Approaching outsourcing as part of the `in' crowd.(VARIETY)(Al Sicherman)

Byline: Al Sicherman; Staff Writer

In addition to Uncle Al's many and painfully detailed descriptions of household and automotive repairs that required umpteen trips to the hardware store, he also has focused the brilliant searchlight of his powerful column on examining peculiar trends and imagining how much more peculiar they might get if it were up to morons like him - or economists.

A trend we're hearing a great deal about these days is "outsourcing" - specifically the relatively recent practice of shifting such jobs as customer-service representative to low-wage economies overseas, where the whole idea of the $79 towel-warmer you're ordering is offensive to the $5-a-day person taking your call.

In a move close to Uncle Al's figurative home - although it is distant literally - the Reuters news agency has moved financial reporting on some U.S. firms to India. Really. Apparently, the data necessary to write the reports is on the Internet, so they can be written in India as easily as in the United States. Maybe even easier because nobody is calling the Indian writers, urging them to switch phone companies.

Upon learning of this development, Uncle Al arranged, as an experiment, to have today's column written for $6 by a contract employee at a journalism agency in Fluoristan, a barely functioning country low in tooth decay. (The $6 was the standing price, Uncle Al learned, but until now there had been no takers.)

If this deal were to continue, Uncle Al would work 3 1/2 days a week, doing whatever he does in the Taste section, but instead of writing this column for the other 1 1/2 days, he'd stay home and watch reruns of "Matlock." But without that 1 1/2 days' pay, he would have to seriously reduce his purchases of Little Debbie Nutty Bars, mystery novels, doughnuts, chocolate, butter, cream and peculiar collectibles.

It goes without saying that he would stop buying the newspaper. But he felt like saying it anyway.

The circle of cutbacks

He does not, by himself, consume enough of any of these items (possibly except Little Debbie Nutty Bars) for his cutback to affect production, but if enough other high-living columnists were to be outsourced, reduced demand might result in doughnut-industry layoffs. That might cut demand among remaining doughnut-shop employees for copies of the National Enquirer, and so on.

At the other end of this deal is the author of the outsourced column, who lives in Squalor (the capital of Fluoristan). Uncle Al must say that the column wasn't terrible. Here are the first three paragraphs:

Uncle Izblk was minding his own business recently (partly because the last time he minded somebody else's business, that whole family attacked his hut with pitchforks, and it took him three days and five trips to the Pile of Dirt to repair it), when he noticed that the back of his oxcart was sagging to one side.

To tell the truth (although that is not usually a good idea in Fluoristan), Uncle Izblk rather enjoys relating tales of oxcart repairs that involve multiple trips to the Pile of Rocks to find just the right rock for beating against the end of the axle to mash it out enough that the wheel won't fall off. Uncle Izblk knows that newer ox carts have a stick through a hole near the end of the axle to keep the wheel from falling off, but he regards keeping the wheel on the old way as a challenge.

So Uncle Izblk drank a cup of mud (he understands that in some places "mud" is slang for a caffeine beverage - that is not the case in Fluoristan) and set off for the Pile of Rocks.

Uncle Al now has mixed feelings about this project.

Working at working

On one hand, he feels he earns his salary - he provides at least 98 cents' worth of effort for every dollar he is paid (once in a while he just hides in the elevator or walks around the newsroom, carrying papers and looking thoughtful). And he's not sold on the idea that jobs sent abroad turn into demand for American products.

(Heck, even if Uncle Izblk wanted to spend all $6 on Little Debbie Nutty Bars, mystery novels and American doughnuts, chocolate, butter, cream and peculiar collectibles - which Uncle Al thinks even an economist would agree is unlikely - it's only $6, compared with the 1 1/2 days' of U.S.-scale wages that Uncle Al would stop spending on that stuff if Uncle Izblk got the job.)

On the other hand, Uncle Al realized that he's not fully comfortable saying that Uncle Izblk (who seems like a nice-enough fellow who happens to live in Fluoristan) isn't entitled to - if not a slice of the pie, at least a little bite of the pie. Or maybe just to lick the plate after Uncle Al eats the pie.

One solution would be for Uncle Izblk to sell his $6 columns to newspapers in Fluoristan (if there were any), and to spend the $6 in the Fluoristani economy, where it would buy lots more (because Fluoristan's lousy wages mean stuff produced there is cheap). All that's needed to get that ball rolling is to jump-start the Fluoristani economy. (But if anybody here knew how to do that, Uncle Al wishes they'd jump-start this one first.)

Or perhaps Fluoristani workers should organize and demand better wages. Higher wages in Fluoristan would reduce the advantage of outsourcing - and the better wages for any jobs still outsourced would create demand for more Fluoristani goods and services - thus more jobs in Fluoristan, and better wages.

Once that happens, of course, most of the jobs outsourced to Fluoristan will be re-outsourced to someplace where they're still cheap, leaving Uncle Izblk not earning $25 instead of the $6 he used to not earn before all this started.

Watch this space for the Uncle Quznat column.

Al Sicherman is at asicherman@startribune.com.

His columns are available at http://www.startribune. com/sicherman