October 3, 2007
Offshoring leaves a bitter taste in the mouths of British chocolate workers
If you are an American worried about your job going overseas, you can at least take comfort in the fact that you have plenty of company in the rest of the developed world.
British candy maker Cadbury has announced plans to move 7,500 jobs to Poland. The move is aimed, of course, at increasing profit margins.
Predictably, the company has already drawn fire from the local union. The question is, will the new offshoring policy translate into a backlash among British consumers?
Attempts to translate the offshoring backlash into consumer action are still sputtering the United States. We Americans show no sign of slowing our consumption of cheap Chinese imports at Wal-Mart.
Western Europe, however, is far more pro-labor, and far more concerned with social issues that bleed into the economic sphere. For example, the environmental movement has a vastly wider following in Europe than it does in the U.S.
Among “socially conscious” European consumers, the anti-offshoring movement still lacks the moral clarity of environmentalism. But this may change if Western European consumers continue to lose their jobs to Poles and Romanians.
For Western European companies, the main offshoring destinations are Central and Eastern Europe, where wage levels are often a fraction of what they are in the heavily unionized West.
---posted at 6:42 p.m. by Ed Trimnell
