Offshoring Sucks!!!

[Ruffhowse]

Yet more jobs at my place of work are being offshored. Everyone should be VERY afraid of this trend, as I see it's pace accelerating. Take a good look at your job. Could some well educated person in India or Pakistan do it, even only half as well? Then your job is certain to be on the schedule for offshoring at some point soon, because it will cost your employer one tenth as much in labor. There are now many, many U.S. and foreign firms who are very aggressively pushing offshoring strategies to as many U.S. businesses as possible, and they are coming up with some very novel ways to offshore jobs one normally wouldn't think were vulnerable. And American businesses are eating it up. So be afraid, be very afraid of this trend. I am.

[Eurobabe]

1. B/C has to take care of that investor class!

Come on, cut them some slack! <sarcasm off now>

[Name removed]

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[Ruffhowse]

3. With offshoring, there are no new jobs to go to, and they pay less than

they used to.

[Name removed]

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[RedEarth]

7. If you have been keeping up with the employment news you would have

noticed there have been very few new jobs created over the last three years and a large percentage of the jobs created have been low paying jobs(Home Depot, Wal-Mart, etc).

Manufacturing(your fathers industry) has been shrinking dramatically for the last 5-10 years and millions of workers have been let go. Your dad was fortunate to have found employment.

[PatriotGames]

4. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

This is something that will not go away without some major overhauls in legislation.

[Warpy]

5. This latest round

is set at eliminating any job that isn't above middle management or any job that doesn't absolutely require face to face contact. Even retail jobs are starting to disappear, thanks to automated checkout.

Yes, this is going to have to be ended. Not only is national security compromised when essential industries are moved offshore (and the military has to import all the gyros it uses in every guidance system it uses), you only have to look at Iraq to find out what a beggared, unemployed population will start doing.

Confiscatory tariffs against corpoations that offshore jobs and industries and still intend for the US to be the primary (sometimes only) market is going to be mandatory. Protective tariffs against predatory economies like those in China and India have to be instituted. Most of all, industries vital to national security, from electronics to textiles, really need to be protected.

There is no way a US worker is ever going to compete against a third world wage that exchanges for far less than subsistence in US currency. If the government fails to take this seriously and start protecting its citizens, its citizens are liable to give it a very ugly surprise.

[Veggie Meathead]

9. I also want to see our jobs protected in some way, but I am

afraid that if we impose punitive tariffs on India or China, they in turn will not buy American products and go buy them somewhere else.
I am even more afraid of what is going to happen to our better paying professional jobs like Research Scientists,Doctors,Lawyers,
Accountants and others.The most recent issue of Scientific American
talks about how clinical trials of many drugs are now being offshored by drug companies like Pfizer, Bristol-Myers, Eli Lilly,Merck etc.to India where the cost of this research is only a fraction of our own.It even predicts that other medical specilaties are going to move to India as new Medical Centers are being built and staffed by the many medical graduates coming out of India's universities.

I am stunned at how fast things are moving and have to worry about my children's future.I think the Republicans will seize on this as a way to cut Medical Insurance costs and send people over to India to get
expensive procedures done.

[Frangible]

8. The problem is the American citizen

The average American citizen is lazy, doesn't vote, and doesn't care about outsourcing so long as they can buy cheap crap at Walmart.

Until the majority of Americans care, the politicians won't.

And even if we did ban outsourcing, what then?

Let's say we have an American power tool that costs $50. And a Chinese-branded one that costs $20. The American one is a little better quality. But most people are going to buy the Chinese one, because they don't care where it's made.

Either way-- it's the consumers' greed that is allowing products made with cheaper labor to drive American jobs away.

Even with no outsourcing at all, foreign competition will eventually have the same effect. Outsourcing just increases the speed of job loss while increasing corporate profits.

In the end, we're screwed, and there's nothing we can do.