Absolutely. After the “Great Resignation,” where labor was tight and wages were pushed up, there was a large push in both tech and financial services to stand up offshoring operations in Chennai and Hyderabad (India), Manila (Philippines), and LATAM (primarily Mexico City, but also parts of South America) in order to avoid hiring US workers.
As others have mentioned in this thread, simply look at the unemployment rate and time to find a job for these workers. The labor force exists, companies just don’t want to pay for it or offer flexible work (RTO, which is also used to cram down labor costs). They want the control back.
Walmart years back tried a buy USA push. Lower prices outside the us, due to lower wages, less regulations, …. Didn’t last long. If people really want in country products, they’ll just have to pay more. Companies aren’t going to make less.
Again, this is about outsourcing knowledge work and labor, not goods you can tariff. With regards to your Walmart assertion, more than two-thirds of Walmart U.S. total product spend in FY2024 was on items their suppliers reported were made, grown, or assembled in the United States [1] (per Walmart).
I respectfully think you overestimate the impact this will have.
Like with the H1-B cap discussions there were murmurs about some time back (Not actually reducing the cap, but instead priority-weighting it by salary instead of difficulty to fill the position, something that'd actually _hurt_ US workers in the positions they can actually compete and be paid well for) this change feels a lot more like a performative money grab than something that will actually change the economics.
Indian headcount is not 25% cheaper for the roles I've seen it used for. It is integer-N cheaper, where N can sometimes be >3-5. Additionally, there simply is not the functional, social, or business infrastructure to spin up a new 10k person business center overnight in the US, meaning that for many use cases even if individual labor is findable, it's not realistic in the same respect.
If anything my fear (and what I've observed thus far) is that businesses will see overseas staffing as critical enough that the cuts will come out of the highest cost center: US employment.
We can try it and see what happens. If the results are suboptimal, the taxes on offshoring can be cranked up. In theory, corporations are forced to operate in a market governed by voters and their representatives, and the resulting policy. We expect citizens to follow laws, why not companies? Why would they get a free pass to evade the spirit of the law (out of “cost efficiency” and shareholder profits)? Keep the corporate labor spend in the country or make the business suffer economically.
Companies can hire remote domestically, the talent exists in the US. There is no need to spin up hubs for thousands of people to drive to offices to Zoom from. If you want access to the market, you can hire in the market.
Checked. My bottles don’t say where they were manufactured. That location can be different than the name of the manufacturer. I’m interested in where they’re made, not whether they are using an outsourcing us generic maker.