[cik]

> The other issue is that this further incentivizes companies to off-shore their support

Why is this a problem? Why are we so attached to the notion that a role must be completed from a specific jurisdiction (outside of regulatory). If you believe in remote work, then why should it matter from where that work is delivered?

Plenty of small companies offshore early support, to reduce costs. In many cases this provides jobs in economies that otherwise doesn't have them, and can lead to a tech industry that in turn hires globally. There are several economies that received a boost this way, and now benefit.

I don't see the problem. Yes, there may be uncomfortable shuffling of roles, layoffs,etc. But, as a believer in globalization, this will just happen. Yes, it will impact me as well.

[modo_mario]

It's wage suppression. Plain and simple.

And workers that don't get what you're on about because they only have the script for a regular customers with regular issues become often incredibly frustrating when you have a more complicated issue that would be immediately resolved by someone at a helpdesk locally that immediately knows what internal niche department and person you should be redirected to.

[charcircuit]

>Why is this a problem?

Because it means that I will have to interact with foreigners instead of my own people. It means that a job that my people could have done gets sent off to the lowest bidder in an economy far away. It means that I get a lower quality service as I believe my people can do it better.

>Why are we so attached to the notion that a role must be completed from a specific jurisdiction (outside of regulatory).

Because in group preference along with wanting to win and be the best are human nature.

>If you believe in remote work, then why should it matter from where that work is delivered?

There is a difference between the location a job is done and who is doing the job. If I remote work from China, I am still American. Changing my location on planet earth didn't change who I am, nor does it change my values and work ethic.

>In many cases this provides jobs in economies that otherwise doesn't have them, and can lead to a tech industry that in turn hires globally.

Which I see as a bad thing as it means money and jobs that could have gone to my own country are leaving and being sent to another. I would rather have local companies invest in local AI than to hire foreigners.

>There are several economies that received a boost this way, and now benefit.

I would rather boost my own economy than someone else's.

[close04]

> It means that I get a lower quality service as I believe my people can do it better.

It's hard to argue nationalistic beliefs.

Maybe "your people can do it better" but they won't because they do it for the lowest possible salary. The only difference is what's the lowest possible salary the company can get away with, because the lowest possible service quality they can get away with is the same no matter where they deliver from. Some nationalists will even tolerate a worse quality of service as long as it comes from "their own".

You wanted a cheaper and cheaper service so the companies offer it to you. When a company advertises "services delivered locally" none of the big mouth nationalists reach in their pocket to pay for it. Part of their values no doubt.

> If I remote work from China, I am still American. Changing my location on planet earth didn't change who I am, nor does it change my values and work ethic.

You think you and "your people" must deliver a better service and have better values because you are "American" (US citizen or literally anyone in the Americas?), or any country for that matter. Is that a part of that work ethic and values? To everyone else in the world that just sounds like very unfounded exceptionalism.

[modo_mario]

>but they won't because they do it for the lowest possible salary

And that lowest possible salary is so low because we allow for wage suppression tactics such as this. My grandma tells with pride of the work they used to do and they did quite well for themselves.

It was things like rolling cigars and soldering on an assembly line. Stuff that now would be described as sweatshop work that nobody would expect to happen locally.

I now do far "higher status" work in the eyes of the classists that think all of this is fine but still don't get close to their wealth.

[close04]

> And that lowest possible salary is so low because we allow for wage suppression tactics such as this.

When you're talking about better paid jobs you're right to point that out.

But for the bottom of the barrel jobs this doesn't hold and you can check by looking at the salaries for these jobs in the countries that can't offshore further. They're still dismal.

The real reason is that the people looking at these jobs have no negotiating power whatsoever. They have no essential irreplaceable skills or experience, nothing that's hard to find on the market. All they have usually is the desperation to do any job to make a living. They need that salary now while the company can beat around the bush with the service, throw AI chatbots at it, allow longer call queues, and so on.

If anything, a the offshore employees have more leverage with their employer because they need to speak some foreign languages to interact with customers. They can differentiate themselves from the sea of other people in their own country. A US employee in a US call center serving US customers doesn't even have that. Not that much different in Canada despite the bilingualism situation.

[modo_mario]

>But for the bottom of the barrel jobs this doesn't hold and you can check by looking at the salaries for these jobs in the countries that can't offshore further. They're still dismal.

No. It absolutely holds and the lowest common denominator is not some argument that it can't be better. Supressing wages in higher income countries does not mean that the lowest income countries somehow get pulled up proportionally.

>The real reason is that the people looking at these jobs have no negotiating power whatsoever. They have no essential irreplaceable skills or experience, nothing that's hard to find on the market. All they have usually is the desperation to do any job to make a living.

My grandparents on one side of the family had jobs that required no (At least not after a good amount of training) essential irreplaceable skills or experience and had plenty of purchasing power. Glass cutting at a glass factory, rolling cigars, soldering on an assembly line. Their negotiating power existed based on the fact that they were good workers and would fuck off to a different factory or pressure trough a union. They did very well for themselves.

Now that negotiating power is gone. They wouldn't go to philips or so because philips doesn't manufacture here anymore. The equivalent jobs that can't be outsourced run from my experience mostly on imported workers from poorer countries who will be replaced the moment they demand better conditions. The effects of that supression on "bottom of the barrel" job leeches upwards into jobs that people perceive as higher status without many people noticing. After all those people that would have done them still go for a different job.

[close04]

> had jobs that required no (At least not after a good amount of training) essential irreplaceable skills or experience and had plenty of purchasing power.

The world changed. The skill pool was expanded significantly and skills are distributed differently. It used to be that no formal education was needed for some things, now everyone expects a PhD.

> would fuck off to a different factory or pressure trough a union. They did very well for themselves.

You still don't get it do you? You wanted stuff so cheap that every "factory" now pays the same shitty salary, and there are no unions because they drive wages and by extension prices up.

You want more proof? Amazon drivers are safe from offshoring, you can't deliver a package in the US while being physically in India. So why are they still paid a pittance and have to pee in bottles while driving? Because they have no leverage and you wanted everything dirt cheap. Offshoring had little to do with it in real life, only in the heads of nationalists.

[intended]

First off, I get the nationalist instinct. I don’t think it’s bad per se.

However, it’s nearly the same global economy. At some point those issues in faraway places are the foreign policy issues in your localities. This is not a defense or argument in favor of hollowing out local economies.

Sadly, cost arbitrage will remain a thing. One underused avenue to make it a more even playing field, is to exports labour and safety standards from the developed world.

Arbitrage built from factories and sweat shops which have suicide nets should be anathema.

This type of enforcement is well within the realms of possibility. FDA inspectors travel to the source factories in other countries to ensure they are compliant.

[modo_mario]

> At some point those issues in faraway places are the foreign policy issues in your localities. This is not a defense or argument in favor of hollowing out local economies.

Factory conditions in kuala lumpur scarcely reach my ears and we don't live under a single world government. It sounds exactly like in defense or argument in favor of hollowing out local economies.

> One underused avenue to make it a more even playing field, is to exports labour and safety standards from the developed world.

Because that has never been and never will be the point of the outsourcing. The point is to undercut higher wages and bargaining power.

[charcircuit]

I don't want an even playing field. I want my country to have the advantage. It shouldn't come down to a 50/50 coin toss whether to offshore or not because they are seen as equally expensive.

I also don't think it would play out that well. If you are offshoring to country B but forced to use a factory following standards from country A you aren't going to be able to compete against a company from Country B using the best factories from country B. In my view you should either try and beat them at their own game by using equivalent factories or you should not outsource and use innovation to come up with a more efficient factory. Purposefully choosing an inefficient option leads to an inefficient economy.

[intended]

> I don't want an even playing field. I want my country to have the advantage.

Why the whole country?

Are all your countrymen equally deserving? Do all of them work as hard, care the same, and give back to their nation the same?

I too, want my nation to “win”, but I want that advantage to be something that we built and something that endures.

They need to win by just being that good, and creating an environment that allows for that to happen.

Since everyone cannot be the best and brightest, I would want a safety net that allows for a society that isn’t constantly in fight or flight.

> offshoring .. best factories from country B.

What typically happens is that factory B will offload work to factories that wont be inspected.

> use innovation to come up with a more efficient factory.

This is what is happening today. We’ve been losing more factory jobs to robotics than outsourcing for a while.

——

When manufacturing jobs are lost, the issue of underemployment and the loss of expertise is what hampers economies. Burger flipping pays far less than Foreman or specialist, and losing manufacturing hubs means no cross pollination and skill development in your populace.

This is all to say I am well aware of the issues, and sympathetic to your greater cause.

However, there is no victory for me in your ‘defeat’. The average citizen in any country has more to gain from the deepening of the middle class globally.

Healthy economies, with actual competition, create a deeper more informed citizenry. This means more people living up to their potential, more ideas, more culture, more resources to solve challenges, and a chance to live up the ideals we seem to be failing.

[modo_mario]

Not him but my 2 cents:

>The average citizen in any country has more to gain from the deepening of the middle class globally.

The deepening of the middleclass here to me has seemingly meant that more people do jobs that are seen as middle class. At the same time the "middle class" purchasing power when it comes to important thing isn't that far off from that of the lower class of the past. yes they can buy big flat screen tv's for cheap now but more important things have started to become an issue despite rapid technological advancement.

>Healthy economies, with actual competition, create a deeper more informed citizenry. This means more people living up to their potential,

You now compete with a foreign multinational which employs people at a fraction of your local wages. So you no longer compete and there's less real actual competition.

[intended]

> At the same time the "middle class" purchasing power when it comes to important thing isn't that far off from that of the lower class of the past. yes they can buy big flat screen tv's for cheap now but more important things have started to become an issue despite rapid technological advancement.

You are drawing a causal line between correlated events.

The middle class globally has been weakened since the 80s.

One of the current issues we are contending with is the fact that wealth has concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.

America recently had a year where the top 10% of earners drove nearly 50% of consumer spending.

We could spend the entirety of the conversation discussing wealth concentration, and it would still be a worthwhile digression.

You can’t have a consumer driven market if the consumers don’t have anything to purchase with.

However, when you dismiss flat screen TVs offhandedly also does your own argument a disservice. By deciding what is important and what is not, you are taking on the role of arbiter of subjective merit.

This is fine, but then you have to also make arguments for how the economic incentives must be aligned to achieve your subjective goals.

——

From what I have said, you should know that I am sympathetic to the motivations behind your argument. I am not sympathetic to bad arguments.

Protectionism is fatal to economies, and simply tanks your drive. The ability of MNCs to just offshore work should be benign, but appears malignant. If work is offshored, it should also result in more productivity or higher productivity in the nation it is offshored from.

You should see higher tax revenues as a result, which should be plowed back into your local economy.

Weirdly, our economies seem to all be becoming more productive, but not much richer.

This is one of the reasons I sincerely recommend exporting labour standards more aggressively. At least you are not at a disadvantage because you have actual labour protections, and it reduces the value of labour arbitrage.

The other issue is retraining doesn’t work at the speed and scales changes happen. Our brains are not flexible enough to retrain miners into programmers and have them find jobs which are equally well paying.

If we had a number for how much retraining we can actually achieve, or how much time it would take, we could figure out how much we can outsource before it becomes impossible to retrain our citizens.

[close04]

> they are seen as equally expensive

They go off shore because they are less expensive.

Gotta love that switch to a passive voice whenever you're flagging your own guilt. You didn't see, things are seen.

You see them as less expensive, you want to pay less and less for every product and every service. If your provider charges you 25-50% extra per month because services are delivered locally, you just switch to the cheaper one. Most nationalists are more big mouth than standing by their stated values.

[clapthewind]

Putting it politely, I think you may have xenophobic tendency. And for all your buster, I suggest you work on having a more sane world view.

[modo_mario]

Not him but....Having a hypercapitalist ultraliberal and globalist worldview that exacerbates wealth inequalities and encourages cutting corners to cut of costs here and there is not the definition of sane. Countries that have had semi-protectionist policies and tried to pull in or protect industry trough policy have done well at times. This includes jobs people now describe as shit.

Why wouldn't I want those to exist locally and pay well?

[dlenski]

> If you believe in remote work, then why should it matter from where that work is delivered?

Okay, well that's easy then.

In general I am highly concerned about the negative social and productivity costs of remote work, in industries ranging from tech support to software development to medicine.