Outsourcing Jobs

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It is 2:00 A.M. and you have been surfing the Internet all night. Your computer starts to slow down and suddenly stops. You cannot explain why; you have tried everything in your power to get it running again. It is early in the morning and you are tired, so what are your options? You decide to call the computer company’s help desk. You know it is late, so you are surprised that someone answers your call. The person on the other end of the phone is an outsourced employee. The language barrier makes it difficult to understand, and you become upset. At this moment your main concern is to get your computer working again, so you continue to let the technical support representative help you. After a short time of being on the phone, the representative helps you, and your computer is fixed. Now that your computer is in working order, you return to the thought that you received help from an outsourced office. You were not happy to get a representative from overseas, but now that your problem is fixed, you realize it wasn’t that bad. Many people have the same reaction to this scenario. It is common today to get upset about the use of job outsourcing. The increase of companies that use offshore help is making people talk. The upfront concern is that the use of outsourcing is taking away from jobs in the United States. This may be the popular consensus, but it is not completely true. In reality, the use of job outsourcing does not have a negative effect on the economy in the United States.

Americans complain about the loss of jobs to outsourcing, so we need to take a look at our unemployment rate. It would naturally make sense that if a job is placed overseas, it is being taken away from an American worker. “In truth, companies have outsourced since the Industrial Revolution” (Kakumanu, Portanova, 2006, p. 1). The use of outsourcing jobs is not a new concept; it has just become more popular. “Offshore outsourcing of labor first became prevalent in manufacturing industries. Labor in other countries was cheaper than America workers, and transportation fell. This made sending work offshore more economical and began a large wave of outsourcing” (Kakumanu, Portanova, 2006, pg 1). Would this then mean that if jobs are being sent overseas in these large waves, there would still be jobs left for American workers?

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