The ethical problems of outsourcing

[question everything]

By Steven M. Mintz
August 6, 2004

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Most supporters defend outsourcing based on economic considerations. Some say more jobs are created at home because the countries benefiting from outsourcing develop more spending power. However, job displacement and social costs exist that should be considered before the trend of outsourcing threatens the long-term viability of our economic and educational systems.

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The long-term effects are likely to be even greater unless actions are taken now to slow the trend. There are important social costs to consider. The key word is "responsibility." Has anyone done a study of the long-term effects on our educational system? Should I, as a college professor, advise my students not to study computer programming or software development because those jobs will be handled primarily from India? What should they study in college? How about accounting? They can learn tax preparation. Everyone pays taxes – right? Yes, but as Lou Dobbs reported recently on CNN, "tax experts estimate between 150,000 and 200,000 American tax returns were prepared in India this year."

What if it was your tax return? Wouldn't you want to know that the personal tax information given to your American preparer might be transmitted to someone in India who put the return together and transmitted it back to the United States? I sure would. Unfortunately, SB 1451 was amended to drop the disclosure due to business opposition.

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The ethical issues of outsourcing were made apparent when it was disclosed in an article in the San Francisco Chronicle on Oct. 22, 2003, that a Pakistani transcriber of medical information threatened a medical center in San Francisco with posting patients' medical records online unless she received more money for her services. This is not an isolated situation. Dobbs reported in May that U.S. software company SolidWorks Corp. found that a worker employed by its Indian outsourcing partner tried to sell its property to a competitor.

More..


Find this article at:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20040806/news_lz1e6mintz.html

Mintz is a visiting professor of accounting at Claremont McKenna College.

[Fovea]

1. To the good, fast, cheap

paradigm, add secure vs. insecure.

A sweatshop does not require ethics.
If someone is willing to work an employee to death for 20K a year,
what makes you think anything you've got as a customer is sacrosanct?

Further, outsourced technical solutions frequently fail due to inadequate understanding of the problem space's social and legal constraints, a problem I fought with a project a decade plus ago when I worked on a French national real estate MLS system.