Outsourcing Us Jobs

(Cannot change 1st page header)

Outsourcing Jobs In America

Brady Hansen

Eagle High School

In 2010, the unemployment rate for the overall United States more than doubled since 2007. In that same amount of time, Idaho nearly tripled their unemployment rate. This is in part due to the outsourcing of jobs to places like Mexico. If the United States were to make a law prohibiting the outsourcing of businesses by shutting down current factories, but allows them to build new factories elsewhere, will significantly reduce the unemployment rate in the United States.

In 1992, the economy was coming of a recession, on slowly going up. 12 years later, there is little change, except that most white-collar(jobs that require a high level of education) are being transferred to places like India so that businesses can cut employment cost severely without trying to use less people. Many, if not all, large businesses are or plan on implementing offshoring for many different reasons. In 2002, offshoring was worth between 32 and 35 billion dollars. It was projected to rise to over one hundred billion dollars in 2008. The problem is that businesses feel like they are overpaying in the United States so they decided to pay much less in adjacent countries, then import from Mexico, for example, and save a lot of money.

Because of this large problem, there most definitely needs federal attention or involvement. What would work best would be a federal law stating that it is illegal to close a building in the United States with intention of transferring the purpose of that building to another factory that is out of the country. The only problem is that many people would try to find loopholes to this law or a way to ignore it altogether. What would be necessary would be to make federal jobs that have the sole purpose of finding and reporting these businesses that are trying to circumvent the law in any way. Another solution to any flaws would be to have all businesses report to the government how many total facilities they have, and what power and productivity in a percent form how each plant is working so that you can tell if a business is slowly lowering the productivity of one plant and raising it in another to slowly close one in the United States. With these efforts in place I think a company would be stopped from or at least harder pressed to continue offshoring jobs.

From 2005 up through 2008 there have been several car and motor companies that have shut down plants in the United States and moved into Mexico. In 2005, Ford made a one billion dollar expansion to their plant in Hermosillo. This expansion provided an additional one thousand two hundred jobs to this plant that was recently outsourced from the U.S. Also, Ford announced that it was ‘shuttering’ fourteen North American factories. In 2006, there were 13,500 jobs for preassembling pieces of cars in different plants in Mexico. These factories are saving money on inventory and labor by shifting jobs to suppliers that are out of the country that send the pre assembled pieces of these cars directly to the factory. Forrester Research made a projection of job losses due to offshoring up through 2015. Starting in 2000, there are about 103,000 jobs lost. This number goes up exponentially until it says that that number will be about 3,320,000 jobs that were lost only from offshoring.

Many people who believe that outsourcing is a good thing to do claim that outsourcing is simply giving charity or a donation to these poorer or less well off people. Adam Ozimek uses a two-person dialogue to illustrate that outsourcing is not