Comment by timv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by timv | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

One example of this, and it happens too often, is when people are training their replacements.

Jobs are sent elsewhere (outsourced, off-shored, or both) and the people currently doing those roles need to train up the people who will be taking them over.

I know one government department that decided to relocate a particular job function to another location as part of a broader "regionalisation" strategy. The people doing that job at the existing location were all going to be made redundant once the new team was ready to take on the work.

The old team had an economic incentive to make the handover take as long as they could. The new team didn't have a lot of incentive to make it go fast. Sure, they were keen to do some real work, but they were also reasonably happy to only have 50% of the case load, and leave 50% back with the original team. Since only the people at the top had any real desire to see the project succeed, you can probably guess how well it went.

To be fair, training your replacements when an entire division is being outsourced to off-shore is incredibly cruel.

My father in law works at an industrial manufacturer where several departments (including IT) are being outsourced to Southeast Asia. The company has been operating locally for nearly a century and a lot of the people who are being made redundant have worked there for decades and are now being kicked out at a point where they are too young for retirement but too old to find new jobs.

I know that a company isn't a welfare organisation, but if you employ upwards of a hundred people in a small town you can't deny having some social responsibility. It's easy to see why the workers told to train their cheaper replacements are having a hard time staying professional.

Why does a company have a "social responsibility" towards a bunch of wealthy Americans, but none towards the very poor southeast Asians who were denied for decades even the opportunity to apply for work at the US facility?

I'm not talking about the US.

And the social responsibility arises from shaping the local economy in such a way that a large number of people become dependent on the company. If a company becomes the main employer in a small town, it automatically takes on some responsibility. This is less true today when most people know they're not going to work for the same employer until retirement but it is still true for traditional companies with that kind of legacy.

It's not about some theoretical ethical responsibility for the greater good of mankind but about taking responsibility for your actions and the effect they have on people you have built a relationship with. If Industrocorp, Inc builds a factory in Podunk and the labour demand raises the number of residents by an order of magnitude, then relocating operations and firing a large number of staff will ruin the local economy the company created.

I'm not sure how that concept is difficult to understand: your actions have consequences, ergo you are responsible for the consequences of your actions. Large corporations may be amoral, but the CEO of a privately owned company deciding to offshore half the employees isn't. Especially when the company periodical repeatedly claims that the employees are valued and their families are important. This makes the CEO an asshole. Period.

The consequence of not shipping jobs to southeast Asia is that folks there will be vastly poorer than unemployed Europeans. That isn't theoretical, its simply a fact.

Why does a non-contractual relationship change things? Are you applying the Copenhagen theory of ethics or something?

http://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethi...

Also, why dont the workers who became dependent on a company deserve responsibility for that action?

Are you seriously implying that it is the responsibility of Western countries to provide and create jobs for southeast Asians?

No, but I don't claim companies owe any responsibility to people in their hometown either. Certainly if companies do owe something beyond wages for work performed, I can't see why it wouldn't be owed to the poor rather than the rich.

Every member of society[0] (including corporations) actions within the social contracts of that society. Society provides corporations certain affordances, in return corporations contribute to society (by paying taxes, reasonable wages and so on). Corporations don't have any god-given rights of their own, they merely have the privileges granted to them by society (via laws and regulations).

I realise HN is a weird place to argue this, but corporations don't exist in a vacuum. They can't exist in a vacuum. Without a state guaranteeing its rights and the means to enforce those rights, a corporation is just a group of individuals. This is not only true for corporations. You don't have any rights other than those afforded to you by society (whether on a local level like the US or a global level like the UN). If there's no-one who's going to enforce your rights, they become purely philosophical (cf. Guantanomo -- unless you believe the UN is going to take on the US government and bail you out of there).

The social contract is primarily between an individual and society at a local level. Thanks to globalization it now extends to other societies across the globe, but the responsibilities of a local corporation to residents of a country on the other side of the globe they don't already have any business relationships with is only secondary at best.

That said, you're kidding yourself if you are trying to argue that increasing profit (or cutting costs, which boils down to the same effect) by outsourcing to cheaper markets could even remotely be considered something ethically positive.

[0] I'm using the terms "society" and "state" or "government" interchangeably here based on the democratic principle that a state derives its legitimation from the people, i.e. the society it governs.

The social contract is primarily between an individual and society at a local level.

What makes the social contract local? Why not say the social contract is primarily between and individual and his race, his class, his clan or his religion?

At one time it was considered a violation of the "social contract" for a white man to hire cheaper negro workers (language chosen to evoke that era). Many folks still consider it a violation of the "social contract" to hire someone who isn't Marathi. Why do you choose geographic locality rather than race?

Outsourcing to cheaper markets reduces poverty and inequality. As a person who doesn't consider Debbie more valuable than Deepika (both are real people that I know personally), I consider helping Deepkia (born into dire poverty and with little chance to escape) far more ethical than helping Debbie.

Stats: http://www.maxroser.com/economic-world-history-in-one-chart/ http://ourworldindata.org/data/growth-and-distribution-of-pr...

> What makes the social contract local?

You're asking questions that have been discussed at length by philosophers, and while there is no definitive "answer", there are some thought frameworks you can think in. Questions of ethics are hard because they're dependent on culture, and their axioms do not stem from nature (although a few philosophers claim they do) but from human psychology and social-psychology. Still, they're not completely arbitrary. You can say your values make you prefer ethical framework A over ethical framework B, but each framework -- while may not 100% logically sound and 100% consistent -- at least frames the discussion.

So, to get back to your question, there are certainly reasons -- within a given ethics framework -- to prefer local responsibility. The reasons start with the question, "why do I have a responsibility towards the Other[1]?" Some philosophers (like Levinas[2], I think), take a very total approach. Others may say that the responsibility stems from relationship and mutual influence (my wellbeing is affected by the Other, and the Other's is affected by mine). If you prefer the second approach, it is clear that you have greater responsibility towards those whose lives are more affected by yours and vice-versa, and as mutual effects can travel through the economy or legislation (you both vote for the same government), and those are local, it stands to reason that the measure of responsibility grows with locality. Other ethical frameworks may agree with this notion of locality in principle, but say that locality only takes precedence when the needs are the same (of the local and remote), but if the remote person/community has greater needs, then that takes precedence over locality.

All of these can make sense, and different people can subscribe to different ethical frameworks. But each of them has to be consistent, or at least have good reasons for breaking the consistency in some circumstances.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Levinas

Pitting the global working class against one another in this fashion will simply drive down wages across the board. Taken to the extreme, eventually the American, European, and SE Asian will be equally poor while c-level executives and investors continue increasing their wealth.

Your idea makes a certain kind of sense, but it's not going to lead to anything except even more inequality than we started with.

More inequality and poverty is the exact opposite of what happened.

http://www.maxroser.com/economic-world-history-in-one-chart/ http://ourworldindata.org/data/growth-and-distribution-of-pr...

Why don't the southeast Asians just create their own companies and jobs? Why do you assume that Europeans and Americans have to create jobs there in order for income to be equalized? You are missing a few things before you can say "its simply a fact." It's not a fact and there are many points in history where it has not been true.

Huh? How many southeast Asians were denied for decades employment at a company in small town USA?

Regarding social responsibility, this is simply my opinion, but companies that wish to employ the full legal and financial protection of the United States and operate within its infrastructure bear some social and moral responsibility to contribute back into the system. Offshoring the bulk of a company's workforce or moving profits overseas to evade taxes and other things of this nature should disqualify any company from receiving the protections and benefits provided by the US, full stop.

Hey, great point ! I wanted to buy property in Thailand but found I'm not legally allowed to because I'm not a Thai citizen.

That's got me thinking, what about the social responsibility of southeast Asians towards Americans who have been denied for decades the opportunity to own property and live in southeast Asian countries?

Every country has it's own laws about who can settle and work and under what conditions. America does it and so do 'Southeast Asian' countries and everywhere in-between.

Thailand decides who can own property (or work) there. It's neither racist (as you seem to imply - but perhaps you mean only when it's America?) nor is it evil.

Guess, I'll just need to suck it up and go without that great beach house in Thailand.

I'd certainly say that the Thai government are behaving in an bad manner towards prospective home buyers. It's not quite as bad - they aren't forcing Americans into dire poverty - but its certainly not an ethical move on their part.

I don't know the Thailand govt well, but India has similar laws and is explicitly racist about them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com