The Outsourcing Spin Cycle

Bill Fink writing in the San Francisco chronicle writes about the other side of the outsoucing story where jobs keeps shifting from place to place in order for the firms to maintain the bottom line. Fink concludes, "What I've discovered isn't so much a one-way drain on U.S. business, but rather a spin cycle, a whirling of people, products and places coordinated to produce our daily goods and services"

Far from being new and Asian-focused, outsourcing, according to Fink, has always happened and was neccessary for progress. In The Spin Cycle of Outsourcing: A consultant tells the other side of the story Fink writes that "The basic concept of outsourcing is that companies want to specialize in what they do best, and find another source for all the other stuff" and that

"The reality is, America is not a nation of bolt-tighteners. If jobs hadn't been sent abroad, on a regular basis over the past 200 years, we'd still be hand-picking cotton on plantations, and weaving shirts on huge looms in sweatshops in New York City, while somewhere abroad the microchip engineers would be sipping wine and watching TVs that American workers were assembling in 24-hour-a-day factories. The question is, do you want to be the place that sends out the unskilled labor jobs, or the one that receives them?"