Global Workforce Integration

3892 Words8 Pages

Global Workforce Integration

Outsourcing, offshoring, and workforce globalization. Those words were voiced late 1999 in Seattle inside and outside the World Trade Organization meeting. Damages in Seattle amounted to $2.5 million, and 500 plus protesters were arrested. 3 In those days, outsourcing was about moving manufacturing jobs to developing countries to take advantage of the lower salary there. The affected blue-collar US workers were acting violently out of anger and frustration since their jobs were taken away. White collar population didn¡¯t voice any opinions about the issue back then, since US had the largest demand for white collar workers.

Today, white collar workers are feeling the pressure of outsourcing in America and starting to discuss the matter seriously. According to researchers at UC Berkeley, 1 in 10 current job positions in the US can be outsourced, while 1 in 6 Silicon Valley jobs are vulnerable to outsourcing. 4 Since software facilitates the white collar job outsourcing and software development is one field most prone to outsourcing, I will focus on the outsourcing issues related to software. I have chosen three specific computer companies ¨C Peoplesoft, Oracle, HP ¨C to discuss their outsourcing trends and make inferences about the global effects. In the end, I hope to arrive at a decision about outsourcing from the ethical analysis of the outsourcing issue. But first, let¡¯s have a look at why outsourcing is being applied to white collar job positions today.

Why Outsource?

A major reason for outsourcing is pay difference. Even though we have currency exchange rates between different countries¡¯ currencies, the exchange rates are only for monetary values and don¡¯t sh...

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3. Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The WTO Legacy, http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/wto/

4. San Francisco Chronicle, Looking Offshore, Feb 7th, 2004, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-

bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/03/07/BUGMJ5FA9G1.DTL

5. Yahoo Currency, http://finance.yahoo.com/m5?a=1&s=USD&t=CNY

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forthcoming

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15. NEELESH MISRA, Associated Press Writer, Yahoo News, March 12th, 2004,

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18. SCU, Engineering Handbook - Ethics,

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