The debate on outsourcing Essay

Outsourcing has been an ongoing national debate for many years and has become more controversial in the last decade. The American people are concerned about jobs shifting from the United States to other countries, which ultimately mean loss of jobs back home. Some of the top countries that the United States outsource their manufacturing and goods to are China, India, Japan, and Mexico. The main reason the United States outsources jobs to foreign countries is to keep labor and manufacturing costs low. People in foreign countries may have a lower standard of living, therefore are willing to work for less money than what the average American worker would be paid for the same job. Some factors that I believe need to be addressed when considering the changing role of the American Labor Movement are education and stricter fair trade agreements.
Employers and the educational system have to better coordinate the education to develop a higher skilled work force. It all begins in our school system where job specific training is almost non-existent. Therefore there are no highly skilled workers entering the work force upon high school graduation. For those students who do not plan on going to college and look for work right away, will be less desirable for companies to hire them due to lack of skills. As a result, companies will have to spend money on training them, which in the long run will cost them more money. Students who strive to learn a trade specific skill are going to stand out in the labor market, which will give them an upper edge in the workforce. This will be more beneficial to employers and therefore would not have to outsource jobs to other countries.
For the United States to become competitive in the global marketplace again, we must tackle the problem of free trade. The U.S. opened its markets to China but China has not reciprocated. Our relationship with China, for example, has resulted in a high trade deficit, thousands of job loses, the decline of our manufacturing industry, and outsourcing of many powerful U.S. companies. We need tougher negotiations with foreign countries and move towards the idea of fair trade rather than free trade. We need to ensure that foreign markets are as open to our products as we are to theirs and cut better deals with our foreign partners. We must strive towards becoming more self-sufficient in the future, or else our debt and trade deficits will continue to rise and U.S. jobs will continue to be lost.
In my opinion, we cannot expect our country to continue being a world leader if we keep outsourcing our manufacturing and goods to foreign countries when we could and should be doing the work ourselves. American citizens want jobs back onshore so they can have more employment opportunities thus decreasing unemployment rates. I believe that by being better educated, highly skilled and having stricter fair trade agreements is a step in the right direction to achieve these goals.