Obama on Outsourcing.

I originally posted this on my new blog which is still on its infancy. The blog is dedicated to call center life but i have not yet find the time to fully promote the blog so I decided to repost my thoughts on this subject here for the benefit of my regular visitors.

Everybody is talking about the recently concluded US Presidential election. Every blogger has something to say about this and I don’t have anything against the topic. First, we have just witnessed the historic election of the first US President of mixed African-American descent. Second, America has a brand new hope that the future will still be promising.

I don’t have anything against Barack Obama either. If I am living in the US, I would probably vote for him too. But I’m living in a country where the US has a huge influence and I also work on an American BPO company. The thing is, not everything good that will happen in the US will have positive impacts to countries with close ties with this country.

I couldn’t help but to worry when I heard of the tough stand of Obama about outsourcing. Even during the campaigns, he is quite vocal about his stand about companies who send jobs abroad. He is against it. He said that the choice is between giving tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas or give benefit to those companies that keep jobs domestically.

We can’t blame people worrying that with Obama at the helm, the slow and untimely death of the BPO industry in the Philippines and the rest of Asia is certain.
However, if we will consider the current global economic crisis, there is a big chance that the new US president may take a more practical stand on this issue. He will need to face the fact that in order to survive, American companies will have to outsource. The cheap labor cost overseas is the reason why some of these companies are still in business. And if these companies are not making money, they can not contribute to the federal economy. And if the economy is unstable, there will be no resources to fuel the “changes” that Obama plans to enforce.

Hopefully, they could come up with a win-win situation on this. But we can just wait and see….