Is the internet responsible for most "outsourcing"?

[Bandit]

Is it because anyone with a computer can do the job from their home and some with homes in Idia or ??? bill way less than americans on their hourly billings. It is because of the internet that all of this is feasible. The internet makes the world a much smaller place and serves a very useful purpose but with it comes some negatives also. I think the internet is going to be the ruination of many "American" jobs. We need to resolve this issue because it is here to stay.

[Skittles]

1. I'd say the ridiculous IT salaries in the 90's had a lot to do with it

it certainly made outsourcing seem very attractive.

[barbaraann]

2. Have you seen elance.com?

I think it is easier to outsource when there's a website for it.

[Dogmudgeon]

3. Nope.

Sorry I can't be Little Susie Sunshine here, but ...

It's the idiot corporate cost-cutters who are responsible. And there are no financial disincentives for "offshoring" work. However, there are very painful disincentives for American workers being paid more than people in Asia.

Outsourcing is good for the Church of Free Enterprise. Note, also, how importing drugs from Canada is a blasphemy that must be suppressed.

Don't worry. All you non-IT people will be faced with terminal unemployment within a few years as the American economy disintegrates under increasing oil prices. So string up a 'Publican for me, will ya?

--bkl
Broke. Sick. Angry. Hopeless.

[Don Claybrook]

4. Not so much the Internet

but the flip side of the same coin: cheaper WAN (wide area network) circuits. I have installed hundreds of VPN connections (virtual private networks). These connections actually do use the Internet to allow private communications, as if you were on a private corporate network. So I guess I'm saying that I agree with your premise, I just use slightly different terminology.

I read something interesting a few days ago, don't recall where. An article stated that anyone who had ever dreamed of the day that they could sit at home or at the beach and do their job, as a telecommuter, should be worried about their job security. Because just as surely as someone can do a job sitting at home, someone else can do it from Bombay or Bangalore a lot cheaper.

I guess I helped in some small way to build the infrastructure that allowed my job to go away. My job consisted of actually touching equipment, so it can't be outsourced overseas so easily, but the jobs done by all of my customers were very outsourcable, and so the business dried up for that, and several other reasons. Hindsight is 20/20, but I don't really know what could've been done to prevent this from happening anyway.

Good topic.

[jobendorfer]

6. there are a whole lot of implications to outsourcing

The bottom line is: if you do your job in a cubicle farm,
sitting in front of a computer, thinking and typing, your
job is at severe risk. I don't care what you're doing:
answering customer calls, writing software, designing circuit
boards or ICs, developing new pharmaceuticals, designing
mechanical parts, processing health-care claims, inventing
nanomachines -- it doesn't matter. There is someone, somewhere
in the third world, who is just as smart as you, just as
well-educated, and who will do the work for 10% to 20% of
what you cost.

There are exceptions, of course.
- defense related work that cannot be outsourced due to
technology export restrictions.
- small business organizations (small organizations can't
afford to outsource, basically)
- jobs that involve direct, personal delivery of services
(teaching, skilled trades, artisans, health care, etc)


Consider this: in the year 1900, the majority of americans worked
on small farms (something like 75-80 percent of the population.)
Today, just a little over a hundred years later, that figure is
something like 2%. And they're feeding a much larger population.
What made that demographic shift possible? Mechanization.

Today, robotics, computers, and the internet are doing for
manufacturing in general what mechanization did for agriculture
in the 20s and 30s.

We are staring into the face of a massive, world-wide disruption
of the social order, and the social contract as we have known it.
How do you make a society function when significant fractions of
the population aren't really needed to keep the airlines running,
the interstates rolling, the factories humming, and the farms
producing? What does the culture look like when there is a
permanent unemployment level of 20-25% or more?

It's scary stuff to think about. Sometimes I think the whole
system will crash under its own weight, a la Rome, or 17th
century Spain. At other times, I have hope that we might move
beyond gratefully serving our corporate masters to a
small business/family business economy. Perhaps the rising
price of oil will make international trade more expensive
(when diesel oil costs $20/gallon, building things in Malaysia
looks less attractive.)

I just feel like the guy in the stable with the horse, hoping
like hell I can get it to sing -- soon.

J.

[Mountainman]

7. I disagree about your small farm example, it was not mechanization.

It is corportization of farms.

I work for one of the largest labor provider in the San Joaquin Valley in CA. We have payrolls of over 3,000 persons a week and they are all in the agriculture business. They work in the feilds and packing houses. They are the ones who supply the labor that grows the food that feeds millions.

The number of workers hasn't gone down in agriculture, the size of the farms increased do to corporations buying them up. The workers no longer own the land. That's the biggest change.

[jobendorfer]

8. you're probably right, in the short-term timeframe

I'm speaking of a span time of about 100 years,
and you see a very different picture. All this
happened inside three generations (my grandpa was
a farmer, born in 1871.)

Population of the U.S. in 1900: ~76 million.
Percentage in farming/agriculture: 38%
76M * 0.38 = ~29M workers.

Population of the U.S. today: ~272 million.
Percentage in farming/agriculture: ~3%
272M *0.03 = ~8M workers

source: http://www.usda.gov/history2/text3.htm

Point is: we went from about 1 in 3 people in the labor
force working on small farms to 1 in 33, working on very
large farms, and feeding nearly 4 times the population.
That's an ~44x increase in productivity! (To be fair:
some of this increase is due to the "green revolution",
some of it to mechanization.)

The point I was trying to make was, generalize that to
industry and manufacturing as a whole. Long-term high
unemployment may become the norm. With big implications
about how we distribute money through the the social
system.

Not to minimize the devastation that corporate farming
has wreaked, though, Mountainman!

J.

[Must_B_Free]

5. MIddle management leapfrog maneuver

some guy selles a promiuse of cost savings based on outsourcing. He gets rewarded and moves up and isn't there to take the blame when the thing falls apart.