.
So what reasonable argument are you advancing?
all you provided was a vague question that has nothing to do with the topic.
So far I see no exception at all.
No, I actually had a point: if outsourcing is so great, why is our unemployment rate so high? I do not believe that claiming outsourcing has nothing to do with it would be valid.
It's like a feudal lord complaining that "if treating the peasents like humans is so good why are my estates smaller than they used to be"
Not everything that's good for the most people overall long term is always going to benefit you personally right now.
Compared to other countries it's not spectacularly high.
Spains unemployment rate is up around 20%.
irelands is up at 14% now.
In Estonia it's 19% now.
Iran: 14%
France is up at 10%
it's a worldwide thing. unemployment is up almost everywhere because of the banking fuckup and it hit american banks hard.
but sure. blame it on outsourcing. blame it on the brown people who are taking the jobs you believe you have a god given right to because god forbid you should have to compete with brown people.
The more ethical thing would be to find any wrongdoing to report. Then blow the whistle on it.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.