Outsourcing as a Cause of Homelessness

Over Reading Days I went to Charlotte, NC for the Nabor’s trip and we worked with the Urban Ministry Center. The organization predominantly deals with homelessness, an issue we didn’t fully address when talking about off shoring. While different authors had varying opinions on what/whom off shoring would affect, they neglected to mention the possibility that outsourcing could go so far as to make more Americans homeless.

Wolf may be right that protecting US jobs could lead to less productivity, but that doesn’t mean we can simply account for these lost jobs in a statistic and move on unharmed. While sitting in on an information session our first morning there, the program director told us that a large number of people waiting for services have recently had their jobs outsourced. While the stigmas we typically attach to alcoholism, mental illness, and drug addiction are still prevalent, I had never thought someone would be homeless as a result of outsourcing.

As wages continue to decrease, as Freeman addresses, employees at the low-value level become more impoverished, and as jobs are outsourced, they simply lose their jobs all together. I’m not sure of the whole story for each person, but one man I worked with was trained in metalworking and utilities and had to work at a temp agency to find work. I for one don’t think it’s fair for someone who has learned a trade and constantly looking for work to find that he can work at maximum 3 times a week. IPE is often concerned with efficiency of the global market, but when we totally neglect fairness and accept homelessness as an expected outcome, I see a larger issue.

Some of the authors may be right and we may crease new needs for ourselves to fill the labor supply, but that does not mean that everyone who lost a job to outsourcing will be trained in the correct skill set for whatever industry we think of next. It is easy to discuss these issues in the classroom and analyze statistics, but it is another to see an endless line of people on the streets of Charlotte who possibly had steady jobs that weren’t lost to the “typical causes,” but to off-shoring to the third world.