Sen. Kerry has been quoted in the news lately saying harsh things about business leaders who are shipping jobs overseas - where the work can get done cheaper - while their own compensation levels remain obscenely high. Anti-Kerry forces have enjoyed pointing to the numerous offshore operations of his wife's Ketchup plants. I think this level of discourse in unbecoming. It also misses an important point.
Any manager at any level has two priorities these days: Cut costs, and maximize personal reward. The first they do for the company, the latter is for the self. It is the nature of the beast. Outsourcing/ offshoring is merely a smart way to do business. Just like hiring young energetic people for $36K is smarter than hiring a fat old guy for $90 or $100k - if the job can be done cheaper, it just makes good business sense.
Besides, according to this week's Business Week, the real culprit is NOT offshoring jobs. No friends the real cause of lost jobs is productivity. After all these years, all the investment in process improvement is paying off. The BW article says about 300,000 jobs went overseas but 2. 5 million jobs have been simply eliminated by better technology.
This makes a lot of sense. Look at all the clerical and support jobs that have been obsoleted by improvements in telephony, web self service, bar coding, word processing, spreadsheets. And aren't the job losses a bit inflated by all those Y2K COBOL experts who were living large during the Millenium scare.
So, let's not castigate CEO's for being not being patriotic. It is un-american to criticize greed and self interest. Especially if you are sitting on a fortune built on cheap ketchup labor.
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