Outsourcing: just colonial chickens coming home to roos

This article, They've sold off their souls is a quick intro to the way that the big global funds players are fastening down the profit motive hard into the companies they buy into and buy up. The result being that considerations that humanised capitalism in the recent past, about how the company's ethos was, keeping stakeholders sweet, motivating workers through vision and so forth, are being shed along with expensive first world workforces.

One of the comments (the 6th) is very much to the point, imho: "To talk about out-sourcing is missing the point. The issue should not be about trying to privilege ourselves by refusing to give jobs to overseas workers: the issue should be why we allow ourselves to retain a system that produces such startling inequality of wealth. The system has always been hugely unequal, but in the past we, the workers of the West, were bought off on the proceeds of screwing over the Third World: but now, as profits get inevitably tighter and tighter, our chickens have come home to roost."

Of course, the irony would be that this process could kill the goose that lays the golden egg: while most disposable income is in the west that's where the markets are -but only as long as people are employed and paid relatively well. Outsource too quickly and recession hits. It is probably true that there needs to be a global redistribution of income; this may be one way it could happen. The issue is how it can be managed so that chronic decline doesn't cause even moGuardian Unlimited | Comment is free | re suffering and so that many can be lifted out of poverty largely by their own efforts?

I need to reflect on this more, but I'm not sure, in the grander scale of things, outsourcing is necessarily a bad thing.