santafe5000

Will your job be next????


http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?file=529970.html
MacDonalds Restaurants are starting to outsource the job of taking your order at the drive thru. The jobs are now still in the US but how long will it be before they go overseas. They have trouble getting the order correct now, imagine the future.
Also heard they are trying automated Hamburger cookers.
Just where are the High school kids and retiree's suppose to work then????

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seretogis

Oh no, does that mean I'll have to fly to India for a hamburger?

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Scipio

Colorado, actually. Reading the article helps. It's not really outsourcing in this case because the jobs will remain here.

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Seaver

Great... so any storm between here in Texas and Colorado means I cant get a freaking big mac for 48 hours... I fail to see how this could be economical. You still need a guy working the register to work the cash and hand the food. Why not put him to work doing something as easy enough as talking into a headset instead of someone who isnt doing anything else and lives in an area of high cost of living such as colorado?

Paq

I've worked in call centers and the only thing i can see about this being faster is that it's more efficient, the person taking hte calls just types it all in, sends the orders, etc and doesn't have to take time to get drinks, take food, hand food over, get ketchup, etc and can just jump on to hte next person while the person who is physically in the store givers out everything

wow, what a runon sentence...

also, one big problem i see is that burnout would be extreme in a job that tedious...call centers are notoriously high burnout jobs bc of the lack of variety and to just sit there, "Can i take your order" all day...

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filtherton

I can't wait until they start outsourcing economists. Then we'll hear about the negative effects of outsourcing.

Paq

HERE HERE!!!!

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Scipio

here here! yes! that's where we want the jobs!

On the whole efficiency thing, sure, I bet they could save a few bucks by centralizing their order taking operations.

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fatdaddy411

Well, until the average American demands no hirer wage than the average Indian, outsourcing will always be a very viable option. But, how long before the dominant companies ARE Indian based? Or Chinese based? Or whatever? I say, it's lifeboat time, cause this ship we call "America" is going down. The east is catching up.

MSD

Right now, they have one person who takes the money, one who takes the order, and one person who bags the food after it's cooked. It's efficient and prevents peoblems caused by the same person handling the money and the food, and any delays that would be caused b combining the first two. I'm perfectly happy with the system, and it's nice that jobs are staying in my commmunity.

Rekna

the advantage to this is one person taking orders can take orders for many different restraunts. This way all restraunts pool the money for people to take orders to pay their wages. Then these people take orders for many different places causing less waisted labor as people wait for someone to come to the drive through. Think about this if a person can take 1 order a minute that is 60 orders in an hour. Let's say a drive through can only handle 30 people in an hour though. Then you can hire 1 person to work 2 different McDonalds taking orders for both of them thus saving the labor of 1 person.

pan6467

There are no benefits to this bullshit, except to the greedy people and those that have to keep labor low to compete against those who can afford to play these games.

People just don't get it (not you specifically, if at all, Rekna). It's tax base baby, fewer workers making good pay affects the tax base. Add that on to factories and jobs that are outsourced and you have no tax base, except the rich and you cut their taxes ..... well you may as well kiss the middle class goodbye because they won't have decent public schools and the parents won't be able to afford the private schools.

As I said in another thread, the less the poor and middle classes have the more the elite and rich have. THAT IS THE UNDENIABLE FACT AND FUTURE OF OUR COUNTRY, should we continue to outsource, pay low wages and keep this assinine "trickle down" economics mindset.

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I just love people who use the excuse "I use/do this because I LOVE the feeling/joy/happiness it brings me" and expect you to be ok with that as you watch them destroy their life blindly following. My response is, "I like to put forks in an eletrical socket, just LOVE that feeling, can't ever get enough of it, so will you let me put this copper fork in that electric socket?"

roachboy

capitalism is making nation-states obsolete.
this relies on the total disempowerment of those who do not hold capital. (and of most who do---small shareholders have no effective power either.)
which is itself a function of the dismantling of political constraints that had forced capital to consider at any level the relationship of its actions to social consequences.
the results of this disregard for social consequences turn up in all kinds of areas---phil is i think correct in pointing to education as emblematic--but i would go a bit further and say that not only are there problems for funding, but also for the functionality of education as what marx called an instrument of social reproduction (reproduction of the labor pool)--how can schools replicate a given class system if the elements of that system keep changing?
the drive for private schools seems at once an attempt to dismantle one of the few remaining trade unions and to make the problems of coherence disappear by privatizing them--which is a typical right response to the process outlined here--make it go away, pretend it is not happening, shut your eyes, recite prayers to capital, wait for things to shake out.

the logic of the macdo call-center move is typical--simultaneously the centralization of a particular function and its separation from the main production (well, in this case distribution) unit--and then a politics of location that is dependent on 1. the general political climate (which sets norms that define what a firm can and cannot get away with) 2. infrastructure 3. lowest possible wage levels. i assume that the present configuration of the call-center/resto relation is transitional, and that once the system gets debugged and increases in scale, you will probably see it become as mobile as other call-center type operations.

it is interesting to think about the reasons why people just accept this kind of process. maybe they think it "progress"? maybe they identify with the interests of capital because the main index of economic activity they see every night on television is the dow jones industrial average? the stock market is the new astrology, but behind that is the illusion that the interests of the population and the interests of capital are identical.

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ARTelevision

I do not see a solution to the "problem" of outsourcing - which I do not see as a problem. It is called economics. You may want to regulate it out of existence. You would be regulating these jobs out of existence in the long run because they are not economically viable if they are restricted to countries that overpay their workers in relation to the wages paid in the global economy for the same jobs.

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rukkyg

If you think America or other western countries overpay their workers, then you must think that the people in Africa living on a dollar a day are getting paid just the right amount. When all the jobs are gone and people start working for the wage in India, the jobs will go to Africa. Soon everyone is unemployed or making $1/day.

ARTelevision

I don't know what the right amount is.

I only know what competitive amounts are.

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roachboy

it requires a particular political framework for it to make sense to think about wage levels outside the context of the social relations that they express.
in this case, the particular political framework is that of capital.
"classical economics"--based in the idea that you can think about markets as abstractions, as formalizable systems that might have self-regulatory mechanisms--is an expression of the interests of capital through and through--because it provides a pseudo-justification for this kind of abstraction.
the consequences of this way of thinking are inflicted on working people.

what interests me in this is that people will argue against the social interests of any given nation-state at the level of wages, for example, but will remain nationalist in other areas: i dont see how the disconnect between them works.

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ARTelevision

There are many "disconnects" in my pragmatic views. They are probably somewhat reflective of our existential situation.

I know you consider the so-called "real world" a fictive narrative, as do I, roachboy. That situation doesn't cause me to abandon a sense of pragmatism about things, however.

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roachboy

well, sort of: if the world around me was simply a fiction, then it would not matter what the content was: it is more a political narrative that emplots a particular logic/way of ordering things and that functions as a support for particular political arguments/views that one might have. the fiction/not fiction division seems to me to get in the way more than it helps here.

i can see how you would think that the position you outline above would be pragmatic, art: but i see it as following from a political position. i suppose that the notion of pragmatism in this context has also to to with what you could imagine yourself doing to alter/effect this kind of situation abroad in the world. given what i do, i can retain the illusion that i could talk in the public sphere about the matter (whether it would make any difference is another matter), so my way of defining pragmatic (accomidation with the environment in another terminology) is different. also, if you do any work on industrial environments, you find youself reading wage levels as indices of class conflict (however it is institutionalized) and this too might explain the divergence of views.

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spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Cynthetiq

IBM was the pioneer of "outsourcing"

Outsourcing has been around forever. It's now just a buzzword.

Before it was called, hiring consultants, hiring a contractor, etc.

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ARTelevision

Well of course, roachboy. I see an implict relativism that can not lead toward action in your schema, however. If the "real world" is a political narrative, then all your assertions are suspect to the degree that they are polemical, simply doctrinaire - just as you describe mine.

But you don't stop at relativism - if you did, you'd only be able to critique all (fictive) positions. Instead, you're taking (fictive politically motivated) positions on this and other issues. To do so implies not relativism - which would be consistent - but absolutism. You seem to think your positions are the correct ones.

This is a long way around saying that some consensus as regards the "real world" is necessary for acting in concert with others. Political pragmatism - even if it may be philosophically suspect - is required of all who would work for change in existential situations.

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roachboy

i dont see things that way, art: worldviews are arguments--discrete elements can (and for me should) be pushed back into the larger schema/schemata that orient them if we are going to talk about those elements--that is how i operate--and i am pretty consistent in this, i think.

we live in a network of arguments, articulated by various institutions (in the big sense, not particular bureacratic entities), which have material correlates, are developed, have histories, etc. you could see them as fictions--for me, that was a heuristic that at one point i found useful and which i now do not find to be so useful.

if any worldview is (explicitly or implicitly) an argument (about how the world is or how it should be) it follows that you can find some to be more persuasive than others, and that dialogue often comes down to a presentation and counterpresentation of positions articulated within different schemata, partly to address the matter at hand, partly to engage the other person in a real dialogue, partly for self-clarification. for me--here at least---if i engage with an issue, i 'll either have or work out a position for myself and write it out--sometimes i am backed away from a position because i find other viewpoints more compelling than the one i started with, other times not.

i become a relativist when i do not engage in an question. or when i do not engage in a conversation.

if i engage, like anyone else, i have a position that i find to be compelling, i have (usually) reasons for finding it so, but i am (usually) willing to put the whole apparatus--the arguments and as much as i can articulate of what orients them--on the table.

what i think triggered your response above is the differing connotations that we spin out of the word pragmatism. i did not mean anything barbed by what i said--i simply mean to link a particular issue (it does not matter here which one) with the narrative(s) one holds about the world one the one hand, and with possibilities for acting on either (if you disagree)....what i meant was that i maintain a basically different view of wages/outsourcing (which are linked here) as a function first of my historian self, and second as a function of the position i occupy which gives me the possibility of acting in a political manner (at the level of argument generation)---if i did not have the latter, it would probably be more difficult to maintain an oppositional position for me. that is all i meant.....

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spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

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Locobot

You guys know about Tilted Philosophy?

Outsourcing of order takers may be inevitable but it will be resisted by managers. To have an order center in Colorado or India seems economical for restaurants that are constantly busy, during slow times however the restaurant is basically paying someone to sit in front of a monitor where normally that person would be mopping the floor or doing some other menial labor. What I forsee is that these new off-site call centers will be marketed as time-saving and efficient initially, but then over time during off-peak hours there'll be one person taking drive through orders for two or three restaurants. Americans will be asked to wait for an available operator, people will complain, but they'll still wait and wait and wait and wait idling their cars the whole time. And just because they can pay an Indian a tenth of what an American would earn for the same job don't think the price of greasy consumptables will ever diminish.

ARTelevision

Yes. Political Philosophy is behind every thread on this Titled Politics Forum.

We'll see about how far outsourcing affects this, or any other industry. I expect it to continue because it makes practical sense.

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Locobot

Yes, understanding the idealogical framework behind political discussions is important but scattering each news story across a field of philosophical entropy is counterproductive.

ARTelevision

This would be your opinion.
Thanks.

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roachboy

this is long. i wanted to run through an outline of the history of outsourcing, and tried to be a concise as i could--what came out is too long for a post and too short for a coherent history, but there we are.....

in the abstract, the idea of "outsourcing" goes back to the earliest phase of capitalism--outwork was a basic element in early textile production, but was largely eliminated with the mechanization of spinning. but saying as much does not help you understand its present incarnation. and saying as much places you in a position where there is nothing anyone could possibly do except submit. a history digression might help to shorten the timeframe in which you think about this, and show that this situation in which we find ourselves is the result of particular choices made by particular concerns in particular political environments. and that all of this could be otherwise.

between 1860/70 and the 1950s, the main tendency in large-scale industry was toward spatial concentration--this concentration passed thorugh a series of phases/ideologies (scientific management at the turn of the century, fordism--assembly-line production--from about world war 1). the geographic logic of this period was to locate production near demand centres (this is clearer in europe--my specialty is france, so i think about this stuff through the french example)

outsourcing in its current form developed out of centralized production, partly as a consequence of a change in how corporations located their facilities (from the demand centres to rural areas where there were no unions, for example)...you see it starting in the early 1950s in machining. this can be linked to a series of general conditions:
1. firms running into limits to the standardization of production (like in machining)
2. the development of semi-automated machine tools
3. development of a dense transportation and communications infrastructure.

so here you already have two important features that drive outsourcing now--"inefficiency" introduced by working people actually controlling skill-sets; automation.

it started with firms contracting specialized machining firms that were able to treat a semiskilled activity as a problem for standardization on its own terms (this requires a basic reorganization of the process)....you can see this moving from a local phenomenon to a general industrial ideology across the 1970s (this sentence is a problem, but what can you do if you are trying to be quick?)....vertical integration, "just-in-time", etc. the basic feature that had conditioned the situation in which we find ourselves is the development of computer technology and a global transport/communications infrastructure--what we are typing on when we post is also one of the most important instruments for the disempowerment of workers yet developed by capitalism.

but technology does not have social functions on its own--the meanings of technologies are contingent on broader political parameters which they do not determine (human beings make history but not as they would like, as the old mole once said) modern "outsourcing" is only possible as a result of **political shifts**--the emblematic hatchet-persons are thatcher/reagan--e.g. in their undermining of the trade union movement (which was already much weakened)--the obliteration of any ideological frame that would require firms to think in terms of social consequences of their decisions about location/type of internal organization, the race to the bottom in terms of cost-cutting, which is what drives the race to the bottom in terms of wage levels.

you can find this general development in almost any industrial sector you look at--different analysts will choose different industries as paradigmatic when they try to work out the general history of these shifts--most i know of looked to automobiles (the regulation school)....

another way of thinking about this general shift is to think about the shift from multinational to transnational firms....

the point of this digression:
efficiency is a political category. it is not neutral.
cost is a political category. it is not neutral.
what firms can do is a function of what they can get away with.
conversely, what firms take into account is a function of what they are forced to take into account.
if you remove political brakes on capitalism, you get a capitalism in which human beings cannot live. except for wealthy human beings, who have always and alone been "free"--presumably they are free so the rest of us do not have to be.

problem:

the collapse of the left has created all kinds of problems for people who would oppose this kind of process. for example, they end up having to argue from a nationalist position. if you look at the positions outlined by groups like attac, you will see a vast symptom of this kind of political chaos:

www.attac.fr

existential problem:

no-one wants to find themselves in what will later turn out to be a "transitional period" but here we are. most people who live through these period vanish without a trace into the huge pipeline of history. and everyone likes to imagine that they will be the exception.

question:

does being alive in a period of political chaos--that outsourcing should be a problem is evident, but the ways to articulate that problem as political are not--mean that you should simply accept what is given to you by the economic forces that structure elements of your world?

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spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

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ARTelevision

You don't have to accept that economic forces that structure elements of your world. You can work to change things if you desire that.

I assess you are injecting an ethical imperative here and elsewhere roachboy.

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roachboy

if there is an ethical imperative it would apply only to myself--everything else is argument.if you find the argument compelling, then maybe it would function to enjoin actions: if you do not, it is a rhetorical tic.

as for acceptance of the role of economic forces--well, analytically there is no way around it. in terms of how i live my life, the question is obviously more complex. for what i was talking about above, obviously the situation is particular.

making the argument that the central terms--like efficiency, like cost--are political does not require an action. what it does do (i think) is chip away at simply treating those terms as if they were neutral. that is an agenda of mine. i see no reason to apologize for it, and have no problem with saying it outright.

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spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

ARTelevision

Understood.
Very excellent historical overview of outsourcing, btw.
Thanks.

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Locobot

Political chaos is an historical constant. There will always be strife over who leads and how. Many economic laws exist outside of anyone's ability to accept or reject them, acceptance is compulsory. Your history of outsourcing is enlightening but omits the impetus behind the current wave: the disembodiment of the means of production. Industry has attained global mobility through technology (e.g. steel manufacture via electric arc furnace rather than larger scale blast furnace production). Many companies' product and means of production are now completely ethereal (e.g. computer programming). Political regulation of industry in this case is largely futile or impossible, how does a government assign value to and tax information streaming across fiber optic networks?

How does one reject globalism and outsourcing while still keeping a nation's industry competitive on a global scale? Isolationism is largely impossible due to communications technology. Economic protectionism, in case you didn't know, isn't exactly en vogue with the business community. Corporate lobbyists are powerful enough to make the business world's view also the government's view. The dictum has been that democratization and wanton capitalism will raise the sunken economies of America's trading partners. In reality though the impoverished nations we outsource to will, in time, pull down the American economy.

roachboy

same problem with the statement "political chaos is a constant" as there is with "outsourcing has been around forever"--its not wrong, but it also doesnt let you think in specific terms. the political chaos of the present is complicated, but at the bottom of my understanding of it is the implosion of marxism as a cultural form.

as for the disembodiment of the production process, it is an important theme and is implicit at pretty much every step of what i wrote. if it isnt, i should think about being more clear when i write or maybe more alert for errors.

the nationalist argument tends to come most from antiglobalization folk---it is really problematic and i take it to be an important index of the particular types of incoherence about in the present.....

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spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

pan6467

I am not anti gloalization BUT I do believe in FAIR trade not FREE trade.

Example: Japan and China both subsidize their steel industries so that they can produce cheaper steel. We make better steel but the economy is such companies need cheaper to keep prices down. Hence our steel gets hurt. Add that to the fact that we tax imports very very little while other countries tax our products going in exorbitantly and because of those taxes we are priced out of competition.

Now Japan and China have the right idea in that, yes the government may spend a lot in subsidizing and selling at cutrate prices BUT in destroying our industry we then become dependant on them and they can then up their prices.

I believe that we need to tax imports equal to the taxes the country importing taxes our goods. So if China taxes our steel say 50% we should tax theirs 50%. However their government will just subsidize that tax and still sell cheap. It's a catch 22. We could tax as a commodity that says all steel entering must be sold at the same price domestic steel sells. That I don't see happening because too many GOP would talk about how that is socialistic and blah blah blah. Yet they don't seem to care other countries do worse to us.

I also believe our government needs to lay down the law and tell companies that want to go overseas or to Mexico or Canada, that they must pay the same wages as they do here and that they must abide by the same OSHA and EPA laws.

I hate the UN (mainly because they do very little to help countries but find fault in everything the US does), however I do believe the UN could establish a worldwide minimum wage, OSHA and EPA guidelines and any country that does not adhere to these would be faced with fines. I think the US and EU could make this work by not doing business with countries that refuse the minimum wage, OSHA and EPA rules.

Until we find a way to level the playing field this country is doomed. There is no free trade when we're allowing others to tax our exports into oblivion and we let imports come in almost free.

Plus the revenue raised by import taxes would be such that our government would be running surplusses soon.

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I just love people who use the excuse "I use/do this because I LOVE the feeling/joy/happiness it brings me" and expect you to be ok with that as you watch them destroy their life blindly following. My response is, "I like to put forks in an eletrical socket, just LOVE that feeling, can't ever get enough of it, so will you let me put this copper fork in that electric socket?"

soccerchamp76

I am behind it. I was able to talk to a techie in India about my Sony LCD monitor at 4am.

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Locobot

Yeah because American workers are incapable of being awake so early in the morning. Thank god for our time-zone-advantaged friends in sub-asia~~!!!

Locobot

I see your point but many economic laws function the same no matter where political chaos is coming from. "Implosion of marxism as a cultural form" doesn't exactly allow me to think in very specific terms. Are you willing to include in this trend what I see as the source of current political chaos: the rise of religious fundamentalism?
It was implicit, I just wanted to make explicit the connections between 16th century textile manufacturers and modern fast food employees, computer programmers, etc.
You raise a point that I was trying to get at, how does one oppose outsourcing without resorting to nationalism? Is it possible to change the ways in which nation's economies interact without violating basic economic principles? It may seem defeatist, but I'm beginning to think that until we have a one-world government protectionist policies are the only way to combat outsourcing. I guess I would agree with Pan6467 on basic ways to approach this problem:

roachboy, do you see these policies as nationalist? Is there an exceptable level of nationalism?

roachboy

locobot: only have a minute right now, so:
the implosion of marxism is something i have been working on formalizing for a while now, so it's probably more a personal referencepoint than a public one...i could run out what i mean at some point....anyway, what i think this entails is a collapse of ready-made or evident frames of reference from which a left opposition can process the world in which we find ourselves--marx worked, directly or indirectly, as a signifier that organized dissent well past the point where his conceptions could be applied without requiring significant adjustment (past where they created as many problems as they resolved)..this worked more because "marx" or "marxism" functioned as culturally legitimate than as a function of his (mid-19th century) analyses of capital.

so what i think you have is a period of sustained, profound vertigo on the left.
this is mirrored in what i talk about next, but...

as for the rise of religious fundamentalism---i would not link the two is i was looking to explain fundamentalism in general--which i see more as a response to the destabilization of older dominant forms of identification--nations, regions, localities are being reconfigured, older types of social and economic solidarity are falling apart--fundamentalism becomes--analytically speaking (not for those who indulge the pastime)--a way to avoid this destabilization by investing in signifiers that link you to networks that position you socially, in reference to the cosmos, etc.---it is like pumping helium into a balloon, or reanimating something otherwise dying or dead--strange factoid: pentacostalism is the fastest-growing social movement in the southern hemisphere. i find this bizarre--but it does make sense as a kind of colelctive, visceral response to what the newer phases of capitalist mutation have generated....i have a (related) interpretation of bushworld that sees it as an american variant of the rise of the front national in france (for the fn, i would talk about the implosion of marxism as a factor, btw...) but i gotta go....

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it make you sick.

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onetime2

Yep because economists drive this trend so I'm sure that's the ticket.

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roachboy

this part is easier:
yes.
in principle no. but then i tend to see nationalism as a kind of collective mental disorder.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite