Outsourcing Jobs to Foreign Countries

Outsourcing Jobs to Foreign Countries

Frank Soto Jr.

Axia College of University of Phoenix

COM120

William Hamlin

February 1, 2007

It is becoming progressively more popular in today’s job market for companies to

outsource American-held jobs to foreign countries. This situation is affecting more and more

people and especially here in El Paso, Texas. Soon to be outsourced is Air System Components,

or ASC, as it plans to lay off about 68 people from its’ two El Paso manufacturing plants this

January. It plans to move some of its operations to Juarez, Mexico, our neighbor city.

Air System Components manufactures vents for air conditioning and heating systems. These

are the latest job losses in El Paso’s manufacturing sector, which has lost thousands of jobs in

the recent years. The sector lost 700 jobs between October 2005 and October 2006, the state's

latest employment data show. Situations like these make me upset because El Paso is a

medium size city that does not have the luxury of losing its’ jobs.

These types of situations are viewed very differently from the perspective of

profitability for the companies versus the emotional and financial effect that the outsourcing

has on the employees. In some cases outsourcing causes employees to quit ahead of time. This

makes it more complicated for the person because he or she won’t be able to find a job right

away. There are companies who have their fired employee train his or her own replacement. I

believe the number one reason why companies employ foreign labor is its profitability. Due to

the lack of federal wage controls a U.S. employer can hire several employees at a fraction of the

cost of a single American employee.

The success of a foreign employee is their training and experience with the job in which

they are taking over. Perhaps the best source of training for a foreign employee comes from

someone who has already been working at this job for some time. This often causes companies

to have employees, as they are being fired from the company, stick around for some additional

time and train the employee who will be taking over their job. This type of situation is not right

at all.

The most reasonable way for the company to go about having employees train their

replacements would be to offer them something in return. By using the offer of additional

money to the employee, it then becomes his or her decision to take the incentive and help train

the new employee, or to leave it up to the company to train the employee some other way.

This is ethical because it allows laid-off employees to choose, without repercussions, whether

or not to help in training their replacements. As long as the company keeps the training

voluntary, they give the laid-off employee the chance to bury his or her pride and earn some

final extra money before he or she must face unemployment or find a new job. In this case, the

ethicality that is questioned is whether it is alright to outsource jobs to foreign countries. It is

ethical for the company to make the training of the fired employee’s replacement