If
you own a computer or piece of electronic equipment, chances
are you may one day have to make a call to a tech support
or customer service department. And if the product in
need of repair happens to be manufactured by one of the
many companies that bases its IT or customer service support
center in another country, your experience with the representative
with whom you spoke likely plays a large part in your
general opinion of the outsourcing debate. Outsourcing,
also called "offshoring" when referring to overseas workforces,
is commonly referred to as the practice of transferring
jobs to other countries in an effort to reduce company
labor costs. As more people lose their jobs to outsourcing
or become increasingly frustrated by having to overcome
language barriers
to communicate with service employees, the outsourcing
trend is failing to meet with general approval in the
United States. Reactions to a 2004 poll in King County,
WA concerning the economical impact of outsourcing varied,
but many respondents felt that long-term outsourcing will
generally harm the American economy and workforce. Regardless
of public opinion, however, the outsourcing of IT jobs,
nay, jobs in general, does not seem to be going the way
of the dodo just yet.
