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Links: The Growth of Outsourcing
Posted by Steven Wu on Monday, February 16 @ 15:46:06 EST News
The New York Times has an article on the loss of new jobs abroad due to outsourcing. The losses are falling hardest on workers in the technology sector, as programming and other technical tasks get sent to countries with much cheaper labor, like India and China. Many politicians (including Bush and, it seems, Kerry) are proposing ways of restricting outsourcing. I agree with the economists that that would be a terrible idea. On the other hand, the mere fact that proper global division of labor will increase overall utility in the long run doesn't mean that the workers who are out of luck here should simply be ignored. Welfare and retraining, whether public or private, should (and to some extent already do) help those left behind by economic trends.
 
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Re: The Growth of Outsourcing (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Monday, February 16 @ 23:33:03 EST
Why should I, a worker left behind by outsourcing, be forced to retrain for another career. I chose the technology industry. I enjoy it and I'm good at it. Why can I not find a job in my chosen market? not only outsourcing. My market is flooded with immigrants who work for less money than I do and usually don't speak english.


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Re: The Growth of Outsourcing (Score: 1)
by dataknife on Tuesday, February 17 @ 12:25:45 EST
(User Info | Send a Message) http://personal.kamigakari.com/dataknife
It's pretty easy to talk about retraining when you're speaking of a factory worker who's not spent more than $1000 on their training and education while they're working; it's something else entirely when they've spent ~30K in a college education and an average of 10% of their salary annually to stay current with technology. Software Engineering is a professional position just like Law and Medicine, would you like to have your position outsourced?


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Re: The Growth of Outsourcing (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Saturday, February 21 @ 01:17:33 EST
First, the jobs are not being *lost* abroad due to outsourcing, they are being lost in the US. The jobs are being *created* abroad. Read the article again.

Second, at what point do we start to worry? When manufacturing jobs were being lost, the economists said "don't worry, retrain for the white collar industry." Now, the white collar industry is being outsourced also.

So where will the replacement US jobs come from? Not white collar, not blue collar.

Seems like pretty soon we'll all be either truckers delivering imported goods from the dock to Walmart, or working at Walmart to sell the imports.
With global connectivity, even secretarial jobs could be outsourced. You dial the phone, re-direct to ?(cheap country of choice) and a $1.75/hr worker answers in standardized english. Makes appointment on computer, automatically updated to desktop in Florida. Why hire a US worker and have to face pesky regulations?


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