Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Bankruptcy Blogs -> Arizona Bankruptcy Attorney Blog

Bankruptcy

: Arizona Bankruptcy Attorney Blog

Outsourcing: Threat or Menace? Does Outsourcing Jobs Create Unemployment? Does a Hole in a Bucket Cause Emptyness?

By Joseph McDaniel, Esq.

Current clients and future clients, you don't need to read this, because I'm just talking about something that makes me hyperventilate if I don't talk about it.

So, how's that unemployment these days? Well, the official numbers simmer around 10%. But I keep a pretty good finger on a series of pulses, and my unofficial number is closer to 20%.

And just yesterday I got to talk to a nice guy who used the word "despair" in the same sentence with "depression" about his recent failures to find a job.

And then I ran into an article in the ABA Journal about the fact that equity partners in large firms are going to be pushed off of the tops of buildings in ever-increasing numbers.

Here's a snippet from that article:

Not only are general counsel turning to Second Hundred firms, they are also sending work to offshore legal service providers and virtual law firms, the article says. ?While some firms call the entry of low-cost service providers a threat to their market share,? the authors say, ?we have also heard others describe these lower-cost alternatives as an opportunity to reduce their own cost structure by outsourcing some of their work to these providers.?

The thing I liked about that paragraph was the balance. On the one hand, some call it a threat, while others see it as an opportunity.

Well, for most folks, it's a threat! 


Simple enough? 


Now, outsourcing of jobs has been going on for a while, but it's not what I see as normal. For most of my life, U.S. Citizens did jobs here in the U.S., and we produced cars and televisions and washing machines for the rest of the world.

And that was good.

Now, for reasons that I'm too dumb to understand, businesses that sell their products in the United States create their products in other countries.

There is sort of an endpoint for the process: when U.S. Citizens are paid as little as workers in Sri Lanka, factories will come back to the United States.

Does anybody else see a problem with any of this?

Because I sure do!

Here's a quick fix for the economy: set up tariff walls so that if a car is produced in, say, Korea, it costs a heck of a lot more than a car produced in, for instance, Detroit!

Suddenly, setting up factories in India, China and Korea loses the competitive advantage it now has, because the low cost of labor there is offset by the tariff wall.

And just as suddenly, jobs reappear, as though by magic, here in the United States, and the depression is over. Done. Finished. Complete.

Of course, I could be wrong.

But I don't think so!

And by the way, our economy has enough folks that if our factories sell to our citizens, we all make plenty of dough.

And that seems like a good idea to me.

Even if it would reduce the avalanche of bankruptcy cases coming through my door.

Full post as published by Arizona Bankruptcy Attorney Blog on September 11, 2010 (boomark / email).