Small businesses are increasingly being faced with the dilemma of outsourcing to cut costs and maximize profits but at the price of domestic jobs and accountability.
The outsourcing of huge sectors of the Australian workforce has becoming an increasingly difficult problem to tackle as companies look to cut costs and maximize profits. Read more
InformationWeek
Offshore outsourcing will continue at brisk pace for next four years, and then ease up as automation replaces offshoring as a way for companies to save money, a new study says.
Mounting political pressure will do little to stop the flow of technology and other jobs moving offshore to low-cost destinations like India and China, new research indicates.
Some 750,000 jobs in IT, finance, and other business services will be offshored from the U.S. and Western Europe to developing nations between now and 2016, according to a study released this week by the Hackett Group. Among the positions going overseas will be 270,000 IT jobs. Read more
THIS IS AN EXTREMELY IMPORTANT BOOK
“So we agree with the end-of-work crowd that computerization is bringing deep changes, but we’re not as pessimistic as they are. We don’t believe in the coming obsolescence of all human workers. In fact, some human skills are more valuable than ever, even in an age of incredibly powerful and capable digital technologies. But other skills have become worthless, and people who hold the wrong ones now find that they have little to offer employers. They’re losing the race against the machine, a fact reflected in today’s employment statistics.”Authors Race Against the Machine
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: January 24, 2012 New York Times
In an essay, entitled “Making It in America,” in the latest issue of The Atlantic, the author Adam Davidson relates a joke from cotton country about just how much a modern textile mill has been automated: The average mill has only two employees today, “a man and a dog. The man is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to keep the man away from the machines.”
Davidson’s article is one of a number of pieces that have recently appeared making the point that the reason we have such stubbornly high unemployment and sagging middle-class incomes today is largely because of the big drop in demand because of the Great Recession, but it is also because of the quantum advances in both globalization and the information technology revolution, which are more rapidly than ever replacing labor with machines or foreign workers. Read More
CHARLES DUHIGG and KEITH BRADSHER NYT
When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president. But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?
Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas. Read More
Ron Hira:, Associate Professor of Public Policy at Rochester Institute of Technology
The goal of these guest worker programs is to bring in foreign workers who complement the American workforce. Indeed, many highly skilled and highly paid workers are brought in by employers to do so. However, loopholes have made it too easy to bring in cheaper foreign workers, with ordinary skills, who directly substitute for rather than complement American workers. The use of the programs for cheaper labor is substantial and growing, and they are clearly displacing and denying opportunities to American workers.Read More
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