It looks like Sarah Sands’ breezy little interlude in her FT column (found through the Yorkshire Ranter)…
So, my Polish builder first worked on my house only a year ago. Seven days a week, 14 hours a day with his crack team. Barely spoke a word in English. Refused tea or coffee, just smoked and consumed Coca-Cola and chocolate biscuits. I was so swelled up with pride at my good fortune that, last December, I recommended him to a liberally inclined film director. I waited for grateful e-mails but none came. I grew a little uneasy.
Then a few months ago, I commissioned my Pole to do a bathroom. He returned without his team. Where were they? He was a little vague; they had disbanded/gone back to Poland/were busy elsewhere, but I should not worry about that.
I didn’t, until it became clear that he was arriving at 10 and knocking off at five. The driven gang was gone. Now he had a baby-faced apprentice who spilt his fizzy drinks on the carpets and broke the window. Every couple of hours they would down amateurish tools for a break. Finally my tight-lipped resentment spilt over.
“What on earth has happened to you?” I cried. “Why don’t you work any more?”
…perfectly encapsulates the attitude behind the changes described in this article (found through The Sideshow):
Dautel’s decision to backtrack now puts him in good company. Many thousands of German companies joined the march to Eastern Europe and China during the past 15 years, hoping to reduce production costs there. But recently many have been returning, disillusioned. Smaller companies in particular are finding they overestimated the apparent advantages of low labor costs or more advantageous tax laws.
When businesses make dubious decisions to outsource or offshore production because it’s supposed to be faster and cheaper while maintaining the same quality, it’s always easy for them to hide their internal reasoning on why to do this behind the usual m.b.a. claptrap, but with people like Sarah Sands it’s easier to see the real motivations. For Sarah, her Polish builders were not people in their own right, with their own economic motivations, but a magical panacea that would get her a cheap, good quality bathroom fast with none of the downsides of hiring English builders. It’s presented as a crime against nature when that turns out not to be the case. It’s as if the natural order should be that there are those who should get paid well for their work (Sarah, those German firms) and there are those that need to work hard for little (Polish workers, countries you outsource to).
There’s a large dose of racism and classicism involved in this. What Sarah left unspoken is that “her” Polish builders started to act like English ones, when they were supposed to remain forever cheap and hardworking. A lot of talk about migrant workers and outsourcing deals in this sort of cliches, in which the domestic, English or German worker is contrasted unfavourably with the hardworking for a penny a day Indian or Polish worker and how the former better learn how to be more like the latter or they will take all their jobs. There’s a great deal of middle class resentment build into this propaganda when it’s aimed at obviously working class professions like builders, as if these are finally receiving their comeuppance after years of unfairly demanding an actual living wage for their work and childish insistance on taking breaks and not working overtime to finish some media type’s kitchen.
I bet the same sort of attitude, only less articulated, is also present behind many decisions to outsource to countries like India. What such decisions fail to take into account is that workers in Indian aren’t working cheaper and harder by choice, but because they have to and once they no longer have to, they will stop, just like workers here. Smart companies realise that, which is why they both try and make sure workers here also have to work hard and cheap by dismantling social safetynets and are always looking for countries where workers still are fast and cheap. That a lot of this also means sacrifising quality is alright, as long as the market can be persuaded to be content with cheap crap…
Companies that cannot afford to lose quality however are out of luck; they should’ve known not to outsource vital processes.