A recent article over on Global Services on Outsourcing often Mischaracterized as Evil and Insidious states that outsourcing costs jobs is one of the myths that turn outsourcing into an epithet.

The article states that it is a jobs fallacy that when a job disappears in a western country and turns up in India it was exported by a nefarious businessmen. The article claims that the reality is that the job was exported because the job has been uneconomic to maintain in the West, whether or not India exists. The example given in the article is that when Carly Fiorina exported 35,000 jobs, it was the right decision, because if HP did not remain competitive in fiercely competitive markets, HP would have lost 100,000 jobs. In addition, if a certain job gets too expensive to do, such as calling a patient to remind her to take her medications, then it will disappear. But if it can be outsourced at an affordable cost, it will not.

I certainly buy the second argument. But I don’t know how far I buy the first. Costs have to be kept under control to support solvency and maintain jobs, but does this mean they always have to be outsourced? Sometimes it’s just a matter of increasing productivity. While that may be hard to do in online customer support, in certain areas of manufacturing, new technology and processes might be all that is needed if the plant is put in an area where costs are low or government incentives are high. In other words, outsourcing may not always be saving as many jobs as other methods could. It’s a balance.