The Case of the Disposable American Worker(s) – (Fossil reminds us, Where will the jobs be?)

So, I woke up this morning reading the news that Fossil is shipping many (most) of its jobs out of country.

So, imagine this… someone is hired at Fossil to do a job. That person does that job well. That person is asked to be a part of the Fossil team, and Fossil aims at high employee engagement. As do all good companies.

And, then, it is discovered that the same work can be done for much less in India, so the person becomes completely, utterly disposable — that very person who was hired for his/her talent, that person who helped raise the employee engagement numbers for the company.

Now, multiply that person by hundreds/thousands. And now you have the reality of the American workplace.

Here’s the article I read in this morning’s Dallas Morning News: Schnurman: Fossil sells out its tech workers.

And, here’s the key excerpt from the article:

“Workers have to feel like they’re very disposable.”
“The executives making these decisions aren’t villains,” Hira (Ron Hira, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington and an associate professor at Howard University) told the Senate panel before proposing improvements to the H1-B program. “They are simply acting rationally” to cut labor costs.

This is a problem without a good solution. Every company is facing competition that does the exact same thing. The mandate calls for lower costs, and lowering the cost of labor is one immediately available way to accomplish this in this era of globalization.

And, companies are so focused on this problem that they seem to ignore the issue of “what will these workers do now?”. And, as this outsourcing and offshoring and labor-cost-cutting continues, the middle-class shrinks, and then shrinks some more.

Where will the jobs be? This is the question that I have come back to time and time again in my blogging career. I read and look, pretty much in vain, for an answer.

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On the Dallas Morning News site for the article, the author, Mitchell Schnurman has an excellent commentary. I’ve embedded it here. Do yourself a favor; spend the slightly over 2 minutes it takes to watch it. It is worth watching!