Romney supporters are drawing distinctions between outsourcing and offshoring to defend his record on U.S. job creation while in the private sector. Is there hope for more employment for individuals with disabilities within the political rhetoric?
Yesterday’s examination of the increasing number of hours put in by temp workers and how it impacts the overall picture of the U.S. job market would not be complete without a discussion of another aspect that seems to be in transition: outsourcing.
In some ways, outsourcing is like a large-scale hiring of temp employees to perform a particular task. By using contract services, a business can more easily increase or decrease production of a product based on whether consumer demand is high or low at a given time. That company also does not have to make the capital investment in resources to handle every link of the supply chain if they can find an outfit capable of assembly, order fulfillment, shipping, transportation, or other logistical elements necessary to get products to consumers.
Outsourcing continues to be one of the main ideological issues separating the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates as election rhetoric intensifies. Even before knowing Mitt Romney would be his opponent, President Obama fired an opening salvo during his State of the Union address back in January, when he urged both houses of Congress to enact legislation that would bring overseas manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.
Since that time, we’ve been tracking stories about bringing offshore jobs back to America and how it could impact employment opportunities for people with disabilities. There is now abundant content to be found in favor of outsourcing since Governor Romney’s supporters have come to his defense. Op-eds like this July 12 column from Robert J. Samuelson of The Washington Post Writers Group strive to exonerate Romney from his role in Bain’s outsourcing strategies and draw an important demarcation in terms:
… [A]ny outsourcing that occurred while [Romney] was at Bain (he left in 1999) was to other U.S. operations: for example, a firm subcontracting its call centers to another U.S.-based company. If work moved abroad, this happened after Romney departed…There’s a distinction between outsourcing (subcontracting work to another company) and offshoring (moving jobs outside the United States).
Samuelson should probably have stopped there; but instead he goes on in an attempt to make the case that the impact of offshoring may not have a substantial impacted on U.S. employment figures and in fact “may have boosted U.S. economic growth — and job creation — by holding down inflation and increasing both consumer purchasing power and business profits.” These same outcomes could have been achieved had the jobs simply been “outsourced” to individuals with disabilities rather than “offshored” to countries were labor was cheap; with the added benefit of adding more taxpayers, lowering the burden on social services, and making life matter for these Americans by providing them with employment opportunities.
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Image by Gage Skidmore, used under its Creative Commons license.