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The sidelining of employee health & safety costs isn't specific to chip-makers/America alone. It's a not-so-hidden benefit of outsourcing in general.

Also, the current political climate in the US (EPA being bled to death slowly) will setup a legal climate where companies' practices that are damaging to employee health suddenly becomes legal/non-issue. It might save a few jobs from getting outsourced, but will leave behind a sick employee pool, with the state bearing the cost of health care.




Worth noting that this is a "benefit" of not offshore outsourcing, but outsourcing in general. Large companies prefer to purchase services from vendors rather than hire employees to limit their liability and responsibility for those workers' well-being. For example, a Fortune 500 will prefer to hire small janitorial services companies to service all of their offices rather than employees, so that these small services companies can ignore workplace safety and reduce costs, while the large company can say "Hey this isn't our problem" when a janitor gets injured on the job.


It is not that, office cleaning is outside the core competency of a company. Hence hire the services of a company that will keep the office clean for a cost, exactly how they achieve that and with what staff is for them to manage as per contract decided on.

By analogy think of the milk in the fridge at work. The company could have employed a farmer and bought land for a cow but that didn't happen, instead that was outsourced.

Nobody thinks 'must own cow', that is almost always outsourced, certainly in the first world. I think cleaning services are like that, no company thinks to build up a department of cleaners, it is outside the core competency, much like dairy farming is. However, the big companies that are criticised for outsourcing departments started out in an era when there weren't so many security companies, cleaning service companies and such like. If those companies started out now they would not be building up 'cleaning departments' with the management structure, pension plan and bonus incentives, it would just be outsourced, probably to some zero hours minimum wage contractor.


That's an attitude that's a byproduct of the short term thinking that dominates modern business.

Companies that I've worked for or have been associated with that were really good at running facilities always used in house staff for facility maintenance and usually had facility services run by a former Navy chief of the boat or senior army sergeant.

If you give a shit, and are big enough to have enough work, you can do janitorial, maintenance and security/reception at a reasonable price. You may save money by having maintenance done by people who give a shit vs. those who care just enough to not get fired.

My current employer successfully "insourced" pure utility functions like electricity generation, because it delivered a positive ROI.


Was the ROI measured in dollars or in 'doing the right thing' type phases? As an example, from what I have read of Apple, it would have been better for them financially to just take from the grid or buy up existing renewable energy but they see non-monetary benefits to going renewable. Cook has pretty vigorously defended Apples position to chafe holders. While I agree with Apples position, it isn't a cheap option.


AFAIK, it is good to outsource for cost reduction AND it is important to entertain in house competences to do the work.


Anyone can clean an office. It's a bad example for outsourcing. There's also security arguments to be made for in-house, respected people since janitors are great position for subversion.


This is a misapplication of core competencies. Cleaning isn't complex and the milk analogy doesn't fly because janitors are self-contained producers of cleaning.


The tragedy I think it's the idea is in the negative. Imo it is not a recipe of what you should outsource but rather what you must not.

Don't outsource your core competency somehow became outsource everything else.

Something I didn't quite understand was a former employer of mine sold their office building and rented all but two floors of the building from the new owner. I never quite understood this.


> sold their office building

Short-term realisable profit and improvement to their cash position, at the expense of future cashflow.

It can sometimes make sense if the business's return on capital is much higher than that of real estate, or the business is at risk of having to downsize.


Owning a building return a few percent on the capital. Many companies can do better yields, and are restricted by capital. It only makes sense to sell and lease back in such cases. Also, it lets you shift expenses from capital to operational on your balance sheet, which is sometimes profitable in itself.


It's very probable that the firm simply didn't have the management bandwidth to do proper property management, which is a business all on its own and unless you really care about it, you're not going to be able to do it as well or as cheaply as someone who does.

I can easily see how a company would prefer paying another company to provide a nice, delineated set of deliverables as opposed to managing workers to provide them themselves.


    > It might save a few jobs from getting outsourced,
    > but will leave behind a sick employee pool, with
    > the state bearing the cost of health care.
As opposed to the current state of affairs where the West just outsources its dangerous pollution to poorer countries, with health care systems even less prepared to take care of those sick employees?

This line of argument seems to have more to do with nationalism than concern for overall human safety.

Yes, ideally nobody would have to suffer from toxic exposure in the workplace, but the situation we're in right now is that strict Western regulations just lead to more sick people on the other side of various nation-state fences.

Given that, it's not at all clear to me that declawing an institution like the EPA is a bad thing. This pollution is happening right now on Earth, is the US better prepared to deal with it than e.g. Vietnam? Probably. But I'd love to hear some arguments on this topic that aren't essentially nationalistic NIMBY-ism.


No, as opposed to adhering to decent workplace safety standards.

Your reasoning implies that any resistance to outsourcing is mindless nationalism and therefore the choice is some kind of trolley problem between lowering standards here or elsewhere.

That's not true. You could very well introduce some restrictions with better reasons than political power-play. In the EU, there are restrictions to ship waste off-country because it would pollute the environment. You coukd just as well restrict outsourcing jobs if the workplace environments are known to be unsafe.


I'm pointing out the casual fallacy and blatant disregard for foreigners in the GPs comments "leave behind a sick employee pool", as if though moving an obviously dangerous job from their own country (with stricter safety regulations) to another country will just magically fix the problem, as opposed to just making people in some other country sick instead.

Assuming a world where every country had the same workplace safety regulations, it seems obvious that a richer more developed country would be better prepared to deal with workplace injuries and other ailments that result having less strict regulation.

Which is why I'm critiquing the GPs comment as having more to do with "nationalism than concern for overall human safety". We should be concerned with the overall human cost of the products we use, not whether the people injured in their production happen to live in place A or place B.

Some of the EU laws you mention are certainly a step in the right direction, but they're only skin deep. No penalties are paid for outsourcing toxicity to poorer countries during the normal import of consumer products, just for some exports of toxic material. The former category is much larger than the latter.


It's almost comical when they pat themselves on the back for creating a couple hundred coal mining jobs, supposedly. Drops in the bucket relative to the US economy.


From what I hear, the state doesn't really want to bear that cost.

This is obviously premature conjecture, but the US may be unconsciously moving towards older days, when at the expense of regulation and worker rights a lot of knowledge and technological edge was accumulated.


Name a company where regulations and workers' rights have lessened.


Social protections have a cost. As US became poorer, this cost becomes too high here and there, naturally moving back to the situation of old. Poor for some workers, but maybe still better than mass layoffs due to businesses shutting down. If a US worker cannot be paid less, because the US cannot become cheaper (it plays the role of gold now), some other benefits will be cut.


The US became Poorer? Isn't the US the richest country in the world?


Have you been outside a major metropolis or SV? Who, to your mind, the Trump's supporters are?

More people in the US are worse off than they were e.g. in 1990s, let alone around 2006 or so.


"with the state bearing the cost of health care" - unless it's privatised! Repeal the state-funded healthcare bill, and then it's the employee's problem if they get sick.




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