Is global outsourcing an opportunity or threat? Well the numbers say a lot; according to a recent report by Forrester research, 3.3 million U.S. jobs in less than 15 years are expected to be lost overseas by 2015. What is worrying most people is not the amount of jobs leaving, but the types of jobs leaving. As reported in NOW With Bill Moyer's (2003), a new wave of jobs are leaving U.S. shores: software development, customer service, back-office support, product development and other white-collar jobs.
From the numbers posted above you would think that global outsourcing is bad right? Well this is not the case. Those that are against global outsourcing only have a few claims one being the loss of American jobs. This is true, there is a decrease in American jobs, but this is only temporary. When people start spending more money the economy will pick up, thus creating more employment opportunities. In case people have forgotten, we are still in or slowly coming out of a recession. As a result, jobs were lost anyway. For instance, many airline employees lost their jobs because airline companies were losing money because people were scared to fly after 9/11. Losing money=lay-offs. The airline companies losing money had nothing to do with outsourcing. There are no concrete facts that say global outsourcing is bad for the U.S. economy. It is funny how people are just now making an issue out of outsourcing, when outsourcing has been going on for the last 40 years. In those past forty years I have seen nothing but prosperity for the U.S. our markets are expending, our economy is growing, and our production is escalating. So what is really going on? Why are people viewing global outsourcing as a threat, when it should be an opportunity? An opportunity to explore new global economies, and expand our own economy in the process.
In The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas Friedman says: .
Globalization has replaced the cold war system with the integration of capital, technology, and information across national borders- uniting Brazilian peasants, Indonesian entrepreneurs, and Chinese villagers, and Silicon Valley technocrats in a single global village.