It’s a small world, isn’t it? We are sometimes reminded how our lives are filled with products that are created in several different parts of the world. A car may have parts from Japan, Germany, America, Korea and Mexico in it. A restaurant court at a shopping center may have foods from many different countries and cultures. We know that variety is the spice of life and that many countries are especially good at producing certain items. We have coffee from Latin America, tea from England, spaghetti from Italy, wine from France, and luxury cars from Germany. No problem.
But now there is a new slant on globalization. American companies and public agencies are now using lower-paid workers in India and the Philippines to do their everyday work for Americans. When you call AOL or United Airlines, or sometimes even your hospital’s accounting office, you are talking to someone in India or the Philippines more likely than from an American town.
The reason is obviously financial. The companies feel that if they cannot get customers to communicate solely with computers, which have no unions or mandatory lunch breaks, the next best thing would be to use less expensive workers. But are they really less expensive?
It is true that a person in Bombay would be thrilled to receive a fraction of what his American counterpart requires to do the same job. Surely, these foreign workers don’t belong to labor unions and probably would not dream of asking for free health insurance and a generous pension when their work is no longer needed. So what is wrong with it? Isn’t that the key to capitalism - being competitive by always looking at the bottom line and trying to increase profits and decrease costs? What’s wrong with saving money?
History reminds us that you pay the price sooner or later. The same is true now of current savings from the work of illegal immigrants and third-world workers for American companies.
What are the costs? Perhaps the most obvious and least mentioned cost is economic. When U.S. dollars go to American workers, part of their earnings pay taxes and social security contributions. The rest is spent in America or put into savings. In both cases the money is used again and again. This is not true of foreign workers if they are spending their earnings in their native land. Illegal immigrants from Mexico allegedly send home almost $30 billion a year. That is money that is no longer circulating in America and has now become part of our country’s foreign debt.
But that is only one part of the cost of foreign labor. Different countries have different cultures, different values, beliefs, experiences, and world views.
This cultural divide struck me recently when I tried in vain to redeem my airline miles. The company has been portrayed in Capital One commercials for its policy of “always say no,” when customers attempt to redeem their miles for travel. I was on the line for one and a half hours with what sounded to be a very old lady in Bombay. As I lamented my concern about getting my daughter home to San Francisco from Paris in August, I had a realization.
This woman lives in Bombay. Every day she goes to work she sees so much greater suffering than I could possibly experience about my daughter’s return trip. When I got no satisfaction from this “just say no” reservation redemption adviser after 90 minutes, I asked to speak with her boss. Her boss exhibited no sympathy or compassion for my daughter’s situation nor my wasted time spent with her subordinate.
Then I realized again, what is waiting 90 minutes on the phone while in a comfortable home in San Francisco to a person who sees beggars, some blind, some disfigured; poor children scrambling for bread crumbs; and traffic delays caused by sacred cows blocking the road in the middle of an unbearably hot day?
I believe it is time for our government to legislate costs for companies hiring foreign labor. The costs in the form of taxes, penalties or fees would make using American workers seem like the much better idea that it really is.
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