On Wed, Jul 23, 2003 at 06:05:22AM -0400, Mike Manchester wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-07-23 at 01:26, Paul M Foster wrote:
>
> > Most of the arguments I've seen against offshoring are pretty specious,
> > and really come down to, "It's not fair!" And most of the people who
> > complain don't really say what they appear to mean, either 1) profit is
> > bad, or 2) companies _owe_ employees.
> >
> I keep hearing about how we (the country) is so far in the hole. But
> don't you think if alot of jobs, that are being sent offshore and not
> just in Hi-tech, Hi-tech and manufactoring are only the begining unless
> there is a stop to it. Were to stay here there would be more tax
> dollors, I don't believe someone in India is not paying income tax.
>
> > Second, businesses don't _owe_ employees. More precisely, businesses owe
> > employees whatever they agreed to when the employees signed on, no more.
> > That could be salary, benefits, day care or whatever. Beyond that,
> > corporations don't owe employees anything.
> Well maybe the don't owe us anything as employees. But if we don't have
> a means of income, (we all can't be managers) Who is going to buy there
> products? I believe with the large unemployeement figures now. We are
> seeing this to a small degree now.
>
> I'm not sure how many new cars, boats or trips to Disney a person
> flipping hamburgers can manage.
>
> Business move things overseas to save money as you said. But it's not
> the salary so much as the other savings the company sees. It's no income
> tax to pay, no FICA, no building costs etc. But if the trend continues
> there will be a lot of jobs no longer her in the US. Sometimes what is
> right of the business bottom line. Is not always the right thing to do
> in the long term. Sure you numbers look good for this year and the share
> holders are all happy. But the long term maybe much worse than you
> think.
Well, I made this point about short-sightedness elsewhere. I also never
said I thought it was overwhelmingly wise for businesses to offshore
jobs. There are often unintended consequences. They will profit in the
short term by offshoring jobs, but they may well suffer in the long
term.
Case in point: American Express has moved a tremendous number of their
customer support positions overseas. One of the problems with this is
that Indians don't understand people from the southern United States
very well. And they don't communicate that well in English. At some
point, perhaps Amex customers will say, "Do I really need this Amex
card?" My Visa services me better. Maybe I'll just drop Amex. American
Express suffers without knowing why. I'm not saying this will happen to
American Express. Only that the fixation on profit alone is pretty short
sighted and will likely have unintended consequences.
>
> So what will everyone do that worked those jobs? I guess we could all be
> stock holders in overseas companys, Oh wait you need money to buy stock
> :) I guess the only jobs here will be, gas station attendents, burger
> flippers, healtcare and goverment (well maybe goverment I guess it could
> be run from offshore also). There sure will be lot of highly degreed
> workers working at those places. Will the want adds in 2015 read.
Remember when computers were as big as a house? And then some kids in
California figured out that you could build one that fit on a desk. And
an industry was born.
Remember a time before Tivo? Some bozo figured out that you could record
TV shows on a hard disk and play them back anytime. And an industry was
born.
You just never know.
Paul
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 20:25:05 EDT