Much has been written about offshoring. It's a trend that's here to stay as more companies seek to contain costs and stick to their knitting. But what are the ethics of offshoring? What sort of moral considerations should be taken into account if employees lose their jobs after years of service, for no reason other than their jobs being sent overseas? What sort of ethical framework should be adopted if the firm knows it has no alternative but to offshore certain activities because if it fails to do that, it will have to close down and everyone loses their job? And isn't there a moral argument in favor of offshoring if it provides work for the poor and unemployed in developing countries.
These are the issues examined in this paper, Fair Shares: A Framework for Analyzing the Ethics of Offshoring, written by academics in Australia and New York.
Actually, the authors stop short of offering a comprehensive framework but they do look at some of the issues involved. It's the first step towards developing a framework. The bottom line however is that the firms that do it unethically are taking exploitative and short sighted courses of action.
The paper offers some preliminary ideas for a framework. For example, offshoring should not harm indigenous cultures, it shouldn't result in child labor, it should do no harm to the environment, it should uphold international labor standards and it shouldn't be used as a short term strategy just to reduce costs.
As more companies send jobs overseas, this debate will get more currency.
Interesting post. Faqir shre is right and cxompanies have to realize they took money away from customers that bought from them before to ship jobs overseas. now the people overseas still are not buying like the ones they took the jobs from.