Time to outsource your life?
By Gordon Powers, Sympatico / MSN Finance
The offshore shift of skilled workers has long been portrayed as the killer of good-paying North American jobs.
But that’s not stopping any number of individuals from turning to a vast talent pool in India and elsewhere for jobs ranging from web design to math tutoring. Thing is, they're also outsourcing some surprisingly small tasks, including booking hotel rooms, finding a plumber and looking for lost luggage.
Companies like GetFriday, Brickwork, and YourManInIndia seem to have hordes of people looking to do just about anything you can think of – as long as it’s legal. Bangalore-based TutorVista, for instance, provides unlimited online tutoring for $100 a month.
Language and cultural barriers can be a challenge, of course. If you’re looking for a deal but would still like to keep things closer to home, firms like Guru and CrowdSPRING offer workers both here and abroad.
Crowdsourcing sites like these allow you to post a project or task online so several people may bid for the work, often offering samples of what they’ve done before. You hire, supervise as necessary, and settle up only when satisfied. Guru, for instance, offers an escrow service in which you deposit the fee, where it’s held until the work is completed and you sign off on it.
If handing off chunks of to-do list scut work makes sense to you, it’s hard to argue with the pricing. Concierge service GetFriday offers pay-as-you-go and monthly plans, in increments of 10 or 15 minutes. The monthly plans start at $120 a month for 10 hours and volume pricing drops that down to as low as $8 an hour.
I wonder if they do garages?
Posted by: haha! ahh? | Feb 27, 2022 10:05:26 AM
sure!! and why not!?!
everyone's doing it!
good for me, good for everybody!
if only everything could be done by other people in other lands making very little money. and all of us sitting on our collective sorry @rses wondering where even the simplest of jobs went...
good plan
Posted by: Richard | Feb 27, 2022 11:03:02 AM
We North Americans have gone bonkers, dumb founded. We cannot believe how this mess we are in could happen. Why us? Are we not experiencing the highest standard of living in recorded history? Of course we are.
The cost to us is also enormous. The cost of goods and services are now rock bottom because we have used off-shore sources of material and labour to fill our appetites for goods and in doing so completely wiped out the existance of a middle class capable of supporting itself. Great move.
Perhaps our national governments will consider it necessary to take a page out of the annuls of British history, a time between the industrial revolution and the 19th century, when the government of the day had to endure enormous unrest and rebellion due to potatoe crop failures, starvation, mass unemployment and political instability. The governments solution was to provide free gin to the poor and the middle class to keep them in a stupor. As long as they were inebriated the governing of the country could proceed as planned and the upper class could continue to become richer and the lower classes held down. This was one of the prinmary reasons for immigration to the colonies in North America including Canada, the West Indies and US, Australia and New Zealand, India and parts of Africa.
Perhaps now, the poor and middle classes will have their choice of poison; straight gin or a gin martini, not stirred and no ice, a James Bond favourite.
I cannot understand why the western world governments are not taking more blame for the debacle we are now in. If there had been an enforcement for Canadians to buy Canadian, for example, and global trade had been better monitored and controlled, then it is quite possible we would be in a different scenario now.
Posted by: this is pathetic! | Feb 27, 2022 11:15:11 AM
And we wonder why we're in this recession?!?
Outsourcing should be illegal. It is already against common sense. If you take away all the jobs, especially all the good ones, who's going to buy your products and services Mr. CEO?
People need to have job security and disposable income in order to consume. It's not rocket science.
I've started to buy EVERYTHING used that can be obtained second-hand. That way, my money goes to a fellow working person, from my hand to theirs, and not to some filthy rich, jet-setting corporate big-wig who spends all day on the golf course. If we all do this, we can send them a message!
Are you listening, you rapacious, immoral corporate big-shots?
Posted by: rodney | Feb 27, 2022 1:30:34 PM
As long as we continue to buy second rate crap from other countries we are going to have a lower standard of living.
It will only get worse my friends.
Did you ever notice that items are not lasting as long as you thought they would, try checking where it was made.
And remember the old saying, "You get what you pay for".
When we start buying what we build here at home and yes "you will pay for quality" and we will still all have jobs.
The alternative is allways there, you can buy yourselves out of a job, China,India and a few other countries won`t mind.
Posted by: Don | Feb 27, 2022 1:41:23 PM
Big business has outsourced to the 3rd world for years and look at the high umemployment in North America. The Jetson's had a robot do all their menial tasks at home. We are not there yet with technology so why not just buy "cheap intelligence" from the 3rd world and we can spend more time in front of the tube....getting more obese and brian dead.
People give your self a shake....there is pride in doing things yourself...it's called growth!