The Cost of Off-Shoring

In the late 1980’s, employers in this country starting downsizing their staff. Both white and blue collar workers were laid off or terminated and it was all attributed to a move towards ‘lean and mean’ production. Concurrently, the standard salary increases of 5 to 8 percent were cut to a mere 1 to 3 percent in many cases, and in other cases, totally eliminated. This move towards lean and mean production leads to a shortage of staff for projects and expansion efforts. These shortages were usually supplemented by temp staffing agencies or consultants. At least for a few years, this strategy kept the jobs in America. In subsequent years however, off-shoring became the trend and tens of thousands of jobs were shipped off to countries where the labor force could be acquired at minimal expense to corporations thereby increasing their profit margins.

The net effect to America was that many blue collar workers at home were out of work and not prepared to perform the duties of the types of jobs that were available. On another facet were the everyday people calling for things like tech support or account and billing issues that were met with the ever impending signs of globalization in the form of accents that made the speaker on the other end of the phone difficult or impossible to understand. That in turn led to a great deal of grief when seeking tech support or account information from some of our largest, most well known firms.

Today, the off-shoring trend seems to slowly be reversing itself. In many cases it has resulted in greater expense to corporations to contend with communication issues and rework than to hire and pay people that understand what is needed and get it done the first time around.

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The Cost of Off-Shoring

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