Shore!

If you follow the talk about the movement of jobs overseas, which is usually called something like 'off shoring', 'right shoring', 'near shoring', and the like, you know that the concept is simple. Any work that can be done without hands on or face to face contact can be shipped away from the point of delivery. Radiologists in Iceland can read XRays that were taken in Uganda. People in a room in Honolulu can answer the speakers for drive-ins in Montana. Computer programmers in India can write code for programs running in Canada to handle health claims in the United States for people from Mexico doing work for people in the United Kingdom. Its the global economy, and it scares me. It is, in a large way, the reason I've lost my job, and others have and will continue to do so. Its not a bad thing... but its not a good thing, either. Opposition to the concept is usually portrayed as that of a Luddite, or someone who just can't hack it in fair competition. I oppose it because I don't think it's fair. By which I mean, fair to me, and to people like me.

An article on the Economist's View weblog quotes an article from the Washington Post: Free Trade's Great, But Offshoring Rattles Me, written by Alan Blinder. He basically says that the concept is clearly good for global trade, and the companies that practice it, but its just as clearly not good for workers who've put time and effort into arriving where they are on the socioeconomic ladder, because we have poor safety nets in place for people negatively affected by such moves, and we have poor educational systems to ensure, or at least make likely, that the people here continue to be at the top of the food chain when it comes to whose work gets outsourced where. The article is worth reading.

As for me, I like the observation I've seen in multiple places to the effect that the CEOs who like off-shoring work never seem to feel that their own job should be outsourced.