“”Outsourcing” means that they will fire US citizens and hire illegal contractors who will work for half the price.”
While you are probably right it’s worth discovering why the layoffs are happening. Government regulation at all levels make having employees expensive. As an employer, you must comply with federal, state, county and city rules. Every rule adds a cost that must be mortised across your entire workforce. So, the accountant goes to work and figures out what it costs above pay and benefits to have an employee. Then the accountant figures out how much money each employee has to earn to cover his cost. Someone who deals with commercial customers and writes orders for hundreds or thousands of dollars per hour easily pulls his weight. A janitor or grill assembler doesn’t. That isn’t because cleaning the place or assembling a grill aren’t valuable contributions. It’s because regulations add so much overhead that the people doing those tasks are not adding anything to the bottom line. Their tasks can be more cheaply exported to an outside supplier. The outside suppliers will be smaller and therefore subject to less regulation, so they can actually make a profit doing those tasks. Whether the outside supplier hires citizens or illegals is a separate issue. But it is not an issue Lowe’s is concerned with.
If we don’t want companies to outsource labor then we need to reduce the ridiculous number of laws, regulations and taxes imposed on hiring Americans.
Your lower working bees are the cheapest employees.
You kill your back bone then you entire operation will suffer.
Still there is NO EXCUSE for a cooperation to fire Americans and hire illegals.
That is fine and I will shop some where else.
I’m not going to support a corporation that does this.
Excellent comment.
I don’t see this as so much an illegal alien problem and a government regulation problem. Health benefits are part of that, but it’s bigger than that. Government makes it hard for businesses to function — they’ve got regulations for everything!
Right on! Plus...
Do you really think Lowes will have illegals working in their stores?
Do you really think Lowes will have illegals working in their stores?
For retail chains like Lowe’s, most employees are liabilities, not assets — for all the reasons you describe.
A post of reason.
Expanding on what you said: every regular employee is a potential lawsuit for "discrimination", "hostile work environment", etc, etc. The potential liability costs are high.
So for grill assembly (for example), you get some outside small company. Maybe the manager's friend's nephew grabs a few friends and they make a bid. If somebody is unhappy over discrimination, sexual harassment, whatever, the little 10-man company dissolves, and re-forms under another name, minus the troublemakers.
“”that must be mortised across your entire workforce.””
Needs correcting.
Yep. They outsource the work and more importantly, the HR elements.
But it's like shouting down a well. I've come to the conclusion there is so much resentment of "business" from conservatives (never mind liberals) - with zero differentiation between the effects of a law on Amazon vs. the effects on Joe's Flower Stand - that any meaningful legal reform will never happen.
You are astute. But you can’t blame the government totally as they are one of the largest contributors to outsourcing in the country and are successful with it.
When I retired from the military and was approached to return to a position a lot like I left, this time in a civilian status, I crossed over into a true enigma of what most people understand as “military service.”
There were a total of 1.3 million active duty military and more than 800,000 reserve forces as of September 2017, according to Defense Department personnel data. But there were more than 142.5 million civilians working for the military in some type of capacity.
https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2018/data-on-display/military-civilian-compare.htm?view_full
And that doesn’t include people working on the edge like congress and all their support. Everything from custodial to IT to decision making is in the middle and over/under the military. Even the POTUS is the overall commander in chief of the military, with checks and balance handed to congress.
So outsourcing is not new, just well hidden. And it’s been around for a long time.
rwood
It would be interesting to find out how Workers Compensation rules categorize “grill assemblers”. The inherent hazard W/C believes grill assembly involves can really hike up the cost of labor.
That is all true. And unfortunately liberal Manhattanite Democrat Ivanka is about to make it worse, getting Daddy to go along with a “bipartisan” paid family leave bill that will make actually hiring people more expensive and riskier still.