It just gets crazier.
Last week we learned more about how the world of big business works.
It seems the big boys who outsource a lot of their work are bringing the outsourcer workers into insource so they can learn how to do the work properly by the insource workers and then they get sent back to India or Philippines or China to provide outsource duties while the insource people in Canada, who have taught the outsourcers how to insource from the outsource, are laid off or provided with diminished duties and pay.
You follow all that?
Apparently RBC didn't get it all right either and their president had to spend a few million of their profits to buy advertisements and commercial time to sort of apologize for doing what they and others have been doing for quite some time, but are just now getting exposed for the crafty, devious little tricks they're pulling off to save a few bucks.
It backfired this time, but these global village practices will continue.
Unemployment is not an issue around here because the oil and coal is here. We can't outsource it. Finding employees is the problem.
It used to be that our big corporations required big numbers of skilled and semi-skilled people to produce and push products. Manufacturing was North America's game plan.
Not anymore.
Our biggest companies now, Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook, all together employ just 190,000 people in North America. That represents the number of people who enter the U.S. workforce every two months.
They have outsourced, they are assembling their goodies in China and elsewhere.
Some companies which have been doing this for years, even a decade or more, are finding that the process is becoming less and less attractive and profitable. Wages are climbing slowly in these emerging nations while wage rates descend in North America where unemployment is high.
They are struggling to get the right personnel in place. They discover the business infrastructure abroad isn't as strong as it could be. They find that governments there are not as easy to work with as they are on this side of the water in terms of corruption, graft and greasing palms.
The business culture is different ... attitudes are different, conditions turn negative and confusing more often, requiring more hours from administration to fly back and forth putting out fires. They are finding they'd rather bring the issue back home where they can understand the problem, culture, personnel and plans.
Yes, the global village is smaller now, but the differences are still pronounced and often they don't translate into efficiencies, or at least not as efficient as the big boys expected them to be.
And please don't misinterpret. These are not prejudicial comments, just facts that have been pointed out by many people who make a living at assessing these things.
Heck, even trying to unify Canada and Canadian workers defies current logic. We have thousands of unemployed skilled workers in Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes who could probably land jobs in Saskatchewan and Alberta but won't or can't due to family and second jobs that would be lost, uneven education systems, housing issues and cultural challenges. I don't even need to mention workers in Michigan and New York who could do with a good job in Saskatchewan or North Dakota. Lots of openings ... not a lot of takers.
So we'll continue to look to Ukraine, Ireland, India, Philippines, Germany, Italy etc. for our next generation of production people and wait for the big boys to bring more jobs home eventually.
