Offshore Storm IV

As a capitalist and entrepreneur... I recognize the truth that outsourcing frees up unproductive capital to be more productive.

As someone who works with the laid off workers, it's undeniably easier for capital to migrate towards new productivity than individual workers.

Many factory workers will not be able to replace their wages in the near future. Quite likely white collar workers can see their skills migrate to equally profitable fields, but then again I've heard of people earning $80,000 who could never re-enter the workforce.

As the saying goes, what goes around, comes around. In Canada, since the '70's, we have suffered from the migration of manufacturing jobs to the cheaper US because the cost of labour was cheaper and taxes were lower. I guess it was OK back then.
Now manufacturing is leaving the US and is going to even cheaper locals like Mexico and India. Apparently duty is a dying quality in companies these days.
The hands of corporations go out to governments for tax breaks and loans yet these hands are not required to be stewards of the people and the environment that make them rich.
Until corporate mission statements focus less on maximizing shareholder values and more on creating a fair work environment with reasonable profits, this cycle will continue and no one will win.
All I can say to my friends to the south is, brace yourselves. There is absolutely nothing you can do to stop this. Corporations are now run by accountants and all they care about is the bottom line and have no loyalty to the countries that help build their businesses in the first place.

I don't understand this fuss over offshoring. The people who promoted free market system around the world are now complaining about the same system, they first encouraged others to subsribe to, when it started hurting over-paid and less productive work force in the developed economies. When the person earning $80,000.00 can not reenter the work force even for less salary then it speaks volumes about the quality of such man power. The people who believe offshoring is just about the cost are living in the fools paradise. It is also about the quality of the deliverables, hard work and productivity. Increasingly high knowledge content work is being outsourced to India. Things like car design, embedded software development, tax analysis and reports, stock analysis etc. There is a shortage of qualified personnel who can do this work at a reasonable cost in the developed world. That's where countries like India step in to help make this world abetter place to live. Walmart who outsources almost everything from China, India and Mexico has helped contain inflation in US, the benefits of which is being enjoyed by all and sundry.
If you do not understand the world of business, trade, finance etc then you should not offer comments and definitely not crib.

--GD>If you do not understand the world of business, trade, finance etc then you should not offer comments and definitely not crib.--

A poor recommendation for a comments area. Who determines whether you are qualified to make a comment?

Back on topic:
The fuss over offshoring is this. There are hundreds of thousands of very qualified workers who have not been employed, some for more than two years. There are many reasons that they have not made a transition, and offshoring is only one of them.

The difficulty with offshoring is that, even if these workers were willing to take a cut in pay and work in India, they cannot get visas and work permits to work in India or other countries to which jobs are moving. Meanwhile, they know many foreign workers on visas who are still permitted to work in the US and still have jobs. And this is not a matter of quality of work. Talk to any manager who had to create a list of people to be laid off. Managers realized that they were cutting high-quality workers.

Although trade eventually enriches all of us, offshoring and outsourcing takes away jobs faster than other new and better jobs come online.

Other reasons for the continued joblessness of many people are (1) the unwillingness of employers to consider applicants from outside there locality (some global economy!); (2) the false precision of the keyword matching for screening resumes; (3) the denial that people have transferable skills that can apply to more than one industry; (4) the difficulty of networking when colleagues are working 14 or more hours a day and cannot be available for lunch - or breakfast or dinner; (5) the stigma of "overqualification"; (6) blatant age discrimination.

The second reason for the fuss is that, for these people, offshoring is not an abstract issue. Sometimes it is a mortgage foreclosure or bankruptcy.

It is a very poor argument to say "They deserved it."

--Randal> The difficulty with offshoring is that, even if these workers were willing to take a cut in pay and work in India, they cannot get visas and work permits to work in India or other countries to which jobs are moving. Meanwhile, they know many foreign workers on visas who are still permitted to work in the US and still have jobs.

Even if we assume for a second that what Randal says about the inability to get visas in foreign lands is true - What kind of a logic is that? So an immigrant with a Phd should be kicked out just because a White Caucasian with a high school degree and knowledge of Java/JSP ( and who worked for insane wages during the dot coms ) is unemployed now? There are plenty of ways to get visas in foreign lands - question is: how many Americans would be really willing to go there? All this moving to foreign lands is just idle talk.

My advice - wake up and smell the coffee. Even if every immigrant was kicked out and all offshoring stopped, there still would not be enough jobs for all the unemployed IT people in the US.

--MS->"My advice - wake up and smell the coffee. Even if every immigrant was kicked out and all offshoring stopped, there still would not be enough jobs for all the unemployed IT people in the US."

I did not advocate kicking out every immigrant; I was explaining why there is a fuss.

--MS->"There are plenty of ways to get visas in foreign lands "

Most countries require you to be a tourist or have a job already in order to enter the country. India is particularly restrictive in its issuing of visas even to do business there.

--MS->"how many Americans would be really willing to go there?"

Which makes more sense? An $8000 salary in Bangalore or $5200 from a part-time retail job? And there are former IT workers with BSCS or MSCS degrees who are doing just that.