Should tariffs be applied to foreign labor (engineering, HR, accounting, customer support)

So we can be double hosed, lost jobs overseas and then you have to pay tariffs for using companies who have said overseas interest?

Tariffs are paid by the end user... AKA us...

Yes, we should de incentivize off shoring labor even more so than manufacturing.

In this scenario, who would be responsible for paying the tariff up front?

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So we can be double hosed, lost jobs overseas and then you have to pay tariffs for using companies who have said overseas interest?

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If it's more expensive to offshore those jobs companies will have nothing to gain by doing it.

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So we can be double hosed, lost jobs overseas and then you have to pay tariffs for using companies who have said overseas interest?

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Or, hear me out, American companies can stop outsourcing their labor to Indians.

I can understand why people like the idea in theory, but I’m not really sure how it’s supposed to work in practice.

Usually, tariffs are on a physical object. Like impose a tariff on a pear or something.

I don’t know how you tax something intangible like an HR department. Are you going to come up with some legal definition of what an HR department even is?

Aside from that, you’d have to make the tariffs really, really high to make them worthwhile. That’s one of the problems that Trump’s tariffs already face. These companies are paying these factory workers in third world shitholes at most 1/10 as much as they’d have to pay US workers. So you’d have to make the tariffs like at least 1,000% in order to bring factory labor home, maybe something like 700% if you take into account the cost of shipping the goods. And for call centers, the businesses don’t have to take shipping costs into account.

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Aside from that, you’d have to make the tariffs really, really high to make them worthwhile. That’s one of the problems that Trump’s tariffs already face. These companies are paying these factory workers in third world shitholes at most 1/10 as much as they’d have to pay US workers. So you’d have to make the tariffs like at least 1,000% in order to bring factory labor home, maybe something like 700% if you take into account the cost of shipping the goods. And for call centers, the businesses don’t have to take shipping costs into account.

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Then make it illegal to employ third world shithole workers at a higher ratio than American citizens. If they want to open a factory in India, the same functioning factory needs to be open and operating in America, staffed by American citizens.

How do you offshore an engineering job? Don’t engineering jobs require the engineer to frequently be present at the site of the building that’s being built?

I can see how you can offshore the other jobs you mentioned (accounting, HR, customer support), but I don’t understand how you can offshore an engineering job.

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How do you offshore an engineering job? Don’t engineering jobs require the engineer to frequently be present at the site of the building that’s being built?

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For government/public work you need a PE “in charge” of the work. For companies like Exxon where the work is private, they don’t need a PE as they shoulder the burden of public safety. So they take the risk when sending things to India for a 75% discount

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How do you offshore an engineering job? Don’t engineering jobs require the engineer to frequently be present at the site of the building that’s being built?

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Local person takes measurements or scans the field equipment, new equipment drawings are scanned and emailed, calculations and drawings are done over seas.

Company thinks it saved 75% on engineering. In reality lots of things are missed by the engineer and designers not being in the field, the engineers don’t personally speak with the on site operators and maintenance people for additional insight, calculations and drawings are of poor quality and require rework multiple times, and all this creates less of a demand for US engineers and designers while making wages lower. Lots of field revisions are required and the construction contractors charge for scope revisions. But hey, we saved 75% on engineering hourly wages even though engineering hours increased and large field revisions and delays occurred. Those costs get blamed on something else so management can claim their savings.