Correccións

The speaking and the reading passages discuss about the reasons, the benefits and the drawbacks of outsourcing.

While the writer strongly supports it, the lecturer thinks that it is one of the reasons for unemployment in the US.

First of all, the speaker explains what outsourcing is: as many US companies have gone global, their current tendency is to decentralize operations.

They maintain the core operations in the US, but delocalize the non-core operations to other countries.

Gradually, more and more jobs have been moved outside the US, including.

According to the lecturer, outsourcing is a major cause of unemployment in the US: by moving a major part of the jobs abroad, companies are removing jobs from Americans at the same time.

Even if on the long run, outsourcing helps major companies secure their financial future, it just results in the loss of jobs in the US.

Finally, according to the lecturer, as outsourcing is a fact of life, the only way to make outsourcing a “win-win situation” is to encourage American companies to educate their workers whose jobs are going to be moved offshore to help them build new skill sets: when their jobs are removed, these workers would be able to get better paying positions in the same company.

However, the writer considers that the main reason companies decided to outsource their business is to gain visibility in foreign markets, and that the combination of low wages and skilled workers only came after.

He also reminds us that outsourcing resembles a period when US companies moved operations such as customer service to rural areas in order to reduce the costs of labour.

Besides, he firmly believes that saying that outsourcing is responsible for the loss of jobs in the US is wrong: companies maintain low cost productions in order to keep products and services affordable, securing their financial future and that of the Americans.

Eventually, he also says that today, most people find it normal that companies keep their headquarters in important cities such as New York but move other jobs to places where the labour costs are lower.