I remember my shock when I learned, not really that long ago, about the Vancouver telemarketing firm that had set up an office in Guyana.
The owner could sit in his living room in Vancouver and monitor the outgoing calls, tuning in to a view of the selling floor by remote video. I found it agonizing to think about the Vancouver telemarketers who had lost their jobs to Guyanese university grads with English accents who would work for $2 an hour.
Even after reading The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman I am still shocked to learn about the growing range of jobs that are being outsourced, and how easy it is to do. A friend introduced me to ODesk, one of many online services that makes it simpler than ever to find a $2-per-hour worker for just about any on-screen job. Job seekers around the world bid on posted jobs; employers can review detailed reports on the respondents’ past history, work ratings and current assignments – or even give them a skills test online to make sure. Once a worker is engaged, the employer can monitor random screen shots of the work in progress.
It doesn’t stop there.
Another friend is contracting out legal work to high-end lawyers in India fully trained in Canadian law, who work for a fraction of the cost of Canadian lawyers and have a client list that would be the envy of any local firm.
Then I discovered the Khan Academy, an online miracle that threatens to undercut every teacher’s job by offering “free world-class education to anyone anywhere.” There it is on YouTube: thousands of bite-sized lessons on the entire high-school basic curriculum, delivered in a highly personal format, with thousands more college courses on the way. Add K-12 teachers to the list of people – along with professors, architects, scientists and editors – competing for their jobs with international competition accessed online.
I took some refuge in Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, a book by think-tank-director-turned-motorcycle-mechanic Matthew Crawford. The book is a homage to the importance and intellectual challenge of manual work (“the useful arts”) compared with the more lucrative “trafficking in the surplus skimmed from other people’s work,” as he describes much of today’s white-collar labour.
He quotes Princeton economist Alan Binder’s assertion that the critical divide in the modern workplace is shifting from highly educated versus less educated people to jobs that can be adequately delivered electronically from anywhere versus those that are place-based, such as construction, maintenance, repairs and personal services.
“If you need a deck built or your car fixed, the Chinese are of no help. Because they are in China,” writes Crawford.
I started touting the value of non-exportable jobs to all the young people I knew, even as that list kept narrowing.
Then I discovered the huge growth in temporary foreign workers in Canada, mostly to take jobs that are too low-paying or unattractive for Canadian workers to want – possibly even building decks or fixing cars. We’ve got more people coming to Canada as temporary workers that immigrate here as permanent residents. Here, too, local workers are competing with eager, capable, more desperate workers from abroad.
Meanwhile, the rich and skilled immigrants we work so hard at attracting are notoriously underemployed because of language, credential, cultural and discrimination barriers, who end up moving back to places like Hong Kong (300,000 Canadians there at last count) while we wring our hands about skills shortages.
Add it all up and what do you get? Amid desperate shortages of skilled workers, unemployment is over 8%. Locals can’t find jobs, especially underemployed landed immigrants. Employers are outsourcing more than ever and bringing in temporary foreign workers. Temporary workers who come here to work can’t stay. The skilled people we entice to come here and invest don’t want to stay.
Maybe the Kahn Academy will come up with a YouTube lesson explaining all this.
I, too, will then be outsourced.