Offshoring, lay-offs, and outsourcing

Today we are going to talk about something I have touched on earlier... but now it has a name. It is called Offshoring . Offshoring is an expression talking about high tech, white collar jobs moving out of the country. What we are beginning to see here in the business culture is companies outsourcing jobs (most commonly, call centers) to other countries. The jobs go anywhere labor is cheaper, ie - everywhere. Specifically though, we are seeing call centers going to India. HP, IBM, and even the Republican party often farm out various call center jobs like order processing, customer service, technical support to call centers in India where the education level is terrific and the wages are considerably cheaper. Another term for this is 'brain drain'. Ironically, the expression stems from India's greatest minds all emigrating to the United States for luxurious corporate jobs that pay far more than the economy could in India. This is indeed ironic because jobs like mine and yours are emigrating to India now. It is important you see this not in political terms at all. This has nothing to do with left or right or even politicians necessarily. The issue is simple economics, people in other countries will work longer and harder for less. As a result, the US economy is losing precious great jobs. Amy Dean is some kind of labor genius, and she had a great quote about this in this article: "If we had one-quarter of the same rights for human beings as we do for compact discs, we'd see a huge breakthrough in trade policy". Now, we can't simply tell companies not to move jobs overseas. That would be stupid, and fascist. So what can we do to keep and lure jobs here? Well, I think we can begin by offering incentives to American companies to keep jobs here in America. As well, we can start pulling out the freebies and crazy tax incentives that big companies are getting who aren't keeping their jobs here. Do you know where your Ford was made? Mexico. Do you know where my Toyota was made? Indiana. Also what we can do is patronize companies who support American labor. This may be tough though, because the recording won't say "please hold, while I transfer you to India". Another cool and interesting step - today's Rocky Mountain News did a piece on legislators wanting to withhold state contracts with companies who move their labor overseas. I think this is a creative and positive way to reward employers for not moving everything overseas, or up to Canada (where my second to last job went. My last job went to El Paso). What we are looking at is possibly a HUGE campaign issue for the presidency. Why? Well, it is an issue that we can all agree on. Besides, with the current president absolutely destroying the deficit and racking up debt for future generations and slowly chipping away at Social Security... we are going to need good jobs to pay off 400 Billion deficit our president has left us with. Yeah, the deficit is completely insano - 500 Billion (keep in mind that Clinton left office with a 236 Billion surplus). Gee, how the hell did we go from a 236 Billion surplus to a 500 Million deficit? We'll discuss that later, I promise.