Outsourcing damages the American economy by sending jobs overseas. "Outsourcing" can be defined as 'the contracting of a business process to a third-party'. In the USA, outsourcing is thought of as a bad, 'dirty' word, spoken about in hushed tones and secrecy amongst upper-classmen and business moguls. As stated by W. Rivkin, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, "The off-shoring phenomenon has implications for policymakers, business leaders, and members of the workforce" (Hanna, J."How Many U.S. Jobs Are Offshorable?"). Politicians give people their false assurances and empty promises to stop it, and businesses feel the need to down-play their involvement in it. Phrases like 'Only Buy American' and 'Jap is Crap' are and have been popular calls-to-arms in the past years, and many Americans nowadays are lamenting the outsourcing of jobs to low-wage parts of the world, in particular Asia; namely India and China. In a time when unemployment in the USA is approaching 10% (combined with under-employment, the figure is actually more likely to be edging towards a staggering 20%), according to research carried out by the University of New Mexico (2013), the mere thought or suggestion of sending any jobs overseas is highly intolerable to many Americans.
Whilst there are clear risks involved with outsourcing, it remains rather simple to see why more and more companies are attracted to this current business model. Cost saving, and lots of it! Comedian Woody Allen once so eloquently said, "Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons". It seems that the owners of big businesses today have taken that message to heart. They only care for their business and not their nation or fellow countrymen.
As see...
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...o offer jobs. "There is a need to control foreign trade, as other nations are doing" reports James Moreland again.
There are two sides to every story, and whilst it is evident that there is a temporary or short-term gain in revenues for the country as well as some jobs, America is giving up on its manufacturing and industrial heritage, on which the nation etched it's name in history, going back all the way to the Industrial Revolution through to the demise of 'Motor City' (Detroit) in the late 80s-early 90s. Ultimately, the country will be left with little to no U.S. owned industrial manufacturing plants, leaving the nation wholly dependent on other countries for jobs, resources and decent living standards. Rather sad it seems. It's no longer David vs. Goliath (in terms of industry). There is no Goliath anymore, just David, and he is getting bigger every day.
Offshoring American jobs have positive and negative consequences to the American community. Some of those consequences of offshoring American jobs include Amer...
Mankiw and Swagel (2006) argue outsourcing is not as large a phenomenon as the media describes. Their research indicates outsourcing accounts for very little of job loss in the United States, nor has it made a distinct contribution to the slow rebound of the labor market. They go on to propose that increased overseas employment has actually contributed to higher employment in parent United States companies. They reported that while 30,000 jobs were lost per month in 2004, two million job changes per month were happening as well. They reference the Bureau of Labor Statistics when they report that in 2015 there are expected to be 3.4 million jobs outsourced, but 160 million jobs gained here in the United States. They also claim that there is a rise in net US income by 12-14 cents per dollar of outso...
Outsourcing is a complicated and a multifaceted subject that involves a “business[’s] purchase of parts or labor from another company rather than maintaining a sufficient enough number of its own employees to do the same work in the country where the company is already based” ("Outsourcing"). The first practice of outsourcing was in medieval times when “nation-states called in soldiers-for-hire to help their own military forces during ongoing conflicts” ("Outsourcing"). Many think of outsourcing as a one way trade of production facilities moving outside of a companies locale but in actuality it is a two way trade that also involves companies from other areas moving their factories to local areas where conditions are beneficial for the specific business. Outsourcing has evolved but the main idea has remained the same. The recent increase in outsourcing “was initiated by Wall Street pressures on corporations . . . . for increased profits . . . in the production of goods and services marketed in the U.S."(Roberts).
Both sides can agree that outsourcing can be desirable for a business do to the potential profit. It allows goods to be made cheaper, management to run smoother, and money to be made faster (Salanţă 270). Both sides can also agree, however, that U.S. jobs are lost as a result of outsourcing (Ahmed 192), as well as environmental damage being cause due to corporations taking advantage of loose environmental regulations (Marquis 39). Upon digging deeper into this debate, one can find that both sides present very convincing arguments.
Since the concept of outsourcing was introduced it has been a subject of debate between politicians and citizens of the United States. Remarkably, it was the United States who supported outsourcing and now it is the United States that feels its economic progress is being threatened by outsourcing. One may argue that the financial situations that existed two decades earlier are not the same as they are today, thus the change of time, business priorities of economies have also changed.
As the problem of job outsourcing becomes more of an issue in politics, elected officials like the President and Congress will no longer be able to ignore the dilemma. The war in Iraq has been at the forefront of the presidential race but the importance of outsourcing American jobs seems to have been slightly overshadowed. If the issue of outsourcing is not watched carefully and a definitive plan hammered out, a trickling down of negative effects may occur within the U.S. economy. However, there is a polarized opinion on the effects of this “phenomenon”.
The U.S. industries have been outsourcing manufacturing for several decades now. U.S. companies thought they were reducing costs by outsourcing development, manufacturing, and process-engineering abilities. Consequently, U.S. corporations’ knowledge, skilled workers, and supply chain, which are the necessities to producing advanced products, have vanished. For example, almost all notebook computers, cell phones, and handheld devices, which were once created in the U.S., are now designed in Asia. When a major U.S. company outsource, it pressures their rivals to do the same thing. They also lose the expertise of process engineering, which would interact with manufacturing on a daily basis. Minor companies and skilled workers go to where the jobs and knowledge networks are no matter where they are geographically in the world. This decline of trade in the U.S. has caused a negative chain reaction to their suppliers of sophisticated materials, tools, production equipment, and components. U.S. industries do not have a way of coming up with new ideas for the next generation of high-tech products...
...but it is also taking away the jobs of many Americans. Not many goods are made in America today; this is affecting the trade with other countries, which affects the economy. Every decision the government chooses to make with the countries budget, helps reflect how the economy is doing.
Slaughter said it’s a common perception that hiring overseas means fewer jobs in the United States. Not so, he said. While job losses are certainly true for some companies, statistics have shown that, generally, increased hires abroad also have complementary increases here.” (Kibbe, 2004)
Outsourcing has been around for many years. In this paper, I will discuss some of the history of outsourcing, the good things about outsourcing, and the bad things about outsourcing. Outsourcing is important because many companies rely on it in order to get many different products and services to their facility on time and in good shape. Outsourcing is a huge part of the business industry today. Any business can be affected by outsourcing.
...stinguish that a qualitatively new type of worldwide trade was developing. The illustration in United stated since the late of 1980 showed that “has less productive portions moved offshore which lead to a decrease in employment while maintaining higher value-added parts. Consequently, all the productivity has risen, while the tradable sector has increased employment” (Spence and Hlatshwayo,2011).
We say that we are heading toward a more global economy because of the fact that competition in today’s markets is global. This means that corporations in the United States can compete in foreign markets and vice versa, therefore U.S. corporations and foreign corporations become interdependent and thrive off each other. This can have a good impact on the United States because it allows U.S. corporations to seek materials and labor outside of the U.S. in countries such as China, India, and Mexico, where workers are paid a lot less money than U.S. workers, thus allowing them to sell their products for significantly cheaper than if they were produced in the U.S.; however, the tradeoff is that many American workers in the industrial sector lose jobs due to this shift of labor to overseas. In the long run this will be beneficial for the U.S. and although some percentage of workers are losing work, new jobs in the services sector, in fields such as computer technology, telecommunications, and language skills are opening up and experiencing growth because of this change.
One of the most cited arguments for intervention is that of protecting jobs and industries from unfair foreign competition (Hill). While industries like aerospace are protected given their importance for national security, job protection appears as a result of unions and industries putting political pressure given the threat of more efficient foreign firms (Hill). Many countries achieve this by increasing the tariffs on imports of foreign products. What really happens when a certain industry is ...
...m benefits may provide more profitability to the corporations exporting the jobs, the long term consequences will undoubtedly resort to the United States being increasingly dependent on foreign nations. The future of middle skill jobs is unclear at the moment, but if the trend of replacing these workers persists the face of the American economy will without a doubt be irrevocably changed.
When Americans hear the word “offshore outsourcing”, they automatically assume that Americans are losing their jobs to foreign countries. Most of these jobs that companies outsource such as the garment industry jobs are offshore outsourced because they are labor intensive jobs. According to Timmerman