Outsourcing: Cheap labor is unethical
Core countries outsource to various peripheral countires in order to save and make more money, however, in the opinion of most, this is very unethical and a form exploitation. Outsourcing simply put is merely the migration of jobs from one country to another. Companies take advantage of the poor workers overseas. While they might be giving them an oppurtunity to make money, they are essentially doing more harm. Cheap labor is simply defined as laboring for very cheap pay which includes no benefits, working in harsh environments, and being subjected to abuse and finally working excessively elongated hours with no breaks or lunches. Cheap labor is unethical for several main points, core countries usually don’t pay their citizens predatory wages, the environments that poor works labor in are harsh and abusive, and finally children are laboring in these harsh environments.
Before diving into further details, one must understand the types of jobs that are outsourced. Honestly, any industry can outsource, but mostly well known companies outsource such as Nike, Coca-Cola, Wal-mart, and Levi are just a few of the companies leave their countries and pay cheap wages.
Typically, most outsourced jobs include but are not limited to software design, market research, data entry, clothing apparel, shoe stitching and even medical transcriptions. This is evident when you make a phone call and you connect with someone in a foreign country, that tells you that that job was outsourced.
Most of the companies transfer to peripheral countries such as China, Bangladesh, India, Thailand and various other countries. These countries are considered third-world countries and most companies go to these places be...
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...cramped and are terribly torrid conditions. Sometimes the workers may have to stand for hours while working. Mostly these places with harsh conditions are referred to as sweatshops. Sweatshops are usually hazardous and put laborors in hazardous situations. For instance, in China in a Apple factory, 62 workers were poisoned with a toxic gass called n-Hexane that workers were using to to clean the screen of Iphones. Lots of those wokers had to go to the hospital and stay for months. N-Hexane has been known to damage the nervous system and several other organs. According to Wen Pei Po, from Chinahush, the report was, “The factory manager made workers use the hazardous gas in inadequately ventilated areas.”(Wen Pei Po, Chinahush.com)
This is one of the many incidents where workers suffer in extreme conditions just to try make money and provide for their families.
Following the globalization, many companies in developed countries move factories to developing nations. As a multinational company, there is at least one facility in one country other than its home country. Those companies have offices and factories in different countries and usually have a centralized head office in their home country. Advocates of multinationals say they create jobs and wealth. And multinationals can improve technology in developing countries, which are in need of this. On the other hand, critics say multinational companies often barely pay employees enough to live on in developing countries, and it is unethical to pay cheap wages.
Recently outsourcing has been in the news, especially during political election years. It seems to be a phenomenon that is causing much concern among the population. But exactly how is outsourcing effecting both workers and businesses? And is it as big of a problem as politicians describe?
Both sides can agree that outsourcing can be desirable for a business do to the potential profit. It allows goods to be made cheaper, management to run smoother, and money to be made faster (Salanţă 270). Both sides can also agree, however, that U.S. jobs are lost as a result of outsourcing (Ahmed 192), as well as environmental damage being cause due to corporations taking advantage of loose environmental regulations (Marquis 39). Upon digging deeper into this debate, one can find that both sides present very convincing arguments.
Outsourcing emerged on the financial arena during the 1980s and has since then been spreading. Outsourcing production was furthered with the process of globalization which provided a new component leading to the strengthening of resources, skill and labor specializations across the world. The process of outsourcing is using the skill and abilities of a third-party to accommodate society on the foundation of labor. As stated earlier, it was during the 1980s that the process kicked off mainly due to the efforts of corporations when they began to hire labor forces across the world. Even though outsourcing has come out from its developing stages, there are still following effects on the US economy.
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...
Not only is the pay and work hours bad, the jobs are dangerous too. One man lost two of his fingers in a machine and after being taken to the hospital, his boss furious for having to pay for the bill, is expected to go back to work in excruciating pain to pay off the medical bill (Lee-Potter 2007). In a Chinese sweatshop in Italy a fire broke out and killed 7 people. Because of all the dust and fabric on the floor, the fire spread quickly trapping workers inside due to iron bars on windows to keep them in (Aloisi 2013). The reason for those 7 workers to still be at the factory is that they were sleeping in “cardboard cubicles” (Aloisi 2013). Most workers cannot afford to have homes outside of the factories and sleep where they work. When factories are shut down, its inhabitants are
“Child labor is work that harms children or keeps them from attending school.” Back then in the U.S., children were working between ages 5 to 17. Between the 1800s and 1900s, many children worked in agricultural fields, fishing, mining, manufacturing, and even drug trade and prostitution. Even though child labor laws are still avoided around the world, the effects on child labor in the US, before, was unbelieveable. Children were suffering from health issues, reform movements grew and other countries followed enforced child labor too.
Corporations in the United States have proved time and time again that they are all about profit and not about what is good for America. One example of this is the fact that many corporations have factories in other countries, or buy from other corporations that do. Nike (an athletic shoe and clothing company) produces most of their shoes and apparel in factories in other countries, including Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, China, Vietnam and Malaysia. According to Nike’s factory disclosure list released May 2011, only 49 of it’s over 700 factories are located in the U.S. (Nike, Inc.) This means that thousands of jobs that could be filled by needy Americans are instead being filled by workers in other countries. This reason that Nike and other corporations outsource is very simple, it is very cheap to do so. In an excerpt from Jeffrey St. Clair's book “Born Under a Bad Sky” the author describes the vast differences between Nike’s production costs and retail prices. “In Vietnam, it costs Nike only $1.50 to manufactu...
Sweatshops are a very big topic today, especially in politics. People are chaotically protesting against these factories. What are the reasons behind this? One of the main reasons, they say, is that they factory owners and
This fact alone implies that a factory job is no where near the worst working situation. As Matt Zwolinski points out in “Sweatshops, Choice, and Exploitation” published by Business Ethics Quarterly, “For the most part, individuals who work in sweatshops choose to do so. They might not like working in sweatshops, and they might strongly desire that... they did not have to do so. Nevertheless, the fact that they choose to work in sweatshops is morally significant” (Zwolinski 2).
Outsourcing is shifting all of the costs-accounting costs, including personnel, plus the risk of failure and the responsibility for action-to the third party. In return for assuming costs, the third party benefits by controlling the operation (Coughlan 167). This is the basic definition of what outsourcing is. Outsourcing has been around from the beginning of time. In the movie, ?It Started With the Greeks,? they talk about how the Ionians found out that they could go around the world and find products that people back in their home town would buy. This essentially started the idea of outsourcing since the people who wanted the product was unable to get it but, they were able to have someone else do it for them. Once people knew that they could get anything that they wanted from around the world it lead into consumerism. So once someone got the idea to start and do this full time as a job they were able to outsource anything that they wanted.
Globalization and industrialization contribute to the existence of sweatshops, which are where garments are made cheaply, because they are moving production and consumption of those cheap goods. Industrialization has enabled for global distribution, to exchange those goods around the world. They can also set apart the circumstances of consumption and production, which Western countries as mass consumers, are protected from of producers in less developed countries. These factories are usually located in less developed countries and face worker exploitation and changes in social structures. Technological innovation allows for machines to take the place of workers and do all the dirty work instead of workers doing hours of hard work by hand.
Labor laws, wage disparities, intense competition and fluctuating currency values are the challenges that are making organizations worldwide to compete in marketplace with products requiring a great deal of labor, and it is now getting harder for some of these organizations to maintain employees abroad. As Mello (p. 610) mentioned that a greater percentage of United States workforces are moving their operations abroad to developing nations like China and leaving an increasing number of United States domestic workers without employment. The foreign markets for the products and services are not the only things enticing these organizations to enter these global marketplaces. There are other reasons these companies are joining the global market arenas. For example, the foreign labor markets, this has attracted interest in many organizations to expand globally (Gersten, 1991). The labor force growth rates in developing nations alone will continue expanding by approximately 700 million people by the year 2010, while the United States labor force will continue to grow by only 25 million. This shows that United States’ growth rate will drop and the opportunities for productivity growth rate will increase in developing countries.
First of all globalization has led to exploitation of labor. We can’t ignore the fact that ethical aspects of international business deserve special attention. Corruption and engaging in illegal practice to make greater profit is a source of continuing controversy. Sometimes companies go international and move their production to foreign countries so they could employ workers for long hours, at low wages and in poor working conditions (sweat shops). They are also using child labor, the employment of children to a full time work that can be otherwise done by adults all that so they could get out of their responsibility towards their workers by avoiding paying them national insurance …When these multinational firms go abroad they forget all about principles and about human beings and their rights, according to Kent, J., Kinetz, E. & Whehrfritz, G. (2008/March24). Newsweek. Bottom of the barrel. “The dark side of globalization: a vast work force trapped in conditions that verge on slavery”, David, P. Falling of The Edge, Travels through the Dark Heart of Globalization..Nov 2008. (p62) also agrees with them when he explained his concerns about Chinese and Indians t...
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