Outsourcing Case

Outsourcing, also known as offshoring, can be argued to be beneficial to America, but it hurts America far more than it benefits. Outsourcing is when a company hires outside sources, i.e. other countries, to produce goods and provide services for a cheaper rate ("Outsourcing, 1). While outsourcing can help lower prices on goods and services and make higher profits, outsourcing takes jobs away from Americans, causes even more economical problems, and can diminish the quality of products. Also, the question of "can it be stopped" comes up frequently. Outsourcing, once thought to be a great idea for America, is actually hurting our country economically and socially.

Outsourcing takes jobs away from Americans; it is simple as that. The reason to this situation is there are very low job creation levels in America's economy. As jobs are moved to overseas to lower cost labor areas, it will change the type of jobs here in the U.S. This will make Americans move on to different jobs, ones that they have no experience with and have to start all over again. This may even make them reluctant to work. Retraining and assistance programs are hard to put into play for workers because it takes even longer to get back to working (Gerdes, 1). The "high-skilled" jobs, including the computer and technology industry, are the ones being transferred the most (Ellis-Christensen, 1). Many big named technology corporations, such as Google and Microsoft, are shipping their research and development jobs to different companies because of their low labor cost. Now because of this, people in America are finding it difficult to find work because of their displacement. Many of the job openings on high leveled engineering openings are for jobs in the Chinese side of their company (Gerdes, 1).

In a sense, America's economical problems are actually helping China's economy. Since we are moving jobs over to other countries, we lose the jobs and economical benefit from the work people put out. But, since China now has those jobs, their economy benefits from it by having much more jobs open, and America suffers from the lack of jobs. Theory has it that eventually outsourcing in China will lead to China manufacturing technologically advanced goods and services. Chinese companies are also taking advantage of their outsourcing benefits by making new investments on the money they are making. Also a benefit for China is that most of these outsourced jobs are factory jobs, and Chinese workers do not go past the factory job in their careers (Dyer, 1). This actually leads to some problems later on. While China is basking in the glory, America's economy is hurting.

The refuting side of this debate is that outsourcing is beneficial to everyone. A benefit to outsourcing is the lower prices on goods and services which make higher profits and has raised the standard of living for foreign workers. Outsourcing in Mexico has led to higher profits. U.S. consumers have enjoyed lower prices by buying familiar products from them. Higher demand for labor in Mexico has lead to higher wages which then improved the standard of