Thinking over the employment situation and reviewing all I’ve read and heard about globalism and outsourcing, I wonder what trades/professions are unlikely to be outsourced? What work doesn’t travel?
Food/agriculture is globalized already, for better or worse. Farmed fish (catfish outranks cotton as a cash crop in Mississippi), apples (grown everywhere, from Australia to China), grapes (exported as fruit and wine on both sides of the equator), etc. Cars, electronics, clothes, all of these are imported now. (Next time, you hear some grumbling about the need to “buy American” ask them if they can be sure everything *they* buy is American-made?)
So what doesn’t it make sense to move offshore? What things don’t travel well? What kinds of relationships, goods, services need to be local? Some examples of the top of my head . . .
* *home construction and service:* we’re not yet able to prefab houses to the point where it’s easier/cheaper to ship a house than to build one onsite. Likewise the maintenance and repair. Furnaces and dishwashers are not “plug ‘n’ play.”
* *medicine:* doctors may not make house calls anymore, but we still need more than a phone consultation to really know what’s going on.
* *deals:* financial dealings that require more authority than an ATM can provide are still done face to face. Maybe someone has to travel, maybe all the parties do, but most deals (real estate, venture financing, etc.) are done face to face and will be so for the foreseeable future.[1]
* *personal services:* from restaurants to drycleaners to cafés.
* *business services:* perhaps this goes along with deals, but lawyers and accountants are always located within walking/driving distance of their client base. You can fly anywhere in the world in a day, but when someone wants to see you _right now_, you need to be there.
I think accountability is at the root of some of these: for the prices paid for non-commodity services, there’s an expectation that someone is responsible for the work performed and that you can get to them if you need to.
Of course, many of these local services rely on goods and services that are outsourced or imported. Construction relies on building materials and components from everywhere. Medicine, on practitioners, researchers, and techniques from all over the world, as well as transcription services that can be done wherever[2]. The purveyors of foods and required coffees are dependent on global trade. Even business services rely on services (transcription, data entry, back-office automation) that may be done several zip codes or time zones distant.
So what does this mean for the world of work in the future? Does it mean more or less choice, more or fewer options? It may be that the work you like to do doesn’t exist in your geographic location (assuming you’re not a knowledge worker who doesn’t have to be anywhere). Will we see a future where, instead of work being distributed around the world, some types of work (manufacturing, for example) will follow the lowest cost labor? What happens to blue collar work in the developed world?
I always understood that one of the reasons for farm subsidies was to keep some minimal amount of food production on these shores: the threat of war and blockade may be less likely than 100 years ago, but there’s some sense in being self-reliant. (Many emerging nations have set that as their benchmark: without food independence, there is no independence.) So what trades and professions would fall under the rubric of being required for self-reliance? Will the free market suffice? I keep hearing a voice in the back of my head telling me I might find the answer in Gibbon.
fn2. with varying results