During the layoffs in the last few years, I've heard several people say that the jobs at the fast food restaurants are safe. Guess again. A New York Times article exposed how several McDonald's restaurants are outsourcing jobs. The person who is taking the order at the drive through window has been outsourced. In this case, it was to a call center in Colorado Springs, but the technology could put that person anywhere. The owner of the restaurants was happy because the time to take an order was significantly shorter this way and fewer mistakes were being made.

Outsourcing jobs has been the management trend for the last few years. The hope was that outsourcing the work would save the management jobs. Guess again. No job is safe when everything can be outsourced.

The situation with McDonalds is an example of the extremes that outsourcing can go to. In this case, the call center was managed by a McDonald's franchise in Colorado. In the Philippines, a similar outsourcing arraignment was done and the call center was outsourced to a third party that also did the local delivery. This development simply continues the relentless push to send all jobs to the lowest cost for highly trained people.

For those who have seen the decimation of the computer programmer jobs in this country, take heart.

The Esquire Group is pushing for the outsourcing of lawyer jobs from Minneapolis. Hildebrandt in New Jersey has partnered with OfficeTiger to off shore lawyer jobs from Ne York. OfficeTiger already has 1600 people in India. Other companies are doing the same for lawyers in England.

I've heard from others that once the line workers were outsourced, the next step was to outsource the supervisors. After that, more of the management was getting outsourced.

It is time to review what happens when things get outsource. Outsourcing is the start of new competition. In small companies, their competition gets started when a key employee decides that she or he is tired of "doing all the work while that person gets all the money" and quits and starts competing. When everything gets outsourced to another country, soon the partners (that we outsource to) figure out that they could be getting all the profit that we are getting and cut us out of the picture. This happened to the electronics industry. We outsourced everything. Now the American companies are facing competition from the people we outsourced to. The companies who were once content with just the manufacturing are setting up sales and delivery organizations in this country.

Never outsource anything that you don't want coming back at you from a competitor.

Dave Randolph,
President, Prairie Trail Software
1-800-618-4199

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