Remote work may be a boon for Americans who don’t like having to commute to the office, but experts warn workers should be careful about what they desire, as companies could easily hire someone abroad to do the same work for a lot less money .
High-paid tech workers could be out of work within a decade if companies continue to outsource these positions overseas, experts say.
“If people who code for Google and Facebook were able to live anywhere in the US they wanted and [work] for a year and a half without ever going into the office, it seems very, very likely that many companies will reconsider in the longer term and will outsource the kinds of jobs that used to not be outsourced,” MIT Assistant Professor Anna Stansbury told Fortune.
The Post reached out to Google and Facebook for comment.
Stansbury said back-end engineers and others could be found for less money in countries like India. Other experts agree.
“If you can do your work from home, fear. Be very scared,” Richard Baldwin, an economics professor at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, told the Europe-based Center for Economic Policy Research.
According to analysts, companies that employ remote workers could pay lower wages to those who do the same work but are from abroad. Getty Images/iStockphoto
“Because someone in India or wherever is willing to do it for a lot less.”
Last year, Baldwin and his research partner Jonathan Dingel authored a paper entitled Telemigration and Development: On the Offshoreability of Teleworkable Jobs.
Baldwin and Dingel categorize jobs into four groups – “highly offshoreable”, “offshoreable”, “hard to offshore” and “non-offshoreable”.
A job is considered “highly offshoreable” when an employee does not need to be physically near a US work location, nor does they need to be near a group or unit in their department.
Tech companies could easily look to countries like India, where highly skilled workers can do the same jobs as Americans, but for lower wages. Getty Images
Many US-based companies have long outsourced their call centers to countries like India, where English-speaking agents are available 24 hours a day.
A recent analysis by the Department of Labor found that the highest-paying jobs like software developers and internet publishing are easier to do remotely, while low-paying jobs like retail and hospitality are harder to do remotely, according to the Washington Post.
Nonetheless, fast-food workers might have cause for concern.
Freshii, a Toronto-based fast-food chain, has already begun outsourcing cashier jobs to workers in places like Nicaragua, according to National Public Radio.
A customer told NPR that on his way to pay for his meal at a Toronto location, he noticed he was directed to a tablet-sized screen at the checkout instead of a live cashier.
Companies in the tech and hospitality sectors have already started moving jobs overseas. Getty Images
The screen then showed the face of a woman working as a virtual cashier, although the clerk was processing the order thousands of miles away from her home country of Nicaragua while the customer was in Toronto, according to NPR.
The Post reached out to Freshii for comment.
Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic more than two and a half years ago, more Americans have been working remotely.
A survey conducted by McKinsey found that 58% of Americans said they work from home at least one day a week, while 35% had the opportunity to work from home five days a week at some point during the pandemic.
According to the survey, 87% of workers said they would take advantage of the opportunity to work from home when given the opportunity.