Insourcing vs. Outsourcing

The Sacramento Bee has an interesting article today on the outsourcing/insourcing controversy, prompted by some grand-standing legislation:

The Golden State ranks first nationally for the most jobs – 713,500 – supported by the U.S. operations of foreign-based companies, according to the Organization for International Investment in Washington, D.C…

On average, U.S. subsidiaries of foreign companies pay their workers 16.5 percent more than domestic companies, the trade group reports…

State Sen. Liz Figueroa, D-Sunol, who’s introduced legislation aimed at outsourcing, said she’s seen no evidence in her district, which includes much of the Silicon Valley, that insourcing is balancing out the negative impact of outsourcing.

“Insourcing is in the debate, but it doesn’t help the thousands of individuals in my district (who) currently don’t have a job,” Figueroa said. “In my district it’s the higher-paying jobs we’re losing – the computer programming and engineering jobs.”

Before I left California to do an in-sourcing job, I lived one district over from former head-hunter Figueroa, who’s generally regarded as a legislative lightweight, for good reason, and who sent her daughter to Smith College to learn radical feminism.

Perhaps the shoddy education California delivers to its higher-ed students accounts for its loss of high-tech jobs:

IT DOESN’T REFLECT well on San Francisco State University that President Robert Corrigan has announced that he is considering axing the School of Engineering to close a budget gap. The university has no shortage of gut courses that appear short on academics and long on liberal brainwashing —

you know, courses in majors that prepare students for careers as low-paid malcontent activists. Yet Corrigan wants to kill a program that enables poor and minority Bay Area students to learn in-demand, high-level skills with which they can make good money.

Just a thought.