Outsourcing Jobs to Foreign Countries

Outsourcing

Outsourcing jobs to foreign countries has become very common among businesses today. This strategy has many advantages and disadvantages that affect businesses as well as the economy. It has been proposed that the government should protect American jobs by imposing penalties on companies that transfer jobs offshore. This would be a harsh attempt to slow the progression of our world economy. Outsourcing jobs has many positive affects to not only the U.S., but the rest of the world as well. Although there are negative aspects of offshore labor, they are far outweighed by the benefits.

The reason so many companies participate in international offshore labor is because it is cheap and it allows companies to choose from the best employees/resources the world has to offer. International outsourcing gives companies access to an extensive amount of inputs that may be available at lower costs or higher quality than those offered domestically. This has a positive affect on quality of the company's product as well as their productivity.

Manufacturing products overseas costs much less than if they were made here in the states. Here, we have a minimum wage that we must pay our employees. In many countries there is no minimum wage so companies can get away with paying employees very little. Many people think that it is wrong to exploit the harsh work conditions of underdeveloped countries. By employing residents of these countries, companies are improving the standard of living. A developing country is going to be a rough place to work with or without the employment that companies are willing to provide. They are not being exploited they are slowly improving due to the money they are making manufacturing a company's products.

It's not just the companies who benefit from cheap labor but also consumers. The cheaper it is to make a product the cheaper it is to buy the product. If businesses are paying high prices to manufacture their products here in the U.S., then they are just going to transfer that cost to the consumer. It would be naive to think that a business would cut their profit margin because their costs go up.

One would argue that outsourcing jobs is a negative thing because it is taking jobs from American people. When a company decides to manufacture a product in a different country, that company is giving jobs to the occupants of that country instead of Americans. This causes uproar because those Americans "lost" their jobs. But by outsourcing jobs are transferred, not lost.

If the job was dispatched to an underdeveloped country because labor was cheaper, then the job probably wasn't that great anyway and the worker should focus more energy on acquiring a skill that will provide a career. We live in a developed country and the residents should acquire developed jobs to match. Leave the jobs that a child can do to the underdeveloped