Exporting US Engineering Labor Overseas, an Ethical Perspective
Introduction
The recent trend of outsourcing white collar jobs overseas to countries such as India has angered many American Technology professionals. This is occurring specifically in areas such as computer software, chip design and technical support. This trend has contributed to the increasing difficulty many Americans, who are looking for technical jobs, are experiencing. The purpose of this paper is to determine whether this anti-outsourcing attitude has any moral basis and to discuss the conflict of interests involved. This trend has a huge number of stakeholders, impacting engineers working for US companies as well as the entire economies of the US and the nations who benefit from the practice. The consequences of this trend are newly established markets and improved standard of living in other countries at the expense of technical professionals in the United States and other countries with established technology industries.
History of Overseas Outsourcing
Outsourcing is defined as services provided for a company by a secondary company that would otherwise be supplied internally. The purpose of this is process is to reduce costs by subcontracting the work to an external company which can provide the service at a lower cost. In addition to lower cost, the benefits also include more predictable costs. This allows companies to concentrate on their core business. This system is advantageous to the secondary external company because they can achieve the benefits of the economics of scales in performing the same specialized work for many companies. Additionally the company can provide lower costs for a service if they can find lower labor costs.
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In the 1960’s American Companies started offshoring job positions to Asian countries, and Hispanic countries. American Companies started offshoring American Jobs because their business was more profitable in other countries, so in order for the companies to be closer to those countries American Companies started hiring employees in those countries. Furthermore, as American companies realized how much money they could save by offshoring jobs to other countries with low income they started offshoring more jobs with the purpose of saving money. As American companies offshored white and blue collar positions, their profit incremented and they were able to invest more money in their products. The objectives of this report are the following:
Outsourcing simply means acquiring services from an external organization instead of using internal resources (Butler, 2000). By using outsourced resources, organizations can gain a competitive advantage by utilizing contingent staff to accomplish strategic goals without incurring the fixed overhead. By focusing on the leading edge and highly specialized skill sets, outsourcing providers can often offer higher quality services, or at a lower price than the client organization. Typical reasons for outsourcing go beyond simple contingent staffing. Outsourcing providers are able to maintain economies of scale with regard to specialization (...
Mankiw and Swagel (2006) argue outsourcing is not as large a phenomenon as the media describes. Their research indicates outsourcing accounts for very little of job loss in the United States, nor has it made a distinct contribution to the slow rebound of the labor market. They go on to propose that increased overseas employment has actually contributed to higher employment in parent United States companies. They reported that while 30,000 jobs were lost per month in 2004, two million job changes per month were happening as well. They reference the Bureau of Labor Statistics when they report that in 2015 there are expected to be 3.4 million jobs outsourced, but 160 million jobs gained here in the United States. They also claim that there is a rise in net US income by 12-14 cents per dollar of outso...
Outsourcing is a complicated and a multifaceted subject that involves a “business[’s] purchase of parts or labor from another company rather than maintaining a sufficient enough number of its own employees to do the same work in the country where the company is already based” ("Outsourcing"). The first practice of outsourcing was in medieval times when “nation-states called in soldiers-for-hire to help their own military forces during ongoing conflicts” ("Outsourcing"). Many think of outsourcing as a one way trade of production facilities moving outside of a companies locale but in actuality it is a two way trade that also involves companies from other areas moving their factories to local areas where conditions are beneficial for the specific business. Outsourcing has evolved but the main idea has remained the same. The recent increase in outsourcing “was initiated by Wall Street pressures on corporations . . . . for increased profits . . . in the production of goods and services marketed in the U.S."(Roberts).
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Opposed to widespread belief of outsourcing threatening the labor of United States economy it has been seen that businesses have been able to extract a multitude of benefits through the outsourcing which has in turn created a number of employment opportunities along with it. When the stock market plummeted; companies began to discharge distress signals and corporations commenced labor cutbacks, as a result of which unemployment began to increase greatly. In times when the recession was reaching its peak, the only alternative was to look for cheap labor and ou...
The exporting of American jobs is an issue that is important and will become increasingly so as more and more white collar jobs are shipped overseas. American companies in the past few decades have been sending American jobs overseas paying residents of other countries pennies on the dollar what they had paid American workers to do. This saves the companies millions of dollars on labor costs but costs Americans precious jobs.
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The U.S. industries have been outsourcing manufacturing for several decades now. U.S. companies thought they were reducing costs by outsourcing development, manufacturing, and process-engineering abilities. Consequently, U.S. corporations’ knowledge, skilled workers, and supply chain, which are the necessities to producing advanced products, have vanished. For example, almost all notebook computers, cell phones, and handheld devices, which were once created in the U.S., are now designed in Asia. When a major U.S. company outsource, it pressures their rivals to do the same thing. They also lose the expertise of process engineering, which would interact with manufacturing on a daily basis. Minor companies and skilled workers go to where the jobs and knowledge networks are no matter where they are geographically in the world. This decline of trade in the U.S. has caused a negative chain reaction to their suppliers of sophisticated materials, tools, production equipment, and components. U.S. industries do not have a way of coming up with new ideas for the next generation of high-tech products...
Outsourcing has been viewed as a strategic decision rather than as an ethical dilemma. Robertson, Lamin & Livanis state that there are ethical considerations that are largely overlooked in evaluations of outsourcing decisions (2010, pg. 185). When reviewing an ethical dilemma, there must be a framework for which a decision can be made. “Utilitarianism
Slaughter said it’s a common perception that hiring overseas means fewer jobs in the United States. Not so, he said. While job losses are certainly true for some companies, statistics have shown that, generally, increased hires abroad also have complementary increases here.” (Kibbe, 2004)
No matter how big or small a business is, a business is able to outsource services that they could not do profitable on their own. 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 outsourcing. Outsourcing has been around since the beginning of time.
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Outsourcing is a technique for companies to reassign specific responsibilities to external entities. There are several motivations for outsourcing including organizational, improvement, cost, and revenue advantages (Ghodeswar & Vaidyanathan, 2008).
...urcing services, the company operation will be became a mess. This is because one organization can’t run a lot of task or project at one time. Therefore an organization need outsourcing in the way to help their organization run smoothly.