Jobs vent
 

Well, the jobless recovery continues (something like 21,000 new jobs in February, 100,000 less than expected, right?). And now my company is going the outsourcing route. They claim they aren't going to be outsourcing core development, but their behavior belies their words. My job will likely be gone in about a year, and in this economy that's a bad thing.

Would you like fries with that?

Welcome to what the entire clue collar class has been suffering from since the 60s. The only winners are the top 2%, everyone else is disposable. Why did everyone think the free ride would last forever? Adapt or die.

I don't mean that as a personal think, i bites ass, but it's simply the reality of the way things are going. There are lots of bright kids in India and China willing to work for a 50th of your pay, their turn has come to be recognized. Next time you buy that cheap DVD player at Wal*Mart, think of the real cost.

Sorry, Jag, I'm unwilling to throw myself on my sword for the benefit of those "bright kids" in India and China.

Outsourcing is often a just plain stupid idea, the problem is that by the time it fails the companies and the jobs are already destroyed.

I'm waiting for the White House to roll out the "No 2004 taxes to any company that creates at least one job before November 9th" plan.

Fine Print:

• Company must advertise job.
• Company must acknowledge that Bush is directly responsible for said job and inform the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Campaign for Bush-2004 and Dan Rather of said job creation.
• No floor on wage for said job irrespective of market conditions.
• Company need not actually fill the position - just give it the old college try.
• No restriction on number of illegal aliens that the company can hire while job is open.
• No restriction on the number of existing or new jobs that can be shipped or created off-shore while said job is open. Hey, the third world has to eat too, ya know.
• Job may be "un-created" at any time after Nov 10th, 2004.
• Program not available to businesses whose tax liability is less than $10,000,000 per year.
• Company may also qualify to never pay taxes again if creation of said job can be corellated to a program that Kerry voted against.
• Company agrees to covertly fund an "independent" University study that "clearly demonstrates" that high deficits are actually healthy for the economy and prevent global terror and warming and stuff.

Don't worry russotto, you don't have too much choice in the matter.
From an economists perspective outsourcing makes perfect sense. I mean at the end of they day there is a massive underutilized pool of labour that keeps prices and therefore inflation down and that in theory will spur economic growth. In reality it's not so simple but really, you have a choice. Pay double for most things you buy, or wait for your job to go overseas.

First world living conditions are entirely sustained by 3rd world poverty, face it, it's been that way for decades. We've been living pretty on the back of the impoverished masses. The free ride is over, globalization means not only does it make sense to send your secondary industry overseas but suddenly the territory (service) sector jobs are in the firing line. Amazing how it was ok when it was those blue collar working class scum but when it hits the middle class suddenly it's front page news. What I find amusing is the way primary industry managed to band together and wield enough force to keep massively inefficient farming running and stupid tariffs in place to the detriment of 3rd world farmers yet all the white collar workers seem to think unionizing is somehow below them - we're IT workers, why would we need unions? How 20th century.

In the end you can't stop it any more than you can stop the progress of science. If your government wants to outlaw it the only people that will suffer are your citizens as your economy stagnates.

I'm not disputing the basic logic, but what happens when so many people's jobs have been outsourced that even the non-doubled price of things we buy is starting to be too expensive?

Those products will be sold for whatever the market will bear in the newly flush former Third World economies.

There's a reason everyone in South Korea has a cell phone, and it isn't because they are so much cheaper there. It is because people there are willing to pay out the ass for luxuries which we take for granted.

There are two theories really.

One is that as more countries enter the 1st world more wealth is generated and everyone is better off, global standard of living rises and technology fills the gaps per se, it's fairly textbook economic theory.

The other is that you'll see a kind of balancing effect globally, a flow of wealth away from established 1st world countries towards 3rd world countries until you hit a kind of global equity. In some ways you're already seeing this with the cutting back of welfare of various sorts by most 1st world countries. We hit a peak, now it's downhill for a while until everything even out.

There are many interesting studies about what happens to sectors that are largely outsourced or made redundant by technology. The rough division goes something like this:

35% or so retrain and move to positions further up the food chain
35% or so find work at a similar level of pay
30% or so move to positions below their previous wages.

This is one proposed reason we see growing wage inequity in many 1st world countries, as we remove the middle of the food chain the disparity becomes larger.

Money also of course breeds money. When you hit a certain level you suddenly don't have to pay tax and have huge streams of income that require little or no maintenance, tends to make things a bit more complex as well. A more recent phenomenon in some countries recently is people leveraging the capital in their homes to invest. This has been giving lots of central banks the jitters as it's helped lead to an incredible rise in household debt in recent years, making the net effect of pricking any 'bubbles' twice as dangerous. Housing market conditions haven't helped either. I'm now crapping on off topic, I'm going to be quiet now.

This is what's happening to the middle class. :(

Jag, you're starting to sound very much like Lenin.

Start using terms like proletariat and burgousie and workers' paradise and I will send the government over there to "help" you. ;)

Brian

Jags comments are well taken.Good job.

My small consolation is that I can't be outsourced ...

BrianR I may sound like Lenin but the market is my career at the moment. In the end I believe both that market forces are unstoppable, only steerable and that in the end, the market will pan out for the best with some intervention. People misinterpret economic readings and fail to understand the absolutism of an economist's stand. In the end economists hate monopolies, they have a beef with environmental damage and many other issues many people seem to think they support. I'm no economist but I understand where they come from.
What I'm saying is not very pretty and doesn't bode well for many people here but if you can prove me wrong, go for it, I'd love to see a good rebuttal.

Yeah wolf, positions where you work directly with customers or clients or patients or inmates are pretty safe from outsourcing.

Which means that introverted misanthropic geeks lose.