Outsourcing = Un-American

I have a rant – if you don’t want to hear it, fee free to move on.

Ok – in this economic climate, it has to be said.

To those companies who continue to outsource tech-labor to third-world countries without even a good record on basic human rights, let alone strict laws and oversight on the treatment of Americans’ financial and personal data…

STOP IT!

You are both directly and indirectly contributing to and furthering the recession. I’d even dare-say you’re an active participant and maybe even a root cause in it.

Listen – It may sound protectionist of me, but I do believe that in situations where our economy is in the toilet, it’s ok to be so. We can’t continue to bolster other economies when ours desperately needs the help.

My former employer – let’s call her “Kelly Robinson” for a while outsourced a sizable portion of her business to Canada. Besides the obvious dollars that were leaving the country, never to return, there is another downside to this – Her business dealt with lending, so as a result we were also exporting names/social-security-numbers/financial information to a country that may or may not have the strictest controls in place to care for that information.

We’re doing the same thing in India. Do you realize how much financial information we send out of the country every day? Half the time I call Dell Financial Services I end up in an overseas call-center, being forced to recite my social-security-number to someone who isn’t even subject to US laws regarding information security and identity theft.

Those are our jobs. 15 years ago I got my start in technology through a support center for a major online service. This is where technology people, in large part, get their start. By exporting the entry-level jobs overseas, we are exporting the entry-point for most of our workers to enter the field.

I’m all for having a “world economy” but until we have a single governing body that actually has the authority to stomp on idiots, it can’t safely be done.

The best you can do as a consumer is to refuse to deal with the foreign call-centers, and to complain loudly when you get them.