[Erin] Stop the presses

Another example of outsourcing journalism to India: in Pasadena, CA., a couple of years ago, a small daily actually outsourced reporting on the city council. Because all the official meetings were streamed on the web, they assigned two young Indian reporters, one of whom had a top-flight journalism degree from Columbia, to report on the city council...from Mumbai.

My high school daughter is interested in graphic design and layout.

Maybe we'd better go back to the drawing board.

As a FORMER customer of HP, every time I see Carolyn Fiorina touting Mccain, I am more likely to vote for Barr. Simply there is no more great outsourcing offender than HP. Their outsourced Bangalore customer service line is a 8th circle of hell. Yet there is the bejeweled Dragon Lady of Computer Hardware, telling us how wonderful John Mccain is after she sold her soul, her customers and her country to cut costs at HP. May she be forced to talk to heavily-accented clueless "Steve" for eternity. Just another example of how braindead the Mccain campaign may be.

Read Bastiat and then see if you still think the same way:

The illusion has its source in our failure to see that foreign superiority eliminates the need for but one particular kind of labor in the domestic market and renders that particular kind of labor superfluous only by putting at our disposal the result of the very labor so eliminated. If men lived in diving bells under water and had to provide themselves with air by means of a pump, this would be an immense source of employment for them. To do anything that might interfere with their employing their labor in this way, while leaving their conditions unchanged, would be to inflict frightful harm on them. But if their labor ceases only because there is no longer a need for it, because the men are placed in another environment in which air is introduced into their lungs without effort, then the loss of this labor is in no way regrettable, except in the eyes of those who persist in seeing the sole value of labor in the labor itself.

...
To have less iron because one works less, and to have more iron although one works less, are things that are more than just different; they are opposite. The protectionists confuse them; we do not. That is all.
...

You, on the other hand, may properly be called theorists in the pejorative sense of the word. The procedures you invent are not sanctioned by the practice of any man on earth, and so you find it necessary to resort to coercion in order to compel men to produce what they find it more advantageous to purchase. What you want is that they should renounce this advantage and act in accordance with a doctrine that is essentially self-contradictory.

I defy you to extend this doctrine, which you yourselves must admit would be absurd if applied to the relations among individuals, to transactions among families, communities, or provinces. By your own admission, it is applicable only to international relations.

And that is why you are reduced to repeating every day:

"There are no absolute principles. What is good for an individual, a family, a commune, or a province is bad for a nation. What is good on a small scale—to purchase rather than to produce, when purchasing is more advantageous than producing—is bad on a large scale; the political economy of individuals is not that of nations," and other nonsense of the same kind.

And what purpose does it all serve? Face up to it frankly. You want to prove that we consumers are your property! That we belong to you, body and soul! That you have an exclusive right over our stomachs and our limbs! That it is your prerogative to feed and clothe us at your price, whatever may be your incapacity, your greed, or the economic disadvantages of your situation!

No, you are not practical men; you are impractical visionaries—and extortionists.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basSophtoc.html

I'm not much of a historian or an economist, but hasn't this sort of thing been going on since at least the start of the industrial revolution? Abandoning labor in one location in favor of cheaper labor costs elsewhere is nothing new. I don't condone it, but it is the result of deeming growth and increased profits the only things worthy of loyalty and respect.

It doesn't matter the means, the effect is the same. What if instead of spending all day pumping oxygen, the Japanese can build an automated pump that can be monitored by IT professionals in India? Same result, people are out of work.

If it is so difficult to do, or if the job is done poorly, the outsourcing ends. I've heard of several companies moving customer service centers back to the U.S. for instance. Many rushed to India and elsewhere, only to find out the costs were higher than they expected. I don't think we need the government telling businesses what is and isn't profitable. As for worker safety, I haven't heard of American jobs becoming more dangerous. People in China are demanding stronger work safety laws because of the outsourcing to China. It increased their wages, making them feel more secure to challenge the government and employers to strengthen laws.

Check out Bastiat. Read Economic Sophisms. He writes very plainly and the exact same arguments (literally word for word in some cases) people make about outsourcing today were made in the 1700s, 1800s and 1900s. I used to lean towards economic nationalism, but after reading him I changed my mind.

But not the care of our children and elderly relatives. Or repairing our cars. The hands-on tending of things/people that cannot be moved overseas for tending will remain the monopoly of workers in the US. Not necessarily US workers, of course--most nursing homes are already staffed by a polyglot mix of Filipinos, Jamaicans, and Eastern Europeans. If you can't export the jobs, import the workers.

As for China asking for stronger worker safety, the government is cracking down on them for doing so.

Why?

Because BUSINESS is pushing to keep the standards where they are, and threatening to move their businesses to an even cheaper, less safe country if they do not.

Any increase in standards being pushed for (even if not received) is only due to the sorts of horrible consequences they are starting to experience en masse that's moving the worker to action.

Its rather like crediting a crappy teacher that leads an entire class to fail for improvements in the educational system, because their sheer level of incompetence simply meant you couldn't ignore it anymore.

"So you would be happier if the guy in Poughkeepsie loses his job to voice recognition software (on-going as we speak) versus to a guy in India? I don't see the difference. The guy in Poughkeepsie still needs a new job. In one case, the guy in India gets to do the old job. In the other, the computer puts them both out of work, and both have to find new jobs."

You honestly think that they would pick a human at all over a piece of software they only pay once, don't have to worry about being sick, or complaining about their hours? They don't use it because it isn't usable yet at a level where customers don't notice the difference.

You honestly think that they would pick a human at all over a piece of software they only pay once, don't have to worry about being sick, or complaining about their hours? They don't use it because it isn't usable yet at a level where customers don't notice the difference.

When the computer can do their jobs, it WILL put them both out of work. It hasn't yet. When a ten year old in Malaysia can do their job for a buck, that will put them out of work too. This isn't about technology because the technology isn't there yet. It certainly isn't the desire to keep people working that is preventing it.

"If it's just about cheap labor, should Massachusetts have made it illegal to outsource to South Carolina? They took all the textile jobs. Or how about automakers? Detroit is losing to foreign car companies in America, because Toyota, Nissan and BMW build their factories in places like South Carolina, Mississippi and Alabama, which have cheaper labor and less regulation (safety, environmental, etc.)"

Whether Massachusetts or South Carolina, there are minimums beyond which we do not let manufacturers go. Either in salary, or in environmental protection, or in worker safety. There's competition, certainly, but the goal is that the worker can manage to make a living, and that the factory doesn't make the area around it unlivable. You don't have that in the areas where they move those jobs.

Myself, I can't see it being illegal. I don't know of a single person suggesting that because it won't work. Our laws don't apply in other countries.

What I can see, though, is this.

Those places you mentioned, once again, forget the tie between the worker and the customer. They want to move their factory to Malaysia, but know that their workers there can't BUY their products. So they want to SELL their stuff HERE.

So, you want to sell here, you have to conform to our rules on product and worker safety and treatment. We don't arrest you, we can't stop you from running your factory.

You just gotta find a new place to sell your stuff.

Other Jim, get your head out of Bastiat and look at reality. In the 90's, the talk was all about how losing a lot of low-end manufacturing didn't matter because knowledge and high-end manufacturing were going to be the future. What's the result a decade later? Our manufacturing base has been hollowed out. High-end manufacturing gets shipped overseas and IT professionals have either been outsourced or undercut by imported labor. And now the same thing is beginning in other professions. Free trade should be used to keep domestic companies and labor honest. Right now it's being used as a bludgeon in pursuit of greed.

If it's just about cheap labor, should Massachusetts have made it illegal to outsource to South Carolina?...

You do realize this is the United States and there are some basic standards everyone has to play by? You're assuming that moving a plant to China or to South Carolina are equivalent. They aren't.

You're right, GM does have higher labor costs. A lot of those labor costs are tied up in things like pensions (until recently) and health care that companies in other countries don't care about or the government assumes the cost. Should we let private companies go under because we, as a country, believe that health care and pensions are better handled by private organizations and individuals, or do we give a bit more of our freedom away in an attempt to get "cheaper" goods?

"So which is the bottom line cheapest country for outsourcing? Does it go around in an endless circle of relativity?"

Yes. One economist I know calls it "rotating the crops."