Steven E. Landsberg nails something that has long bugged me about protectionists. Why is it more important for fellow citizens to have a job than foreigners? Isn’t that thinly-veiled racism? And what I really don’t understand is that often the people who bemoan outsourcing are the same ones who, in other contexts, admonish me to “think globally”. Having seen poverty here and poverty in the third world, if anything I’m inclined to think they need the jobs more than we do.
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Darwinism
Pure and simple.
Re: Darwinism
So, racism, then?
It is nationalism. Our team , our interests, come first because nobody else is looking out for our best interest.
Nothing to do with race. it is in how you define your team.
Using his example, we might care more to give American “strangers” jobs first ahead of workers in Juarez, because those Detroit strangers paytaxes here, are involved in local politics here, send their kids to the same colleges you send your kids to, and vacation in the same resorts, etc.
Sending the labor to Juarez’s version of strangers supports a foriegn economy, a tax base that doesn’t serve us, but someone else, a political system that may or may not be opposed to toppling our own. With the possible exception of expanded trade “highways” being developed, we have simply sent our money elsewhere and told our own people to find opportunity somewhere else.
Except that the economics says that we ultimately benefit from sending those jobs overseas.
I’m fiercely nationalistic when it comes to things like national security and environmental policy. But I don’t understand it when bleeding hearts who decry our evil meddling in the rest of the world also bitch about sending jobs (and hence, wealth) overseas (I’m not including you in that group).
I completely agree. It really is racism. We are convinced that we are more important than everyone else in the world and that we deserve jobs in our own country because dammit, we have a right to them. But sorry, if someone is better qualified, is a better worker, does a better job, I want them to be working for me.
I don’t nec. believe in protectionism…
well.. the economic “benefits” of super cheap labor are not always inherently the way to go.. Scandinavian countries like Finland and Denmark have extremely high labor costs–but also extremely high salaries–and they focus on high-quality products and everyone makes out pretty well.
but then.. the biggest problem I have with “outsourcing” is that only certain jobs get outsourced.. and they are almost never the extremely “high-priced” ceo jobs that could just as well be done by Japanese and German executives.. which would save companies a ton of money… but are instead 100’s of middle-class jobs… 😉
if this makes no sense…
it is because I be way tired… 🙂
I can’t say what most protectionists are thinking, but there is a valid point to be made.
There is a fundamental asymmetry in any labor negotiation. Employers are few in number, generally too few to apply economic reasoning1 (which assumes a large number of players), so they have the power to dictate terms of employment. This is aided by the fact that managers tend to have backgrounds in negotiation and law whereas potential employees tend to have backgrounds in their own fields. The effect is that employers typically write contracts and employees only sign them. If the entire company profits, the extra money goes entirely to upper management2. Market forces do not address this. It becomes even worse in international cases, in which American companies can call for military intervention in cases of unionization or otherwise uppity workers3.
In the United States, a powerful union movement and the populist political movement established a set of protections against this. While many of these protections have been clumsily implemented or mired in corruption, they are still partially effective.
The countries to which outsourcing tends to happen do not have these protections. By outsourcing without barriers, large corporations have managed to totally circumvent all them completely. This is the central problem with outsourcing.
1 — It is worth noting that in industries such as plumbing in which practitioners tend to work directly for customers, and so the number of employers is large, the labor situation is very different.
2 — There are exceptions to this, but, for large businesses, they tend to be only in cases where truely qualified employees are also rare.
3 — I would have to look up exact cases of this. I remember seeing the details but not what they were. It is also worth noting that India, a nuclear power, is the only country in which outsourcing to there has significantly raised the standard of living.
United Fruit Co. comes to mind regarding (3).
nationalism as opposed to racism….
canada is not a race…
😉
(albeit, the above statements do not mean I agree with it. I actually support immigration. I support Bush’s new immigration work VISA. I think it was brilliant. Allow the cheap labor for 25 cents that no one in the U.S.A. will work for, and no…these can’t be minimum wage jobs or we’d pay $10 a head of cabbage.
But record every worker into the VISA program. So we can track, remove, etc. those who we deem unbeneficial and/or dangerous to the american society. (Terrorists, criminals, dysfunctionals).
There are a number of legitimate concerns regarding outsourcing.
#1. The outsourcing company has almost certainly paid an Indian (or wherever) firm to provide staff. Even if this staff is technically competant to do the job (and that IS an “if”), there are lingual differences, work-environment differences, and cultural issues to be considered.
#2. When people talk about the “economy” benefiting it often doesnt mean the workers in aggregate. I still know people from the post-2000 tech collapse who haven’t recovered anything like their former positions or job functions, and make much less. The company that cut them might be doing better, but how about the workers?
There are a number of legitimate concerns regarding outsourcing.
#1. The outsourcing company has almost certainly paid an Indian (or wherever) firm to provide staff. Even if this staff is technically competant to do the job (and that IS an “if”), there are lingual differences, work-environment differences, and cultural issues to be considered.
#2. When people talk about the “economy” benefiting it often doesnt mean the workers in aggregate. I still know people from the post-2000 tech collapse who haven’t recovered anything like their former positions or job functions, and make much less. The company that cut them might be doing better, but how about the workers?