Patriotism Of Offshoring A Near 50/50 Issue
Don St. John
A poll by business publisher The Marlin Company finds a close split on the question of whether U.S. companies ought to be outsourcing to other countries - and almost nobody is undecided.
A slight majority of Americans in a recent poll released last week said that offshore outsourcing of jobs was inherently unpatriotic and that companies that do so deserve scorn from U.S. citizens.
The poll was conducted by polling firm Harris Interactive in late May to early June for business publisher The Marlin Company, which specializes in assessing workplace issues. It found that 53 percent of the 772 respondents surveyed felt that companies who offshore jobs are unpatriotic, and the same number said that they resented companies that do send jobs to other countries.
The poll was remarkably free of undecided respondents, however. 41 percent of the respondents took the position that offshore outsourcing isn't unpatriotic, and 44 percent don't resent companies doing so, leaving only 5 percent and 3 percent respectively without an opinion on the issue.
That may well constitute further evidence of the deep divide over the practice of offshore outsourcing, which has garnered intense attention in the media and public opinion over the past couple of years as higher-level jobs such as information technology positions have been sent to countries such as India and China. The Marlin Company did not distinguish the types of workers who were surveyed.
Not all of the poll questions were so evenly split, though. Only 18 percent of the respondents said they feared seeing their own jobs sent overseas, with virtually all of the remainder saying that they had no fear of losing their positions. However, nearly two-thirds of the respondents, 63 percent, said that they felt American workers were at the "end of a golden era, when people looked forward to retirement, pensions, health insurance and long-term security."
"The implied social contract between employer and employee has changed dramatically in the last generation, and American business is on the precipice of seeing the word 'loyalty' eliminated from the corporate lexicon," said Marlin president Frank Kenna III.
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