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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.
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.
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
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.
Of course it's not "ethical"
Then of course you can explain your reasoning? I fail to see what is unethical about it. "I don't agree" != "unethical".
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.
On what basis is it unethical?
The potential employer is starting a business. He is seeking help doing so. The business happens to be overseas.
Is any of those things - starting business, hiring people, or doing business abroad unethical? I don't think so.
What we're really talking about is not ethics. It's our feelings - we are unhappy about facing competition. We're particularly unhappy because the competition can work for much cheaper than we can, because we are used to a very high standard of living. This feeling is natural. However, that's not the same as our competition being unethical.
Instead of trying to claim it's a moral flaw in our competition - who after all are people with families too, trying to make a living just like us - we should be finding a competitive advantage. If we want to be paid more than them, we need to be better than they are.
I think the gentleman made a bad decision. Either we adapt or fail.
On the other hand, I happen to be a senior IT manager in a company, where I know personally in my department we will be replacing about 30 jobs over the next 12 months that had been outsourced with direct employees of the company. We are learning that it doesn't give us the quality or the flexibility that we were really looking for. In addition, our customers services is going through a process of insourcing large parts of its contact centre, because at the end of the day, direct employees have a greater stake in the satisfaction of the customer and we manage our people better than our partners.
But eliminating yourself from the mix ensures that your views and thoughts will never be heard. If you really wanted to change things, you would jump in with both feet and see where it goes.
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
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.
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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
Of course it's not "ethical", but that's not the point. It's legal, and that's all that matters.
Are you saying that all one should consider, in general, is what's legal rather than ethical?
Or are just just saying that in this particular case?
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
Couldn't agree with you more. While it is legal to offshore the work, with a 9-10% unemployment rate in this country, it's not ethical or moral. Sadly, when you deal with stockholders and what is right for them, it's about the almighty dollar (or whatever your currency is) and their returns. Nobody ever said capitalism is necessarily or moral. But, once upon a time, people trusted the companies they worked for - companies very often took great care of their employees - now, we have to look out for ourselves.
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.
Perhaps because he feels that "his country" is superior to all others and so helping a different ones economy is helping something inferior.
This is also known as Nationalism or Tribalism. I would be interested in hearing a different possible reason.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Indeed - the point Cohen seems to completely ignore is the morality of engaging in a race to the bottom.
True - rampant outsourcing has, and will definitely help a lot of professionals get their start in India - and that IS a good thing - but the net effect is to minimize the value of human workers in any role of employment. Your function will be to further shape the role of "support" into a set of blind scripts, minimizing the actual help provided to a voice reading a small set of webpages to someone.
This wouldn't be such a bad thing if money weren't such a critical divider between people - rich and poor, death and survival. But it is - and your function would be, at least in subtle way, to inconvenience everyone so that a small rich group didn't have to spend as much money on professionals, diminishing the value of your own profession along with it. You'd be tearing down tools used to help people so that there is a cheaper replacement that does less.
The whole thing is a bit of a red herring before larger issues though. Not too long from now, creatively programmed automation will take even more of these roles - and jobs might not be something everyone can be expected to have in order just to make things work anymore. Due to economies of scale, the cheapest automated tools will still be cheaper than the cheapest people eventually.
What will happen to those without the means to sustain their wealth without access to jobs? What happens when companies simply don't need large masses of people, and most people don't have access to methods of gaining money? How much longer can we run our economy this way? How valuable is the role of a human, in a society ostensibly built for human freedom?
Ryan Fenton
As chance would have it, Randy Cohen has been removed from the NYT magazine as of yesterday. A new writer will take over The Ethicist in March. Your wish, granted, to some degree or another.
I would do it because I have a family and taking care of my daughter is more important than anything else. Of course it would be different if I was single with no dependants but everything changes when you have kids.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
It's not about technological progress and buggy whips because sufficient new jobs are not replacing the ones that go overseas. That's why our wages and/or jobs have been slumping for a decade.
Other nations "adjust" their currency and laws to create jobs at the expense of consumerism. We do the opposite in the US. It's great that you can afford a China-made iPod with an unemployment check, isn't it?
It's a lobbyist lie that we can maximize BOTH consumerism and jobs, and Asian countries know this.
Table-ized A.I.
Just make sure that when the CEO has trouble with his laptop, he has to call the call center in Mumbai.
So it's not ethical because it inconveniences people near you?
I don't think you're really taking about ethics. You're talking about the position that's most advantageous to take. But that wasn't the question that was asked.
I love the parodies in that article.
Somebody needs to write I Started a Cheese Moving Company, Lobbied the Government with my Profits, and now it's Too Big to Fail.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
While it is legal to offshore the work, with a 9-10% unemployment rate in this country, it's not ethical or moral.
What if the country that gets the jobs has a 25% unemployment rate? What if the country has vast amounts of starvation and extreme poverty? What makes it ethical to say that the lives in this country are more important than the lives in other countries?
People talk like outsourcing jobs is equivalent to stealing. That is not so. No one owns a job; no one deserves a job. My country has no more right to a job than any other country. We all have to compete. What could possibly be unethical about fair competition?
But, once upon a time, people trusted the companies they worked for - companies very often took great care of their employees - now, we have to look out for ourselves.
What time was that exactly? Was that at the time when companies used child labor? Was that at the time when no one worried about worker safety and many jobs had appalling mortality rates? You have a fantasy view of the past. You have always had to look out and fight for yourselves. You have always had to compete. Some groups (e.g. auto workers in Detroit) were able to gain some insulation from market forces in the past, but that couldn't last. The market will always catch up to you.
or you don't know what ethical means.
ToasterMonkey Questioned?
Of course it's not "ethical",
Excuse me, why?
To which you responded:
when I was young, I had no understanding of 'local issues' and thought that buying global products would not matter.
then, I see the middle class disappear and we can't afford to buy the things we *design*, let alone build.
this matters. its news for nerds and it IS stuff that matters. outsourcing will but us in the ass and had already lowered quality of products and services worldwide.
You have not explained why it is unethical. The post you replied to asked for clarification as to why the parent thought it was unethical to help set up a call center in another country.
You assert that "outsourcing will but[sic] us in the ass and had already lowered quality of products and services worldwide." Can you offer some support for this premise? In a related note you seem to blame outsourcing or globalization for the "disappearing of the middle class", again I am disinclined to accept this premise without support.
Your discussion of price, dollar, and the thought patterns of "business people" is a complete non sequitur, as is your opening statements relative to assumptions about the parent posters age.
I believe you may have point for discusion, but as it stands it is poorly articulated and not well supported by anything other than your assertions.
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 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
. To my way of thinking, selling out your fellow citizens to make a buck is unethical.
Citizens of what? The nation? The planet? To my thinking, valuing one person above another just based on where they were born is unethical.
Don't know about "laws of ethics" but there are innate Natural Rights, which all human beings share simply because they are human. Example: The right (or instinct if you prefer) to own one's self, rather than be owned as a slave.
Another right, my personal favorite, is the right to share ideas: "Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.
"Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point.
"Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property..... Grants of copyright can be justified in very peculiar cases only, if at all - the danger being very great that the good resulting from the operation of the monopoly, will be overbalanced by the evil effect of the precedent; and it being not impossible that the monopoly itself, in its original operation, may produce more evil than good. [Think RIAA and MPAA.]" - Thomas Jefferson
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Fair competition would be fine, but competing against child labor or with people happy to poison their own water and air is not far competition.
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.
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.
. To my way of thinking, selling out your fellow citizens to make a buck is unethical.
Citizens of what? The nation? The planet? To my thinking, valuing one person above another just based on where they were born is unethical.
Citizens of my country, of course. Do I wish the people of any other country ill? No. Will I go out of my way to hurt them? No. Will I go out of my way to prevent them from hurting me, and those important to me? Yes, I will ... and they, should they have any sense of ethics at all, will behave exactly the same way. Keep firmly in mind that, while you may feel that nationalism is unethical, they don't!
... but nor do I see that as a reason for me and mine to give up what generations of our forefathers built for us.
The truth is that one may have high ideals, but those ideals had better track with reality or human suffering will result. The problem with many of my fellow Americans is that they are utterly complacent and exhibit misguided compassion. They haven't had to suffer in the same way that people of most other countries have, truly do not realize that America is vulnerable and is not above economic ruin. When the total collapse of the United States finally occurs, well, they'll have only themselves to blame. We seem to have lost the will to compete on any serious industrial scale, and that's frightening. I hope you live here in the U.S., and I hope you have a nice lifestyle: maybe you'll appreciate your ethics more when you're on the street hoping for a handout.
So, do I blame the people of China or India or any other developing nation for wanting a better life? No
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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" .
As you almost point out, it isn't just a race to the bottom. For the folks in the country you are outsourcing to it's part of a race to the top.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Someone from India.
The trillions of foreign aid are nothing compared to the hundreds of trillions the US (and the rest of the first world) are leeching from the rest of the world in raw materials and cheap labor. Do you really think US Americans would be better off if they would stop all international trade?
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
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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.