*Outsourcing For Fun And Profit- A Film Review Of "Outsourced"

Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of the trailer for "Outsourced".

DVD Review

Outsourced, starring Josh Hamilton, directed by John Jeffcoat, 2006

Okay, it was bound to happen, right? After all the gnashing of teeth about the lost of American jobs to other countries, after all the India-China bashing as the symbol of those loses and after all the strident, if fruitless, lambasting of those facts by every yahoo politician and cretin-like labor bureaucrat we were bound to get out of Hollywood (or Bollywood, for that matter) a comedic take on this phenomenon. And, given the political ethos of these times, a little ‘lesson’ in multi-culturalism to boot.

It may be unfair to lay the vagaries of the world labor market and the current phase of capitalist “globalization” on a simple film, and I won’t, at least not much because this was actually an entertaining film on its own terms, but its subtext (nice weasel word, right?) does fit in rather nicely about the state of the still fervent “outsourcing” strategy that virtually every large corporation in America (and elsewhere) has hit upon in order tot reduce (and reduce significantly) their wage bills, particularly administrative costs and the price of unskilled and semi-skilled labor.

A quick sketch of the plot is in order. An American telemarketing corporation in order to cut those high administrative costs fires it’s American–centered order-taking staff and out sources to the highly skilled but cheap wage Indian labor market. A middle level executive, the star of the film, Josh Hamilton, is called upon to bring the Indians up to speed and the twists and turns of the plot turn around the struggle to get the Indians to conform to the Taylor productivity speed up system well-known in American business circles. The faults and follies of this transformation drive the, sometimes understated, comedy of the film. Along the way, naturally, said executive gets an up close and personal lesson in multiculturalism from a very fetching Indian love interest.

But here is the point for our purposes-in the end, and I am really giving nothing away here, the Indian employees in their turn are fired so that the corporation can set up shop in the even cheaper Chinese labor market. In short, the race to the bottom continues on its merry way unabated. It is that unabated condition that I will finish up with. I’ve mentioned those cretin-like labor bureaucrats above who have “belly-ached” about the flight of jobs to other countries without lifting finger one to organize labor internationally to drive wages up and make the flight of jobs out much less attractive . Hell, they haven’t, at least since the great wave of industrial unionism led by the CIO drives of the 1930’s, done anything to organize labor in the cheap-labor American south or, and here is the real crime, Wal-mart. This is hardly the end of the discussion. Let’s leave it at this for now- organize globally and think locally. Thinking the other way around gets us no place- American, Indian or Chinese.