Is Inshoring a Threat?
For the past few years, one of the media's favorite buzz words has been "outsourcing," which they tend to misuse when they are referring to organizations which terminate domestic employees and move their work to foreign countries where it typically can be done at a lower cost. Outsourcing is not the same as offshoring, which is the word that the media should actually use to refer to what those organizations are doing as one American organization can chose to outsource part of its work to another American organization and that's hardly the type of activity that politicians or the media can or should get worked up about.
But offshoring does pose problems for many people, especially those who are focused on the micro economic effects. When you lose your job to someone in Pakistan who is happy to do the work you used to do for 1/10th of the cost, how can you not be upset? And even if that doesn't happen to you, how can you not be scared when you see that happening to a friend or family member?
Interestly, the media has recently been shining their spotlight on the practice of inshoring, which occurs when foreign organizations terminate some of the employees in their home country and replace those employees with U.S. workers. An example is the Indian engineering firm Infosys Technologies, which recently opened an office in Fremont, California.
Infosys has created a Global Talent Program through which it is paying entry level engineers $55,000 per year. Over the past year, more than 1,000 American college students and recent graduates applied for the Program's 126 job openings. Why the stiff competition? The pay isn't different from what organizations are offering. The work is pretty similar. The biggest different is that new Infosys provides extensive training to its new employees for six months in Mysore, India. "The training itself is looked upon highly by other companies," says Brandon Pletcher, who recently graduated with a computer engineering degree from the University of Arizona in Tucson. "It gives us the edge to do our jobs better."
- Source: Fast Company, October 2006.
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