Is global outsourcing crushing your dreams of a career?

The popularity of global outsourcing with businesses big and small, may be creating jobs in the developing world but it’s Australian workers who will pay the ultimate price for cheap labour overseas.

Recently the Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend magazine ran a feature article on Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelancer.com. The headline for the cover story “First Your Job Then the World: How Matt Barrie became Australia’s King of Global Outsourcing” says it all really. Matt Barrie is getting rich by making your job redundant.

Thanks to websites such as Freelancer.com, a business in Australia can have almost any job performed by someone living in Asia, Africa or Eastern Europe for a fraction of the cost of employing someone locally. Good news for cash strapped small businesses perhaps, but as one of the nation’s largest employers, it’s scary to think about how many jobs could be going overseas. For every job it sends overseas, the small business sector is providing one less work opportunity here at home, a fact that should concern us all.

And if you think it’s just the jobs of low skilled workers who are at risk, think again.

Examples cited in Greg Bearup’s article in Good Weekend include: ‘where it use to cost $50 an hour for someone to do the books, you can find a qualified accountant in Asia for $5 an hour. The website that once cost $20,000 to build can be done for $500.‘¹

Jobs at risk from global outsourcing include: content writers, IT professionals including programmers and software developers, graphic designers, data entry, manufacturing, sales, marketing, accountants, recruitment and small business services.

What chance does an IT professional or freelance writer have in Australia, when their years of experience mean nothing and the work they spent years training to do, can be auctioned off to the lowest bidder for less than minimum wage?

At this stage, it is the freelance workforce in Australia who has been hit hardest by global outsourcing. But there may come a day when every employee in Australia will have cause for concern.

The possibilities are frightening. As more jobs are outsourced overseas, employment will become harder to find here at home. The number of single income families will increase (which is bad news for any woman who has career aspirations of her own) and because wages will flatten out due to the availability of cheap labour overseas, economic growth in this country will slow to a complete stop. If the retail sector thinks things are bad now, just wait until job security becomes non-existent due to the casualisation of the workforce!

And if you think Matt Barrie is going to apologise to the Australian workforce, you’re sadly mistaken. Barrie justifies his business model by pointing out that he is giving the poor in developing countries the work opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise have to access to. But what Barrie doesn’t know, or doesn’t want to acknowledge, is the quality of the work performed by his army of self-skilled workers isn’t up to scratch when compared to the skilled workforce in countries such as Australia. How can it be when our nation spends billions of dollars each year on education and training and the developing world struggles to give even the most basic education to it’s citizens. The danger for Australian workers is when the person doing the hiring doesn’t know the difference.

References
1. The Net Worker by Greg Bearup. Good Weekend, The Sydney Morning Herald, 25th February 2012, p 13.

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