who wants gandelf to start on about outsourcing?

[Heta]

or so more can understand

when you are to tired to masturbate, you pay someone else to do it for you

[OohhoO]

Should outsource god IMO

[Gandelf]

Was going to say something but got side-tracked and forgot.
Oh wait a mo, just remembered....

You would think that customers could influence manufacturers regarding outsourcing. I mean, it's our money right? We have the freedom and right to spend our money where and with whom we wish, surely?

Are we so blind, or couldn't care less? We're always told that it's a "buyer's market", so if everyone stuck together and insisted on only buying goods from companies who don't outsource, then those who outsource would lose business and would either go bust or have to source locally.

I think that's what it is to a certain extent. People just buy without checking where it's come from. The sense of pride of the people has gradually been eroded through years of seeing home companies being sold to foreign companies, like Rolls Royce for example. Also, remember when the Mini was a British car, built in Britain? Remember when British football clubs were British owned? Might as well remake "The Italian Job" and use Volkswagen Beetles! "Halo, mein name ist Michael Cain, und not a lot of people know zat!" (that's a joke btw, I don't have anything against the Germans really).

Think I'd better shut up.

[Lairiodd]

It's where jobs have been sent abroad where they can be done by foreigners in poor countries who work for 10p an hour or whatever. It's like slave labour

No it isn't, they get paid more than any other job they could get in their home country. This is good for them and good for the company but ....

Unfortunately, it has the side effect of lower quality products, despite prices for said products being the same to consumers for the most part.

... that can happen .

Feel free to argue that it is not a good buisness idea (which in alot of cases it isn't). However it is not fair to call it slave labour or exploiting the workforce as if they didn't do it, then those workers would have even lower wages.

[Xest]

Part the problem is most people don't think about needing phone support when they buy a service like a bank, a computer, an ISP, a mobile phone or whatever and that's one of the most problematic outsourced sectors because apart from them being incompetent (due to being so cheap, you simply don't get good people for 79p an hour whatever country you're in) they neither speak our language well or understand localised issues and whilst this is no problem when outsourcing manufacturing, it's a major set of issues in customer focussed jobs such as call centres.

It's only when people have bought the product/service and find that they need phone support that they realise how utterly shafted they have been, in the long run I'd imagine that this will show too, people wont return if they have a bad experience with a call centre. Using Dell as an example again, simply because they're probably one of the most blatant examples of how a company can go from fantastic with a brilliant reputation to a really heavily frowned upon company due to outsourcing - they were down in profit by $1billion in the last year and this is in a period where their market is on a rise not a decline, so something has clearly hit their business hard and I'd guess almost certainly that that something is outsourcing. Other companies have now moved their call centres back to the UK - even Dell has built a new call centre in Scotland - so it's not entirely hopeless, we are seeing change back to quality service in the call centre area, but don't expect to see high quality manufacturing return any time soon.

[Xest]

No it isn't, they get paid more than any other job they could get in their home country. This is good for them and good for the company but ....

....

Feel free to argue that it is not a good buisness idea (which in alot of cases it isn't). However it is not fair to call it slave labour or exploiting the workforce as if they didn't do it, then those workers would have even lower wages.

I think you missed the sarcasm Lair

[Lairiodd]

Are we so blind, or couldn't care less? We're always told that it's a "buyer's market", so if everyone stuck together and insisted on only buying goods from companies who don't outsource, then those who outsource would lose business and would either go bust or have to source locally.

Nobody really cares, they just want cheaper products.

I think that's what it is to a certain extent. People just buy without checking where it's come from. The sense of pride of the people has gradually been eroded through years of seeing home companies being sold to foreign companies, like Rolls Royce for example. Also, remember when the Mini was a British car, built in Britain? Remember when British football clubs were British owned? Might as well remake "The Italian Job" and use Volkswagen Beetles!

Specialisation and free trade leads to improvements in efficiency. If a country makes everything itself then there is less economies of scale and less competition.

[Gandelf]

Specialisation and free trade leads to improvements in efficiency. If a country makes everything itself then there is less economies of scale and less competition.

That's not what I was saying. What I was trying to convey is how terrible it is that established British companies have been bought out by foreign manufacturers. Companies that stood for great quality (like Rolls Royce, as I previously mentioned) and were an icon of "Britishness".

[Slayn]

It started when things went from being made in England/wherever to made in Taiwan/Singapore, only that something made in Taiwan/Singapore nowadays is actually the high quality version and the stuff made in the rest of China/India is what you want to watch out for

Bets on how many years before "Made in China" or "Made in India" is a sign of higher quality and it's the "Made in Africa" you want to watch out for

There's a little confusion here I think. If a product is made entirely abroad and then sold in here, then it isn't outsourced, it's simply an import. This is true even if the company is a domestic one, like Apple or Nike or whatever.

Outsourcing is when a firm moves only a certain stage of its operations into the hands of another company, often abroad. So when Microsoft has indian programmers debugging its products, or when The Simpsons have Korean artists animate their shows, that is outsourcing. It means that the firm is paying another firm to provide the labour and management of that particular stage of their service.

The firm almost always does this to lower their costs. It would also be feasible, though, for a firm to do it to improve the quality of their product. When a games company pays to use the Half-life engine, or Havok physics code, this is in a certain sense outsourcing.

The argument that it is slavery is, as Lair said, a little facile. Outsourced workers to get paid peanuts compared to the domestic workers they replace, but if it wasn't a competetive wage in their own country, they wouldn't take the jobs in the first place. If they are doing the work and living in poverty, it is only because their already existed a less visible but equally severe poverty for them in that country.

[Xest]

As I said my slavery comment was meant sarcastically

You're right though, outsourcing is rather different to what we've been discussing, that's why I tend to see it more as a thing that's effect call centre and software quality than anything because as with the examples you cite, these are things that have been shifted abroad whilst the company itself remains in the US/Europe/wherever.