Outsourcing and the Worker

Outsourcing, its Discontents, and some Solutions

http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~pslm/livingwage/outsourcing.html

This piece explores the ways in which outsourcing worsens standards of all kinds for wokers and communities, and unfairly shifts both power and concrete benefits from workers to management. Outsourcing produces unequal power relations and unfair labor standards in several ways:

• Outsourcing, and managerial threats to outsource, reduces the power of directly-hired, unionized workers to win and maintain decent working conditions.

• Outsourcing severely restricts the ability of outsourced and non-union workers to organize unions.

• Outsourcing reduces transparency and obstructs flows of information, thwarting the ability of the Harvard community enforce internal standards -formal or otherwise.

• Outsourcing reduces management's incentive to enforce workplace regulations in two ways. First, the contractor's legal status as an employer reduces the liability of the institution where employees actually work, and where workplace regulations must be enforced. Second, outsourcing to smaller firms reduces the size of potential claims in litigation.

• Outsourcing divides workers into tiers which can be played against one another. At Harvard, management has used this strategy to discipline workers' wage demands.

• Outsourcing creates a dispensable, replaceable pool of workers who are easily exploited and can be used to drive down standards for other workers.

• Outsourcing creates loopholes which allow institutions to evade employment and labor laws.