Subject: blog clipping regarding “outsourcing”

an interesting read at [www.ftrain.com] – not least as commentary upon and a pointer to another article…

Initially, I found The Dark Side of the Outsourcing Revolution to be a breath of fresh air. The article seeks to see the growing debate over outsourcing (call centers, programming services, etc.) not in black and white, but in shades of gray, and in particular, the author, Naeem Mohaiemen, seeks to show that racism, as well as economics, is driving the debate over outsourcing. Given a long interest in the urgent problems of American racism, I was immediately sympathetic. But his points often rely on lefty conventional wisdom, and on a second reading I found myself frustrated with many of his arguments.

For instance, he argues: Would outsourcing be a political hot potato if the jobs were going to Norway, Israel or Portugal? In fact, no one complains about job loss to Ireland, even though it is the global leader in outsourcing.

This makes rough emotional sense that sort of racism is real in the U.S. but the statement loses much of its force when you realize that there is far less wage disparity between those countries and the U.S. than between, say, Bangladesh and the U.S. It’s the fallacy of exclusion. In addition, the statistics provided on Ireland ($8.3 billion last year in outsourcing revenue from the U.S.) and India ($7.7 billion) do not address the fact that a dollar in India buys you, presumably, much more labor than can be bought in Ireland. Assuming that is true, if you compared the number of person-hours bought for those sums, you’d find that India displaces far more American workers in this field than Ireland. And the real issue for workers, after all, is not dollars, but jobs.

I don’t necessarily endorse any or all of the above – I prefer to keep my own counsel; still I find it interesting as a clarification of some of the techniques used to obfuscate the arguments.