Outsourcing costs outweigh benefits in the long run

Michael Pravica, Henderson

Saturday, Feb. 5, 2011 | 2:02 a.m.

Businesses that export American jobs and technical know-how need to be aware of the following critical issues:

1. By eliminating jobs here, they curtail the ability of ordinary Americans to purchase the very products they manufacture, setting up a vicious cycle.

2. By seeking cheaper labor in places such as China with horrible labor laws and a poorly trained workforce, the quality of products has dramatically declined and has, in many cases, become outright dangerous (for example, melamine-tainted milk and dog food, lead-based paints, toxic metals in jewelry, and noxious home- and lung-destroying drywall), which ends up costing the companies that outsourced this production far more in the end with the inevitable lawsuits and required compensation that result.

3. By hiring desperate, impoverished workers to produce their products overseas for a pittance, there should be no surprise that these workers will not be loyal to these cheap companies and will not honor their trade secrets but will sell them to the highest bidder, as we are witnessing daily.

4. Finally, it is wholly illogical, pollution-generating and very energy-inefficient to, for example, transport parts or raw material from here to be assembled in China and then brought back across the ocean to be sold in America.

Company leaders need to be reminded that you get what you pay for. Buy American!