February /March 2004

Volume 44, Number 4

What will offshoring do to us?

by Ron Arner, Managing Editor

I have mixed feelings about the issue of American companies shipping jobs overseas.

I've seen several news stories about this issue and I've read about it in newspapers and magazines. The Denver Post recently addressed the issue of offshoring jobs in an article titled "Jobs exiled from U.S. give rise to activism," (December 14, 2003). I am glad to see the issue getting a lot of press, because in my opinion it should be an important topic in the upcoming Presidential election.

According to the Post article, more than half a million jobs will have been sent overseas by the end of 2005. If the trend continues, more than three million jobs will be offshored by 2015. I have a hard time blaming some companies for sending jobs abroad—after all, if their competitor has already done so, how else are they to remain competitive?

When I first heard of the overseas job trend, I did not consider it a threat at all, and in fact I couldn't even imagine what everyone was getting so upset about. I taught English in Seoul, Korea, for a year in the late nineties, and saw first hand how poor the English skills were in their capital city despite a U.S. presence for 50 years. That a nation like China, even more isolated culturally from the West than South Korea until recently, would be able to compete in the communication sector is still beyond me.

My time in Korea was one of the most enjoyable and fascinating experiences of my life. The Korean people I met were almost always friendly and full of praise for Americans. My students were fun, I made good money, and if the Korean economy hadn't collapsed while I was there, I don't think I would have had a single bad thing to say about working abroad.

When I came back from Korea and was working for AT&T Broadband, one of our contract customer service centers opened a call center in India. I saved some of the chat sessions I saw from the Indian call center because the grammar and spelling mistakes were so bad I thought they were funny. I couldn't understand immediately how India became a part of the offshoring problem in the first place. After all, the caste system is still in effect and it's one of the poorest nations on Earth. Then I remembered Ghandi. After doing a little research, I was surprised to learn that the British had been in India since the early 17th century, when the East India Company first began trading there.

Ironically, as I was writing this article, I chatted with a support agent because I was having problems getting my TurboTax software to load. It seemed obvious to me from the broken sentences and the repetition of my statements that the agent was located in a foreign country, or at least was not a native English speaker. This leads me to another reason why I feel the offshoring problem may not be much to worry about. Although it will be a long and arduous process, I think companies will eventually realize that to keep their customers happy they will have to provide better customer and technical support in both verbal and written formats. I am not saying that many foreigners do not have an excellent command of the English language. Some of the students I taught in Korea had lived abroad and were already nearly fluent in the English language. I am saying that broken English does not cut it in the business world, and I have never encountered a customer who enjoys explaining him or herself over and over because the person trying to help cannot understand what is being asked of them.

Since I enjoyed working abroad before, I thought there may be one positive aspect to this controversy that I had not yet examined, which would be to work abroad again. After all, foreign earnings are tax-free to a point, and I would love to have another working vacation like I had in Seoul. I decided to search for international jobs on the Internet to see what I could find.

I had a friend who was laid off by Quark a couple of years ago when the company relocated to India, so I wasn't surprised to find most of its openings are now located there as well. It still had seven jobs available in the U.S. and four in other countries besides India.

AT&T (Comcast) and Qwest did not have any foreign jobs available. Comcast doesn't even offer the option to search for them on their Web site. Qwest does, but didn't have any openings.

IBM and Microsoft both had extensive foreign employment Web sites. I saw a Technical Writer position listed on one of them, and was a little surprised to see Microsoft's foreign sites written in the native language of the country they represent, not in English. (The job descriptions were in English, though.)

If the U.S. economy doesn't get better soon I may have to seriously consider working abroad again. Now that I'm a homeowner, I'm not completely sold on the idea, because I really enjoy gardening and can't imagine what I would do with my all my belongings. The Denver Post article I mentioned at the beginning of my article highlighted one Web site devoted to fighting the overseas trend: HireAmericanCitizens.org. Although I remain undecided on how I feel about the offshoring issue, I do know that I'm going to make up my mind by next November, and I intend to vote accordingly. I certainly hope you will do the same.