The Outsourcing of American Jobs The exporting of American jobs is an issue that is important and will become increasingly so as more and more white collar jobs are shipped overseas. American companies in the past few decades have been sending American jobs overseas paying residents of other countries pennies on the dollar what they had paid American workers to do. This saves the companies millions of dollars on labor costs but costs Americans precious jobs. 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”. In recessions of the past the American worker was laid off with the impression they would be rehired as soon as demand for goods and services were presented again. Now people in jobs from computer programmers to telephone operators are losing their jobs and never returning to the same field again. The big issue here is that if we continue outsourcing specific jobs overseas we could erase a whole industry of job opportunity from the American people. Economists say the framework of the U.S. labor force has been changed due to past outsourcing of jobs by this country. The more outsourcing that continues the more our job force’s structure will change. As a result, the American worker can no longer wait to be rehired into the same job or profession. Using their time while unemployed, Americans are retraining themselves and attempt to step into an entirely different career. There are many key people that factor in on this issue of job outsourcing. First is the American worker. When most people think of jobs being sent overseas they think of factory workers or telephone operators, but the recent trend in the outsourcing of jobs has been higher paying jobs like accountants, computer programmers, or financial analysts. These jobs are considered white-collar jobs. In this election candidates will try to appeal to everyone who votes. Bl... ... middle of paper ... ...ing of jobs that Americans are qualified and trained to do. If a company were going to outsource jobs maybe a good policy solution would be to match, if not double the number of jobs in the states to that of the number of jobs being shipped away. Another thing to consider is that the government doesn’t necessarily have to directly regulate business hiring. The government could impose a self-regulatory policy where as the big companies could set their own rules and guidelines and have an industry standard for the amount of outsourcing a company can do. In Kingdon’s “Three Streams” of agenda studying, problem stream, political stream, and policy stream the three streams of job outsourcing haven’t quite met together for a real policy that is set in stone. There is definitely a problem stream that is rapidly growing. The political stream is overflowing so much the issue is being drowned out by other political issues. As for the policy stream, it seems to be a small stream that no one can really figure out. Once someone finds a fair and just set of policy regulations and picks a good policy window to present it in I believe there could possibly be a good solution to this problem.
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...
Opposed to widespread belief of outsourcing threatening the labor of United States economy it has been seen that businesses have been able to extract a multitude of benefits through the outsourcing which has in turn created a number of employment opportunities along with it. When the stock market plummeted; companies began to discharge distress signals and corporations commenced labor cutbacks, as a result of which unemployment began to increase greatly. In times when the recession was reaching its peak, the only alternative was to look for cheap labor and ou...
One of the hottest trends today for big corporations is outsourcing and offshoring. Outsourcing simply means a company based in one nation will hire from other nations in order to more efficient accomplish its goals. It makes sense on the part of the corporation, why pay a programmer in the US $80,000 a year when they can pay a programmer in India less than 1/10th of that salary, and make him a very happy man. This because even when he is earning 1/10th of the US salary, he is still earning more money than he ever hoped to get in that industry in India. It seems like a win-win situation1, but there is still a loser: The growing unemployed population of the US. As more jobs go overseas, more US citizens are finding themselves becoming obsolete.
According to the article “Restoring American Competitiveness” by Gary P. Pisano and Willy C. Shih, the United States industries have worn down competition through the damages from outsourcing manufacturing. There are several issues that have caused serious problems to the U.S. economy, which have caused the decline of trade due to shortage of innovation and competition. Theses problems are lack of funding for research and development by government and businesses and poor financial decisions made by management for outsourcing. There are several recommendations that the government and business executives can do to rebuild U.S. industries.
Do you ever wonder what our nations underlying focus is? The answer is simple and should be fairly easy to guess… Money! Outsourcing originated from someone coming up with the idea that we can make products for practically nothing in other countries and make very high profits. Although it seems like a great idea to businesses, it negatively affects our country. American consumers are buying these products that are made in other countries and the companies profits are continuing to rapidly increase. At the same time, people that are in the production field of work in America are losing their jobs because producers would rather pay foreign workers to get the job done for a much lower wage. When it comes down to it, one of the reasons our economy is suffering is because of outsourcing. Basically, it all comes down to money. The consumers don’t pay close enough attention to where the products are made. Therefore, consumers are spending extra money and are causing outsourcing to thrive. The lack of knowledge Americans have on the subject of consumers affecting outsourcing is leading our country to economic stress but if we begin to recognize the issue, the jobs we could potentially save may be our own.
... Today, state and federal policies tolerate and compensate for the obliteration of U.S. jobs. These policies distribute financial breaks and government bonds, while still giving entrance to the U.S. market to companies that destroy American jobs and abuse employee’s rights by shipping their labor elsewhere. Government must reform policies that encourage and reward job creation and implement policies of research that will create new jobs for the future. Works Cited Corporate Myths about Shipping Jobs Overseas.
This paper provides rhetorical analyses of two presentations pertaining to outsourcing. Neither particularly opposes outsourcing, yet each provides information addressing two different outsourcing concerns. Kibbe’s 2004 article “Outsourcing: the good, the bad and the inevitable” focuses on United States (U.S.) job impact. Van Heerden’s 2010 speech “Making Global Labor Fair” focuses on human rights impact.
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)
The purpose of this paper is to explore the strategic advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing information technology (IT) functions. More importantly, it is to discuss the viability of outsourcing specific strategic functions, such as software development, hardware maintenance and network management, which have been among the most common non-core functions outsourced organizations. In exploring the strategic advantages and disadvantages of IT outsourcing, several sources were used, specifically research by Draft, Kaplan, Porter and other credible researchers on the subject.
The issue on outsourcing jobs is not only jobs being taken away from Americans but its hurting our economy. There are many other smaller issues that are created when jobs are outsourced. Items such as containers that the items are shipped in, it is cheaper to build a new container where the item is being built than it is to ship the empty container back. That creates a smaller issue of having thousands of unused containers lying around. (Winkipeida, 2013)
The issue of outsourcing has been one of the major component that is affecting the labor market and the economy of the U.S as the big companies that which employees a large population of the United State employees has now shifted their operations oversees where they can find a large demand for cheap labor and low taxes. This issue has complicated the situation of the U.S economy considering that the rate of unemployment is increasing day by day. The issue of outsourcing must be behind the increased rate of unemployment in the country as this jobs that are outsourced to the foreign countries would have been occupied by those skilled Americans who can now find no job or end up getting jobs that which do not fit to their skills (Hira, pg. 63). There is a relative demand for skilled workers in t...
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.
Outsourcing has been around for many years. In this paper I will discuss some of the history of outsourcing, the goods things about outsourcing, and the bad things about outsourcing.
Large corporations seeking the extra dollar to pocket are willing to spend whatever it takes to reduce the cost of production and increase profit margins. Doing whatever it takes in some instances can help men moving operations overseas to developing countries who are glad to be working. These developing countries unemployment rates are extremely high, so any job that pays is great to have. Americans lose jobs to foreign workers because the American economy is one of the largest in the world and its citizens enjoy great standards of living, when juxtaposed with a city of the same size in Taiwan. Labor costs play a huge and crucial role in corporations, which in turn pay the profits to the corporate giants who run, manage, and own the businesses.
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