Fair Shares: A Preliminary Framework and Case Analyzing the Ethics of Offshoring

Abstract

Much has been written about the offshoring phenomenon from an economic efficiency perspective. Most authors have attempted to measure the net economic effects of the strategy and many purport to show that "in the long run" that benefits will outweigh the costs. There is also a relatively large literature on implementation which describes the best way to manage the offshoring process. But what is the morality of offshoring? What is its "rightness" or "wrongness?" Little analysis of the ethics of offshoring has been completed thus far. This paper develops a preliminary framework for analyzing the ethics of offshoring and then applies this framework to basic case study of offshoring in the U.S. The paper following discusses the definition of offshoring; shifts to the basic philosophical grounding of the ethical concepts; develops a template for conducting an ethics analysis of offshoring; applies this template using basic data for offshoring in the United States; and conducts a preliminary ethical analysis of the phenomenon in that country, using a form of utilitarianism as an analytical baseline. The paper concludes with suggestions for further research.

Financialization and Outsourcing in a Different Guise: The Ethical Chaos of Workforce Localization in the United Arab Emirates

“…As part of the culture of financialization or maximum utilization of human and financial assets, many companies choose to offshore their operations to developing economies with lower salary scales, lower operational costs, and lower requirements relating to the provision of benefits to workers. The USA has been at the forefront of this practice with a very large number of companies outsourcing operations (Gordon and Zimmerman 2010). The impact on workforces in the countries located has been revealed to be less positive than commonly proposed (Kaplinsky 2000), and the impact on the retrenched workers in the country of original operations is typically negative, at times, even in the very long term (Kletzer 2001;Madrick 2004).…”