The rapid growth of global outsourcing and its social and economic impacts is explored in ‘Impact outsourcing’, or ‘Socially Responsible Outsourcing’. Yes, you won’t hear so much support for ‘impact outsourcing’ from US presidential campaigns trail, but its major force could be powerful to make a meaningful change for social and economic good.
What Is Socially Responsible Outsourcing?
Socially responsible outsourcing or impact outsourcing, refers to an arm of the (business process outsourcing) BPO industry that employs socioeconomically disadvantaged people as the primary workers to provide high quality services to clients. It focuses on hiring workers from vulnerable and poor communities with lower requirements such as data entry work, microwork, data cleaning, video tagging and scanning documents. Ultimately, impact outsourcing aims at bridging the gap between digital employment and poverty.
Impact outsourcing opens up opportunities for communities in dynamic economic sectors. For example, In Eastern India, Muslim women who were used to be rejected from workplace are now starting to find home-based opportunities. Thanks to partner organisations such as iMerit.
Nonetheless, outsourcing still remains a touchy subject. If you’ve lost your job because there’s a computer can do it faster or someone can do it cheaper, you will likely struggle to see these efforts as ‘socially responsible”. But the most significant question here is— how outsourcing can be used for social and economic good.
“This work is going to be outsourced from the country no matter what, so why not direct that to employment for people that are otherwise going to be marginalized from the workforce?” Crumbaugh of Samasource (a US non-profit organisation) said.
Unfortunately, the competition does not only come from people of other nations. It may also arise from lines of code and inanimate objects. As more and more firms embrace impact outsourcing as a part of a double or triple line, new struggles emerge. This includes how to protect a globally dispersed digital workforce from rights violation and other debilitating practices.
Compliance
Heather Franzese, the leader of Oakland, California-based social firm Good World Solutions, conversed with Devex about the Labor Link platform she’s utilised to reach 200,000 workers in 16 nations.
“Ensuring basic compliance with international labor laws is the first step, but that’s table stakes now, and that’s what people are expected to do as a minimum,” says Franzee. “What we really want to do is connect millions of workers on this platform and poll them in real time about their needs and then connect them with local service providers who can meet those needs.”
According to Franzese, the Labor Link platform tends to scratch out the surface of what’s possible in terms of technology innovation to protect workers. Hence, a very important measure is to identify and design protections for workers. She stressed out there’s a plenty of room for the global development community to support firms that embrace socially responsible outsourcing. It does not just end with connecting them with workers, but also by ensuring that they go “beyond compliance” and concentrate on “worker well-being.”
Our challenge, nevertheless, is not just to create a sustainable result, but to evolve a public view of how the outsourcing industry should be. And it means working with willing partners to embark a significant contribution to create measurable change. If real discussion is warranted among BPO companies, then it would surely create a meaningful dialogue for economic and social good.
Don’t put outsourcing genie back in the bottle and pretend that you don’t live and work in a digital village. That won’t do any good for social and economic change!
