The New Slaves--Offshoring Office Jobs
American business now offshores a wide variety of office jobs: Customer Service, Information Technology, Accounting, Financial Analysis, Engineering, Architecture and maybe more fields that I am not aware of.
Someone decided that these were jobs that could be done from a distance and never gave any thought to the fact that people working in other countries never get feedback for the work they do. When I created a computer program in America for an American company, the co-workers who used that program were quick to let me know if it failed in any way. I was the one who had to fix my own errors, but I had the privilege to learn from my mistakes. If someone in India writes code for America and the code bombs, someone in America has to try to fix the error. The person in India never learns from experience. Of course, if I were sitting in America writing programs for Indian companies in the same way, I wouldn’t learn from my mistakes either. Distance does impact results.
When I produced computer programs in America for American companies, I quickly learned each business from the people around me. I could run down the hall with questions or suggestions. That just doesn’t happen between continents and across time zones. Isolation creates problems. Distance does impact results.
The media is encouraging people to consider going abroad for major surgeries to save money. The problem is that surgery is often only the beginning of treatment. My own major eye surgeries left me “married” to the retinal surgeon for the rest of my life. I will be required to see him for a follow-up exam every year. Is the offshored patient to go abroad annually for an exam? Or will American doctors be relegated to the role of follow-up examiner for hotshot surgeons abroad? How much faith would you have in the competence of a professional willing to spend his career doing follow-ups for surgeons in another country?
Most Americans have regular dealings with customer service abroad and are left with the feeling that they have not received service at all.
I’m convinced that my mortgage company does not have its foreign customer service agents hooked up to its computer systems. When they promise to send me paperwork, that paperwork never arrives. It has happened so many times that I’m certain their computers never upload to America at all.
I have, however, discovered the reason that the person we speak to abroad begins to speak faster as soon as we ask that person to speak slower: talking to us is terrifying for the foreign customer service agent. In most countries there is a probationary period of six months to a year. At the end of the probationary period, the people who are not keepers can easily be fired. In most countries, those who are kept cannot easily be fired after passing probation. As you might imagine, a lot of probationers do end up fired and replaced with cheaper new probationers. Joblessness is a severe problem in many countries that offer cheap labor and there are lots of candidates for each job. The person who is not a keeper at one company may never be hired for a second chance at another company. So when you indicate that you can’t understand that person’s English, you are sending that person into the kind of panic that makes that person even harder to understand. It is the ultimate no-win situation for everyone involved-- on both continents.
In any case, when you call a bank for assistance, do you want your most personal financial information and all of the details of your identity available to someone in another country where your government couldn’t protect you even if it wanted to? Everyone knows that hackers plague the Internet, but corporations feel entitled to send our most private financial and medical information to banana republics that could at any moment fall into the clutches of an anti-American dictator. And we aren’t even told of the risk we’re being subjected to until the worst has already happened.
This is the subject for a whole book rather than a blog posting, but to me the most important point is that while American companies insist that they are shipping jobs overseas for lack of skilled workers in America, actually they are eliminating skill sets in America. Our own corporations are doing exactly what is required to reduce us to a second rate nation with a reduced standard of living.
Students are not stupid. When they see American engineers, software developers, financial analysts, accountants etc unemployed and unable to find new jobs, then they don’t study those fields. Who in his right mind would go tens of thousands of dollars into debt to study a field that already doesn’t have enough jobs for all the skilled Americans who want them?
Soon America will have no choice but to offshore because there really won’t be Americans with the needed skills. Already there are few tool and dye makers because those good jobs went abroad with the factories. We play musical chairs with American lives for the profit of a few. In the end, we will have pulled all the chairs out from under all of us.
Someone decided that these were jobs that could be done from a distance and never gave any thought to the fact that people working in other countries never get feedback for the work they do. When I created a computer program in America for an American company, the co-workers who used that program were quick to let me know if it failed in any way. I was the one who had to fix my own errors, but I had the privilege to learn from my mistakes. If someone in India writes code for America and the code bombs, someone in America has to try to fix the error. The person in India never learns from experience. Of course, if I were sitting in America writing programs for Indian companies in the same way, I wouldn’t learn from my mistakes either. Distance does impact results.
When I produced computer programs in America for American companies, I quickly learned each business from the people around me. I could run down the hall with questions or suggestions. That just doesn’t happen between continents and across time zones. Isolation creates problems. Distance does impact results.
The media is encouraging people to consider going abroad for major surgeries to save money. The problem is that surgery is often only the beginning of treatment. My own major eye surgeries left me “married” to the retinal surgeon for the rest of my life. I will be required to see him for a follow-up exam every year. Is the offshored patient to go abroad annually for an exam? Or will American doctors be relegated to the role of follow-up examiner for hotshot surgeons abroad? How much faith would you have in the competence of a professional willing to spend his career doing follow-ups for surgeons in another country?
Most Americans have regular dealings with customer service abroad and are left with the feeling that they have not received service at all.
I’m convinced that my mortgage company does not have its foreign customer service agents hooked up to its computer systems. When they promise to send me paperwork, that paperwork never arrives. It has happened so many times that I’m certain their computers never upload to America at all.
I have, however, discovered the reason that the person we speak to abroad begins to speak faster as soon as we ask that person to speak slower: talking to us is terrifying for the foreign customer service agent. In most countries there is a probationary period of six months to a year. At the end of the probationary period, the people who are not keepers can easily be fired. In most countries, those who are kept cannot easily be fired after passing probation. As you might imagine, a lot of probationers do end up fired and replaced with cheaper new probationers. Joblessness is a severe problem in many countries that offer cheap labor and there are lots of candidates for each job. The person who is not a keeper at one company may never be hired for a second chance at another company. So when you indicate that you can’t understand that person’s English, you are sending that person into the kind of panic that makes that person even harder to understand. It is the ultimate no-win situation for everyone involved-- on both continents.
In any case, when you call a bank for assistance, do you want your most personal financial information and all of the details of your identity available to someone in another country where your government couldn’t protect you even if it wanted to? Everyone knows that hackers plague the Internet, but corporations feel entitled to send our most private financial and medical information to banana republics that could at any moment fall into the clutches of an anti-American dictator. And we aren’t even told of the risk we’re being subjected to until the worst has already happened.
This is the subject for a whole book rather than a blog posting, but to me the most important point is that while American companies insist that they are shipping jobs overseas for lack of skilled workers in America, actually they are eliminating skill sets in America. Our own corporations are doing exactly what is required to reduce us to a second rate nation with a reduced standard of living.
Students are not stupid. When they see American engineers, software developers, financial analysts, accountants etc unemployed and unable to find new jobs, then they don’t study those fields. Who in his right mind would go tens of thousands of dollars into debt to study a field that already doesn’t have enough jobs for all the skilled Americans who want them?
Soon America will have no choice but to offshore because there really won’t be Americans with the needed skills. Already there are few tool and dye makers because those good jobs went abroad with the factories. We play musical chairs with American lives for the profit of a few. In the end, we will have pulled all the chairs out from under all of us.
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