Outsourcing drive throughs is better than breaking ships

Wendy’s has jumped on the drive-through + call center bandwagon I blogged about here earlier. I first learned of this in the Thomas Friedman book, The World is Flat, but this article in the Boston Globe today does a better job of explaining the rationale…and it really is a win-win situation for everyone involved. Would you rather sit in a house in New Hampshire, talking to drive through people 3,000 miles away and get paid $8.50/hour…or actually have to work in that restaurant, taking orders while cooking and making change for customers?

Anti-outsourcing folks are always quick to find some negative spin–for example, the call operators are on a very tight leash, with software that monitors their efficiency, etc. Frankly, if I have to have my efficiency monitored though…and I’m working in fast food…I expect the physical workplace is full of enough indignities to make that seem like a cakewalk.

To me, this is more an example of one of the completely unpredictible things that has been made possible by high bandwidth and ubiquitious internet connectivity. People are thinking about tech support guys in India, but it also means somebody can set up a call center in their house and make some extra cash.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the world, far from the realm of the creative class…60 Minutes tonight ran a story about Bangladesh shipbreakers. Bangledesh is dirt poor and they have no resources. However, as luck would have it, a few years ago a big ship grounded on the beach after a typhoon and was abandonned. Local scavenged the ship. Since then, it has become an industry that employs something like 30,000 people (some of them as young as 12 years old) at the synergistic task of tearing ships apart by hand and blow torch to salvege whatever they can, principally the steel, which is badly needed.
But it’s an environmental nightmare, and not the kind of working conditions anyone here would want. My reaction…seeing all those poor people trudge barefoot through a sea of petrochemical sludge…then sleeping at night on steel plates they salvaged…it’s just one more motivation for them to envy and hate us. Envy us because just by being born in this country, unless you are insane, even if you end up homeless, you are probably not going to be working under those conditions. Hate use because we (the West) are dumping this crap on them.

But they probably don’t see it that way. What did they have before the ships came? These folks are a long way from benefitting in an appreciable way from globalization.