Comment by close04
10 hours ago
> It means that I get a lower quality service as I believe my people can do it better.
It's hard to argue nationalistic beliefs.
Maybe "your people can do it better" but they won't because they do it for the lowest possible salary. The only difference is what's the lowest possible salary the company can get away with, because the lowest possible service quality they can get away with is the same no matter where they deliver from. Some nationalists will even tolerate a worse quality of service as long as it comes from "their own".
You wanted a cheaper and cheaper service so the companies offer it to you. When a company advertises "services delivered locally" none of the big mouth nationalists reach in their pocket to pay for it. Part of their values no doubt.
> If I remote work from China, I am still American. Changing my location on planet earth didn't change who I am, nor does it change my values and work ethic.
You think you and "your people" must deliver a better service and have better values because you are "American" (US citizen or literally anyone in the Americas?), or any country for that matter. Is that a part of that work ethic and values? To everyone else in the world that just sounds like very unfounded exceptionalism.
>but they won't because they do it for the lowest possible salary
And that lowest possible salary is so low because we allow for wage suppression tactics such as this. My grandma tells with pride of the work they used to do and they did quite well for themselves.
It was things like rolling cigars and soldering on an assembly line. Stuff that now would be described as sweatshop work that nobody would expect to happen locally.
I now do far "higher status" work in the eyes of the classists that think all of this is fine but still don't get close to their wealth.
> And that lowest possible salary is so low because we allow for wage suppression tactics such as this.
When you're talking about better paid jobs you're right to point that out.
But for the bottom of the barrel jobs this doesn't hold and you can check by looking at the salaries for these jobs in the countries that can't offshore further. They're still dismal.
The real reason is that the people looking at these jobs have no negotiating power whatsoever. They have no essential irreplaceable skills or experience, nothing that's hard to find on the market. All they have usually is the desperation to do any job to make a living. They need that salary now while the company can beat around the bush with the service, throw AI chatbots at it, allow longer call queues, and so on.
If anything, a the offshore employees have more leverage with their employer because they need to speak some foreign languages to interact with customers. They can differentiate themselves from the sea of other people in their own country. A US employee in a US call center serving US customers doesn't even have that. Not that much different in Canada despite the bilingualism situation.
>But for the bottom of the barrel jobs this doesn't hold and you can check by looking at the salaries for these jobs in the countries that can't offshore further. They're still dismal.
No. It absolutely holds and the lowest common denominator is not some argument that it can't be better. Supressing wages in higher income countries does not mean that the lowest income countries somehow get pulled up proportionally.
>The real reason is that the people looking at these jobs have no negotiating power whatsoever. They have no essential irreplaceable skills or experience, nothing that's hard to find on the market. All they have usually is the desperation to do any job to make a living.
My grandparents on one side of the family had jobs that required no (At least not after a good amount of training) essential irreplaceable skills or experience and had plenty of purchasing power. Glass cutting at a glass factory, rolling cigars, soldering on an assembly line. Their negotiating power existed based on the fact that they were good workers and would fuck off to a different factory or pressure trough a union. They did very well for themselves.
Now that negotiating power is gone. They wouldn't go to philips or so because philips doesn't manufacture here anymore. The equivalent jobs that can't be outsourced run from my experience mostly on imported workers from poorer countries who will be replaced the moment they demand better conditions. The effects of that supression on "bottom of the barrel" job leeches upwards into jobs that people perceive as higher status without many people noticing. After all those people that would have done them still go for a different job.
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