The Continued Threat of Outsourcing

IBA GroupMark Kobayashi-HillaryHR magazine published a feature earlier this month titled “lower-skilled jobs still threatened by outsourcing to Europe” – the kind of headline that compels a reader to read on, but the story isn’t quite as described.The feature is extremely confused for a number of reasons. First, the writer is not just talking about low-skilled jobs – he uses the comparison of experienced IT industry workers to contrast different salaries across Europe. Then secondly, he talks about how salaries in Germany, France, Belgium, and Ireland are up to 57% higher than in the UK.This confuses me. IT professionals on £42,000 per year are not low-skilled workers and if there are many countries in Europe paying higher salaries than the UK then surely those are the places where most skilled workers will go anyway?And I would question this data. I have a lot of Irish friends and they are almost all figuring out how to leave Ireland. It is impossible to believe that pay and conditions are better there than in the UK.The most confusing thing is that this is now 2013. Europe expanded to the east in 2004, almost a decade ago. It feels very strange for the media to be talking about how jobs are threatened by outsourcing when Europe itself is a free trade area that encourages businesses to work across borders – with the free movement of people a key part of the union.I was recently in a bar talking about the continued expansion of the EU to two senior executives from Austria. I asked them how they felt about Bulgaria and Romania joining the union – they immediately responded enthusiastically and suggested that it will make business with these two important markets a lot easier.This is the complete opposite of the British reaction – where a fear that thousands of people will flood to London from the new EU member states is still the normal reaction. Only the British press appears to be still fearful of the European Union, with this ‘jobs threat’ headline just the latest example I have read.There are more British people living and working across Europe than Europeans working inside the UK. So why does the media fear this European jobs threat? It seems that many British people are capable of venturing into the world to find where the opportunities exist.