Guangzhuan Mo
Dr. Tai Houser
ENC1102
October 6, 2016
IT projects offshore outsourcing: an inevitable trend
Outsourcing, especially offshore outsourcing, is not a new topic, but a continuing controversial global trends for the industry of manufacturing, and information technology. As Corbett said, outsourcing is the practice of transferring non-core competitiveness jobs to other suppliers rather than doing it self. Many experts are arguing that offshore outsourcing will harm the U.S. economy than it will benefit the American people in the long run, while advocates can also list a bunch of benefits over adverse. However, the practice of offshore outsourcing has been going on for decades, and it wasn’t resulting as opponents’ claimed. Instead,
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Actually, some proponent only focused on the negative details, considering these minor negative effects are major effects of offshore outsourcing. They also see offshore outsourcing a threat to America’s economy, security and many other aspects of American people, and ignore its positive effects on the overall America economy. In the book Outsourcing America: What's behind Our National Crisis and How We Can Reclaim American Jobs, Hira lists some specific negative facts that come after offshore outsourcing. For example, “Many companies have employed programs to accelerate the process that they euphemistically call “knowledge transfer,” whereby they force their U.S. workers to train foreign replacements. The U.S. worker is then laid off after his or her knowledge has been extracted.” (Hira, 10) Another negative argument provided by Hira is “computer science enrollment dropped by 40% from the 2003 to 2006 academic year.” (Hira, 12). And this drop is because “Many of our best and brightest students are not majoring in technology disciplines because of the fear of offshoring.” (Hira, 12). However, these arguments don’t have accurate data about the word “many”, indicating that those facts or reasons hardly stand for major evidence that offshore outsourcing is dramatically harmful to America. These evidence are weak and vague in supporting the idea that offshore …show more content…
According to Corbett, trace back to the early 1990s, outsourcing came into practice for the first time. It was a time when severe depression covered around the U.S. and even those most competitive of its businesses suffered significantly. “Companies used outsourcing then to help streamline their operations and to regain their competitive strength. The result was an unprecedented period of economic growth during the latter half of the 1990s. as we enter the mid-2000s, today’s challenges may be even more pressing than those of a decade ago.” (Corbett, 15) It is the general result rather than a snapshot combined by a few specific evidences. This short revision objectively indicates that offshore outsourcing is not that threatening as proponent claimed. Organizations has benefited from this practice. And that is the reason offshore outsourcing continued and developed. History is a giant that people can stand on its shoulder. In the background of Globalization, information technology plays an important role. In the past, offshore outsourcing has contributed to the growth and development in the manufacture industry, as a sub category of offshore outsourcing, IT projects offshore outsourcing can also contribute a lot to the growth and development in the IT
Despite that an excessively excellent image of outsourcing was provided to individuals one or two of years back, the truth check they were confronted with shattered the dream badly. Recent statistics reveal that over four-hundredth corporations are concerned either in experimenting or are already engaged in shifting their services overseas in search of low-cost labor and services that are being provided by countries like China and Bharat. Such efforts have left native market labor at extreme disadvantage wherever they're finding it vastly tedious to create each ends meet, leave behind the back-breaking burden of taxes they're being obligatory to. With over four-hundredth major company executives registering their opinion by discouraging the method of outsourcing the controversy that was antecedently being won by the
‘Is your job next?’ headline blared, followed by the disturbing preview of the article inside: “A new round of globalization is sending upscale jobs offshore. They include chip design engineering, basic research— even financial analysis. Can America lose these jobs and still prosper (R. Hira, 2008, p-1)?” The reaction of this news was swift and divided. Definitely large corporations that will be outsourcing will make huge profits in the long run but “what about the American citizens?”
The U.S. economy has seen many hardships within the last decade. The economy has suffered from a recession that is still threatening to cripple some Americans and unemployment has been at an all time high. People have lost homes and jobs and many businesses have gone bankrupt simply trying to survive. However, in the midst of this economic crisis some companies have managed to survive. Many companies, approximately 36% of them, have found a way to avoid economic collapse by cutting costs (Job Outsourcing Statistics, 2014). One of the most popular cost reducing strategies of our time is called outsourcing.
To begin with, some people are against it because the use of outsourcing takes the jobs that could be filled by Americans and gives them to people in other countries.The opportunity for an American to provide for his family is swept off beneath him when these jobs are given to people of other countries.A great example is one from the article “The Cost of American Outsourcing”. The Company “Whirlpool” closed it’ refrigeration assembly line in order to move it down to Mexico in which it left more than 1,200 Americans without jobs.In most cases these people
While outsourcing may be beneficial to some of the companies partaking in it, the general consensus is that it ultimately proves to be harmful to the American workforce. The act of outsourcing and shifting many company call centers and technical support teams, or “low skill service jobs,” to foreign countries reduces jobs for those that could truly benefit from them within our own country. The unemployment rate has dramatically increased, and continues to rise, compared to what it has been in years past; yet there are numerous companies which still insist on handing over these “low skill service jobs” to people in other countries such as India. The most obvious and logical reason for outsourcing is reducing costs; people are working for
As the world has gotten “smaller” in terms of trade, outsourcing has become a hot topic in much political and economic debate in the United States.
By 2004, more than 80 percent of U.S. executive boardrooms will have discussed offshore sourcing, and more than 40 percent of U.S. enterprises will have completed some type of pilot or will be sourcing IT (information technology) services. In fact, some of the biggest firms in the United States have been seriously discussing outsourcing recently. One of these companies being IBM, the world's biggest computer maker, discussed saving about $168 million beginning in 2006 by moving thousands of programming jobs overseas, according to internal information provided. U.S. businesses, battered by the recent three year bear market in stocks and an economy struggling to find its footing, have already developed a taste for super cheap labor in developing countries, where workers are increasingly better trained especially if they've spent significant time working in the United States on temporary visas. The impact of overseas outsourcing could be significant; many economists doubt the trend is big enough yet to disrupt the broader U.S. economy. Imports of business services account for less than 1/20 of 1 percent of gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the nation's economy. At the least, it's not doing much to end the longest U.S. labor-market slump since World War II. More than 9.3 million people are
As esteemed journalist Tom Piatak wisely puts it, “The trickle of outsourcing threatens to become a flood.” His words speak the truth as outsourcing has left United States’ workers jobless, and it continues to increase the unemployment rate every year. During February of 2009, American workers lost a record 651,000 jobs alone, increasing the unemployment rate to 8.1 percent, the highest it has been in 25 years (Katel). Multinational corporations, hoping to cut down costs and stay profitable in the market, outsource by exporting American jobs to third-world countries such as China and India. It may seem noble that outsourcing provides third-world countries with job opportunities, but the United States’ markets and industries are greatly
As the problem of job outsourcing becomes more of an issue in politics, elected officials like the President and Congress will no longer be able to ignore the dilemma. The war in Iraq has been at the forefront of the presidential race but the importance of outsourcing
In light of recent growth of domestic and foreign countries outsourcing and off shoring over seas, companies been taken advantage of the cheap labor cost for outsourcing and off shoring manufacturing. Competitive business investing in domestic and foreign manufacturing have affects every part of the business industries from design, software development, finances and logistic management, i.e., customer and sales. Nevertheless, outsourcing been praised by businesses for outcomes of cost-effectiveness, efficient, productive and strategic, but damned as malicious, because of companies’ greediness, detrimental, and brutal in the public eyes.
According to scholar Ron Hira, corporate outsourcing is “nothing less than a direct assault on hardworking middle-class men and women in this country.” Hira proposes five steps to mitigate the problems associated with corporate outsourcing. These steps include: (1) the United States government acknowledging that outsourcing causes major problems through their speeches, legislation, etc.; (2) the U.S. government disclosing information to its citizens about what products are manufactured in what country and plant; (3) documenting and studying outsourcing to truly see its effects before constructing a permanent strategy of action; (4) persuading companies to stop promoting outsourcing; and (5) helping those American workers who have been displaced by outsourcing. What is missing from this plan of action is an explanation of how we as American citizens get companies to stop outsourcing when salary savings could be up to 90%,
Supporters argue that outsourcing has a minimal effect on job losses, and has increased economic growth in some cases. In actuality, outsourcing has decreased the domestic economy by decimating job opportunities and lowering wages. Steven Pearlstein, economics columnist for the Washington post reaffirmed arguments that outsourcing has decreased employment availability and stability of the economy by saying “There are growing numbers of people who think that what started as a sensible, globalized extension of sending some work outside a firm to specialized companies may in fact be creating long-term structural unemployment in the United States, hollowing out entire industries”. (Pearlstein 3) The IT industry has been especially affected by outsourcing, with many jobs moving overseas to India and Bangladesh, leaving employees in the United States without a job, unable to compete with lower wage offerings. Supporters of outsourcing argue that this business strategy increases everyone’s productivity, raising everyone’s income, and boosting economic growth. Many such studies tend to focus on large multinational corporations, for which the data and anecdotes are more readily available. And indeed, during the 1990s, the data seemed to show that for every one job added abroad, companies added almost two new
The term outsourcing refers to the act of contracting out business activities and procedures to a third party. The act of outsourcing sometimes involves the transfer of assets from one organization to the other. The term is also used to describe the act of handling the control of public services to the private corporations. Outsourcing mainly involves both the local and foreign contracting. At times, the term is used to describe relocation of business organizations to another country which is a also known as off shoring. This term is very popular in the U.S especially in the 21st century (Davies, pg. 21). The main motivation for the activity of outsourcing is the financial saving due to the reduced international labor market rates. The
In today’s global business competitive environment, business organizations must innovate and adapt new strategies to sustain revenue generation, value while remaining competitive. Organizations have embraced outsourcing principles and adopted them to help in expanding to new markets. Outsourcing has enabled US multinational corporations to reduce costs and compete effectively in the global market. While the proliferation of outsourcing has been beneficial to short term growth by taking advantages of; low wages, taxes and investment incentives in developing countries, it will significantly dissolve the competitive advantages the United States enjoys. The outsourcing approach changes the historical model of economies of scale, the resulting intangible and hidden trade costs of outsourcing shall have a heavy bearing on the US economy. The competitive advantage of high technology, support for startups will be gradually eroded, enabling developing countries to compete directly with the United States.
There are a variety of factors that outline the significance of outsourcing and its rapid growth over the years. Firstly, there has been an “increased desire on the part of organisations to focus efforts on core activities, which are the source of competitive advantage” (Wilton, 2011). This allows the organisation to invest all efforts