Outsource or be outsourced?

Soon it will be possible to outsource most of our employment to overseas countries — mind-numbing and body-destroying factory jobs have been heading overseas for years — and companies are now sending legal work, IT and other white-collar assignments overseas.

Your local newspaper might be part of the next great industry that will originate overseas via outsourcing because the work of putting together a paper is cheaper in India. Several papers are already using Indian companies to edit the pages of American newspapers.

Business Week reports that the Orange County Register will outsource copy editing to overseas workers during a one-month trial. Officials at the newspaper said sending the paper overseas to be edited will improve the paper’s local focus — possibly by reducing expenses so that workers won’t have to be laid off. Feel free to insert your joke here about how it is deemed necessary to send a newspaper overseas to improve it’s local focus. (H/T to fellow Indiana blogger Ruth Holladay for spotting the story).

Some might say that it is great that mind-numbing office jobs, such as copy editing and years-long discovery document review of ever proliferating terabytes of ESI from company hard-drives and email archives is going overseas because it could free us up to advance our personal and national economies by focusing more on creative enterprises.

Could the end of dull and repetitive assignments free us up to pursue our highest callings to figure out the next great solutions to life’s problems? Or, will we suffer the fate of the buggy whip workers who lost their jobs and were never heard from again because they failed to adapt to changing economic challenges and opportunities?

Might we reach a time when we will all be bosses sending the tedious tasks overseas to be completed? Tim Ferriss advocates outsourcing your own work assignments, including our own personal assignments to free up time to travel the world and make money on the internet and other ventures.

Could it be that the way to “beat” outsourcing is to embrace it wholeheartedly?

Video: OC Register Outsources Editing To India

Video: Fired!

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