Here’s the situation: A recession—now known as the Great Recession—began in late 2007 and was declared over in mid-2009 by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which tracks business cycles. But some 15 months later, the nation’s unemployment rate sticks stubbornly at nearly 10 percent, with more than 15 million Americans out of work. (Try convincing those people the recession is over!) Another major part of this story is that nearly 12 million people—about 7.5 percent of the U.S. population, are ready, willing and able to work but have given up looking for a job or are working part-time because they can’t find full-time work. No doubt many of you have family and friends caught in either or both of these situations.

While Gross Domestic Product is recovering, it’s so sluggish and slow that it has not reached its pre-recession growth rate, which is a really bad indicator about the future health of the economy because by this point in the recovery cycle  of all nine of the previous recessions since World War II, GDP had reached its former peak.

What we are apparently seeing after the economic and financial crises that have buffeted the nation is the birth of a new economy, maybe one that will resemble something we fondly remember, but maybe not. Maybe full employment (roughly 4-5 percent unemployment) is another measure that will be a fond memory.

In any case pointing to outsourcing as the major culprit for this parlous and perilous U.S. jobs situation is misguided and reveals a lack of understanding about the way a globalized trade economy works. This misunderstanding is evident as the media can’t even get the basic terms right.  The term for sending jobs overseas is called offshoring, not outsourcing, but that’s a distinction rarely made in the mainstream media.

When a company lays off workers in the U.S., it’s wrong to assume the jobs go overseas. It’s a scare tactic formula that makes for alarming news stories from the Associated Press, for example, but it simply does not equate. For many businesses, those jobs are just gone – the victims of belt tightening. For others, outsourcing may mean shifting the work to someone who is better, faster or cheaper (in many cases all three!); while the jobs are outsourced, they are not offshored.

One can even convincingly argue, as recent articles have in the Huffington Post and The Wall Street Journal, that outsourcing actually creates jobs. A lot of jobs.

The recent WSJ op-ed said, “The fact is that for every job outsourced to Bangalore, nearly two jobs are created in Buffalo and other American cities.” This article, and others like it, commented Huffington, “asserts that while outsourcing may send some jobs overseas it simultaneously creates more jobs and that the net is positive job creation.”

After its own in-depth examination of the numbers, Huffington said: “We might easily conclude that outsourcing creates growth and jobs in the United States.”

Granted these articles employ a blur of statistical data, and we all know that statistics can  be manipulated to prove almost anything, but the argument for outsourcing and job creation seems much more compelling than not.

So while we’re talking about an emerging new economic paradigm, let’s not forget to mention the paradigm shift that Vested Outsourcing brings to the table in terms of collaboration, innovation and mutual planning for desired results.

Vested Outsourcing takes outsourcing to a whole new level – helping companies get better, faster and cheaper. When you can work with a supplier to do that, why NOT outsource!  The job doesn’t go away, it gets shifted to the company where the work has the most value. I call that good business sense.

I recently prepared a letter to the president about all this, which I’ll share with you from my soapbox here next time.

NBC’s new sitcom “Outsourced” premiered Thursday night. It’s supposed to be a comedy about outsourcing, specifically about a U.S. company that outsources its call center operation to India. The problem is it gets outsourcing so wrong it’s not even funny. During the show’s 22 minutes – minus the eight minutes of advertising from the likes of Yoplait, American Express, Subway and Sierra Mist (they should be ashamed) – the needle on my lol meter never budged.  I read a review Friday that called it “horrible” and the “worst new show of the season” so  it’s not just me.

Putting comedy opinions and silly stereotyping aside, from my perspective the show does nothing to dispel the knee-jerk misconceptions that surround outsourcing; rather it propagates them.

I get really frustrated when people who don’t have a clue about outsourcing start bashing it. In a blog post earlier this year I wrote about the mistaken perceptions that people have about outsourcing and offshoring, mainly that outsourcing simply means shipping U.S. jobs overseas. The general media, along with many politicians, plays into that by bashing outsourcing exclusively as jobs being shipped overseas.

Outsourcing is actually a respectful industry. It’s not about finding cheap labor overseas – it’s about finding the best providers for the performance of non-core activities. Yes – some companies have gone about it wrong chasing cheap overseas labor – but those that do miss the point and end up with failing outsourcing deals and customers who are frustrated with poor performance. Microsoft is a company that is getting it right, winning the Shared Services Outsourcing Network  “Best Mature Outsourced Service Delivery Award with Accenture – who manages Microsoft’s back office procure-to-pay process. Jaguar and Unipart also get it right – with Unipart having a vested interest in  helping Jaguar reach top billings in the JD Powers Customer Satisfaction.

Outsourcing is not a joke or a funny human resources endeavor; NBC’s “Outsourcing” is a joke, but not the kind with laughs or that bears repeating.

When people ask what I do and I explain that I teach people how to do their outsourcing better and smarter, invariably they jump into the conversation with their experience about how their company “outsourced”  their work to some some country where people can’t speak English and took their jobs away.

Outsourcing has been going strong since Peter Drucker and his Harvard Business Review articles in the 1980’s advised, “Do what you do best – and outsource the rest!”

But why do people get outsourcing and offshoring confused? Why is there the perception that outsourcing is offshoring? I spent five years working for a $1 billion global outsource provider and the lion’s share of their work was done in their region. The company outsourced, yes indeed, but the jobs stayed close to home and in that country.

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