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Comment by Johnny555 | Hacker News Reader

But unlike with service jobs that need to be done locally like a garbageman or electrician, what good does a union do against outsourcing jobs that can literally be done anywhere in the world?

Demanding to the employer: "Either keep our jobs in this country or we're going to stop working!", seems like it would just accelerate the offshoring.

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One leverage workers have is refusing to train their replacements. That's just cruel. IBM probably forces them to do it by threatening their severance package. But if there was collective refusal that power balance could be tipped.

Or refuse to work there in the first place.

That seems like pretty weak leverage, since refusing to transition the work won't stop the outsourcing. Even if a worker refuses to tell anyone how the Widget Orders get entered into the computer that orders them, someone can reverse engineer the process and figure it out.

"Even if a worker refuses to tell anyone how the Widget Orders get entered into the computer that orders them, someone can reverse engineer the process and figure it out"

Someone could reverse engineer this, but they fired him too.

The process might be disrupted seriously. But - who would care?

Someone could reverse engineer this, but they fired him too.

Or they fly him in from overseas and say "Hey, see that stack of forms? You are your team have to figure out how they get entered into the computer so we can make more Widgets"

It depends how protective the country laws are.

Here in Germany, Nokia was forced to either find alternative jobs for the employees of a plant they were closing down or to return to the local government all the subsidies that had gotten to built the plant.

That's because the German government apparently isn't bought and paid for by private corporations. Or at the very least not foreign ones.

It would work if you organized globally. Masonry guilds did it 700 years ago.

the companies can be taxed to the point that it would cost the same to have an American employee or one in a foreign country. Companies want "globalism" but they don't want to pay for it.

I don't see how that could work since companies would either contract out overseas work, or hire overseas workers through a subsidiary, so instead of IBM hiring 1,000 foreign call center workers, they'll pay "Joe's Call Center" a negotiated fee to run a call center, without IBM writing a single foreign paycheck.

This sounds like a corner case in the hypothetical law, which is addressed by wording the law more carefully, not jettisoning the idea.

If every company is taxed heavily for outshoring work, it would be impossible for Joe's Call Center to employ 1,000 people and make enough profit for them to be competitive vs just hiring the workers directly.

Joe's Call Center is incorporated in India and run by Indian management. IBM just hired them for Call Center services.

Unless you forsee taxing all companies for all oversees work, I don't see how that can work.

And I'm not sure how you can effectively tax a company for all overseas labor, for example, a computer is made up of thousands of components with thousands of suppliers, how can you tax IBM for the low-paid subcontracted labor that mines the minerals that are sold to a manufacturer that makes the plastic that's sold to another manufacturer to create the dielectric for capacitors that's sold to another subcontractor that makes the capacitors that are sold to another subcontrator that glues them on the big tape reels that are sold to another subcontractor that loads them into the pick and place machines that are used by another contractor to build a board that's used by another subcontractor to build a computer for IBM.

How far down the chain do you plan on going with taxation? It's easy to look at the simple case and say "Tax overseas workers!" but it's actually quite complicated to come up with rules do actually do so since there's no clear line that divides employees and non-employees. And if you draw that line, the company will move its workers to the otherside of the line.

How far down the chain do you plan on going with taxation?

Start with the low-hanging fruit and target specific industries. Call center, direct marketing, etc. Perhaps a tax break for not tasking, directly or indirectly, an offshore company for any primary business need. (The law has the benefit of not being code - a judge can see through most avoidance schemes)

There's probably a nontrivial healthcare cost benefit in reducing the collective country's blood pressure from being able to talk to someone they can understand when they need help..

(Only sort of kidding about that last bit...)

All that would do is move more work overseas.

I hear this all the time. If it could have been sent overseas, it would have been already.

The reason H1Bs are popular is it allows cheap workers whom can be managed in the US onsite. The management that uses H1Bs doesn't want to move the whole department overseas; if they did, they themselves wouldn't be needed. Executives grow their departments as big as possible as a political goal.

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