Working with Offshore Vendors

Boycott EVERYTHING Disney, as one reader commented on The The New York Times site. That will send a clear message to management and a way to stand in solidarity with the fired workers.

Iris, The NY Times article may have been more about importing workers than sending work overseas, but they are two sides of the same coin. Outsourcing type composition and page layout to India and other countries has decimated the American textbook production business and destroyed the careers of many highly-skilled people. Here’s my quick take on what happened: American publishers were profitable, so they were bought up by larger companies that knew nothing about publishing. B-school grads in the accounting departments decided that production work was a commodity, and it didn’t matter who did it or where, or how well. They shipped all this work overseas for pennies on the dollar compared to the cost of doing the work in the USA. American workers, who were highly educated, experienced, and understood the culture of the country the textbooks were being created for, were laid off en masse. Since there was no more production to do, other administrative people and project managers etc. also lost their jobs. Prior to this upheaval, there were several textbook publishers with design & production departments in the Boston area, and several independent textbook developers. Now, most of these indepndents have gone out of business, and the publishers have consolidated their operations in other cities, such as New York, since there are only a few designers left, along with the people who manage the relationships with overseas vendors. I used to do freelance work for both the independent developers and larger publishers, and when this all started, we were sometimes called into fix or completely redo the files that came back from overseas, because they were so poorly done as to be unusable. I don’t have objective data, but everything I’ve seen and heard has confirmed that ever since the great outsourcing revolution, the overall quality of the textbooks has gone into the toilet. But the much bigger effect has been on the people who work in publishing. People used to go into publishing because they wanted to make books. The money was never as good as in other sectors, such as advertising or financial firms. But the designers and editors and production people all worked together to make a quality product, and it was a good place to work. Now, there are no more production people, few designers, and from anecdotal evidence I have heard, the morale is extremely low at these companies. Everyone who still has a job is working under the threat of the inevitable pink slip. I used to know several other production artists who were very good at typesetting and page layout. I even had projects where I needed to hire 5 or more compositors for a few months. Now, almost all of those freelancers have either taken early retirement or gone into lower-paying service jobs, such as retail or dog walking. If I had a project come in that required me to hire more than 1 freelancer, I would have a very hard time finding anyone left who even still knows how to use the latest software. They can’t afford a subscription to the Creative Cloud, or a new Mac—they don’t have any work. Publishing is only one of many industries to suffer this fate. The message to the worker is, “we don’t care about people. Our #1 concern is about profit, and getting the products made as cheaply as possible. If we have to accept lower quality to get highter profits, so be it." It’s a shame, but it’s apparently the new normal in American business. People don’t matter. Just profit. Outsourcing is an explicit confirmation of that mindset. It’s ironic that companies want to have the same rights as people, because they don’t actually care about the people who work for them. Yet they want customers to be loyal to them. Maybe if the public treated companies the way companies treat their employees, they would get the message.

Matt Mayerchak thanks for posting.

Here’s another POV on outsourcing: www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff-at-disney-train-foreign-replacements.html?_r=0