Outsourcing

Is outsourcing--shipping American jobs overseas--good or bad?
According to Ron and Anil Hira, in their book entitled Outsourcing America (Amacon, 2005), the problem isn't so much that outsourcing is happening, but how it is happening. Most companies believe they can save a tremendous amount of money by outsourcing to other countries, where labor is much cheaper--thereby being able to lower prices and make more money for their shareholders. But this causes many Americans to lose their jobs. Economists claim that those loosing their jobs can be retrained for other jobs that will make them even more money. The trouble with this argument--the disiplaced persons, in many cases, are not able to get new jobs paying as much as their old jobs. The Hiras point out that outsourcing continues to grow and that this is becoming a huge problem.. Rather than saying outsourcing should cease, the Hiras make a number of policy recommendations, including these: (1) Overhaul assistance programs for displaced workers. (2) Train the next generation of workers to have lifelong marketable skills, placing primary emphasis on learning how to learn and a secondary emphasis on specific skills. (3) New institutions are needed to represent the interests of workers. Individual American workers are the big losers from outsourcing; "they are at the mercy of a system that offers few protections in the face of the potentially devasting loss of their jobs, benefits and, in fact, their careers. Labor unions are not effective.