The Outsourcing of Empathy
The job posting appeared on the same day I was terminated. Job reference JR2411404—an RPA role posted in Wrocław, Poland. My role. The same function, the same skill set, the same automation work I'd been doing for four and a half years at PPG's Pittsburgh headquarters. The posting has since been removed, but the timing told a story the company's official explanation—"position eliminated"—couldn't quite contain. The position wasn't eliminated. It was relocated. The elimination was of me.
My manager was based in Poland. He had his network there. Our one-on-ones—which had been the primary channel of direct communication between my work and my management—were canceled with increasing frequency until they became, at most, a monthly occurrence. Synchronous communication became rare. The managerial relationship that's supposed to provide development, support, and the kind of relational knowledge that contextualizes performance had been reduced to a time-zone-delayed, asynchronous interaction with someone I'd never met in person.
This essay is about what distance does—to decisions, to empathy, to communities, and to the people who find themselves on the far side of a global efficiency calculation. It's the closing essay of Part II because distance is the mechanism that enables everything else I've described: the masking, the silence, the hostile feedback, the severance under duress, the bureaucratic barriers, the wellness theater. Distance doesn't cause these things. But it makes them easier to inflict and harder to see.
Distance as Ethical Buffer
Geographic distance reduces the moral weight of organizational decisions. This isn't a theory. It's a documented psychological phenomenon. People make harder choices about people they can't see. Terminating a position occupied by someone in a different time zone, on a different continent, communicating through a different primary language, is psychologically easier than terminating someone at the next desk. The moral friction that proximity creates—the knowledge that you'll see this person tomorrow, that your teams overlap, that their absence will be felt in the hallways and the meetings and the lunch rotation—is absent when the person exists only as a name on an org chart and a Teams icon that occasionally turns green.
This buffer operates at every level of the decisions I've described in this series. The feedback culture of Essay 10 is easier to sustain when the manager delivering the feedback is six time zones away and has never shared a physical workspace with the person receiving it. The silence engineering of Essay 9 is easier to enforce when the channels of communication are already attenuated by distance, language, and asynchronous scheduling. The accommodation failures of Essay 12 are easier to justify when the person requesting accommodation is an abstraction—a resource in a workforce planning model, not a human being whose daily functioning depends on the decision.
My one-on-ones were supposed to be the bridge across that distance. Regular, synchronous conversations where a manager and an employee maintain the relational connection that makes effective management possible. When those meetings were canceled—reduced from a regular cadence to at most monthly, and frequently less—the bridge was dismantled. What remained was the org chart relationship: technically connected, functionally isolated. My manager knew my deliverables. He did not know me. And in a system where decisions about employment, accommodation, and development are made by people who know your output but not your context, the output is all that matters. The human being producing it is irrelevant—which is to say, eliminable.
The cancellation pattern is worth examining because it reveals how distance compounds over time. A skipped one-on-one in January is a minor scheduling disruption. A pattern of skipped one-on-ones from January through April is the systematic erosion of the only regular touchpoint between an employee and the person making decisions about their future. Each cancellation is individually defensible—schedule conflict, competing priority, rescheduled for next week. Cumulatively, they accomplish something no single cancellation intends: they sever the relational thread that would make the eventual termination difficult. By the time the decision was made, the relationship was already so attenuated that eliminating the position carried no relational weight. You can't feel guilty about losing someone you were never connected to. The distance did the emotional work that the decision required.
Thomas Friedman's vision of the "flat world"—where globalization creates equal opportunity across geographies—described something real from the perspective of capital. Money moves freely. Work flows to wherever labor costs are lowest. Technology enables collaboration across time zones. But the flat world, seen from the perspective of the worker rather than the investor, looks different. The flatness is in the labor market, where your role can be posted in another country on the day you're terminated. The terrain is anything but flat when it comes to power, information access, and the ability to influence the decisions that determine your livelihood.
The Outsourcing of Care
Distance doesn't just operate between countries. It operates within the organization itself, through the systems that insert intermediaries between managers and the human consequences of their decisions.
HR departments, as I described in Essay 13, function as institutional defense mechanisms. But they also function as empathy buffers. When a manager needs to terminate an employee, HR manages the process. When an employee needs support, the manager refers them to the EAP. When a workplace conflict requires resolution, the manager routes it through a formal complaint process. Each of these intermediaries serves a legitimate organizational function. But each also accomplishes something else: it relieves the manager of the obligation to care directly.
This is the outsourcing of empathy. The manager doesn't have to sit with the terminated employee's grief—HR handles the meeting. The manager doesn't have to understand the employee's mental health needs—the EAP handles the assessment. The manager doesn't have to navigate the complexity of interpersonal conflict—the formal process handles the resolution. At every point where management might require emotional engagement with the human consequences of organizational decisions, a system exists to absorb that engagement and redirect the manager's attention to operational concerns.
The effect is cumulative. Managers who never have to face the human consequences of their decisions make decisions with less human consideration. Not because they're bad people—most aren't—but because the organizational design removes the feedback loop that would connect their choices to their costs. The manager who terminates a position doesn't see the employee scrambling for health insurance. The leader who denies an accommodation request doesn't witness the employee masking through another meeting. The executive who approves the offshoring strategy doesn't know the names of the people whose roles are being relocated. The distance between the decision and its consequences is maintained by design, and the empathy that might otherwise inform the decision is outsourced to systems that process it procedurally rather than relationally.
The irony is that this outsourcing creates the very conditions that make more outsourcing necessary. When managers don't develop the capacity for empathetic engagement—because the organization has designed them out of every situation that would require it—they become less capable of providing the relational management that would prevent many employee crises in the first place. The EAP doesn't just absorb the emotional labor. It atrophies the managerial muscle that would reduce the need for it. The system that outsources care also outsources the organizational capacity for care, creating a self-reinforcing cycle where managers become less relationally skilled and employees become more dependent on institutional intermediaries that were never designed to replace genuine human connection.
The EAP is the clearest example. As I described in Essay 14, the EAP exists to provide employee support. But it also exists to provide managers with an off-ramp from emotional engagement. "Have you called the EAP?" is a response that looks like care and functions like delegation. The manager has fulfilled their responsibility by pointing the employee toward a resource. What happens within that resource—the four-month wait, the assessment that misses the mark, the limited sessions that end before the crisis does—is no longer the manager's problem. The empathy has been outsourced. The checkbox has been checked. The manager can return to operational concerns with a clear conscience and a documented referral.
What Gets Lost in Transit
When work moves across borders, what travels is the task. What doesn't travel is the context.
The automation work I did at PPG wasn't just technical execution. It required understanding organizational culture—how different teams operated, what their pain points were, where the informal processes diverged from the documented ones, who to talk to when the official process didn't capture what was actually happening. This is relational knowledge. It's built through proximity, through shared hallway conversations and unscheduled check-ins and the ambient awareness of organizational dynamics that comes from being physically and culturally embedded in the environment you're trying to improve.
Relational knowledge doesn't transfer through documentation. You can document a process. You can't document the understanding of why the process works differently on the third floor than on the fourth, or why the team in logistics uses a workaround that the process map doesn't capture, or why the informal approval path is more effective than the formal one for certain request types. This knowledge lives in relationships, and relationships require sustained proximity—not necessarily physical proximity, but the communicative proximity that comes from regular, synchronous, contextually rich interaction.
When the one-on-ones stop, when the team is distributed across time zones, when real-time collaboration becomes asynchronous handoffs with twelve-hour turnaround times, the relational infrastructure that supports effective work erodes. What replaces it is task-based coordination: tickets assigned, deliverables tracked, outputs measured. The work gets done. But the intelligence that makes the work valuable—the understanding of context, the ability to anticipate needs, the relational trust that enables honest communication about problems—degrades.
The company captures this loss nowhere. The efficiency metrics show reduced labor costs. The process documentation shows work being completed. The project management dashboard shows tickets moving from "in progress" to "done." What the metrics don't show is the quality of understanding behind the work—the difference between someone who completes a task and someone who understands why the task matters, what it connects to, and what might go wrong in ways the task description doesn't anticipate. That understanding was the value I brought after four and a half years. It was the value that was eliminated when the role moved to Wrocław. And it was the value that no metric captured because no metric was designed to measure it.
This is the knowledge destruction I'll examine in more detail in Essay 17's analysis of goodwill accounting. The financial system assigns zero value to the institutional knowledge that walks out the door with every terminated employee—and in fact treats the elimination as value-creating because it reduces costs. But anyone who has watched a team lose its most experienced member knows the cost is real: the projects that stall because nobody remembers the context, the decisions that repeat mistakes the departed person would have flagged, the relationships with other teams that atrophy because the person who maintained them is gone. These costs don't appear on the balance sheet. They appear in the gradual degradation of organizational capability that shows up, months or years later, in metrics like the twenty-position Computerworld decline.
The Local Cost of Global Efficiency
When PPG offshores a position from Pittsburgh, the cost doesn't disappear. It transfers—from the corporate balance sheet to the community balance sheet.
Pittsburgh loses the tax revenue from a salaried professional. The local economy loses the spending that salary generated—the restaurants, the dry cleaners, the small businesses that comprise the commercial ecosystem around a major corporate employer. The talent pipeline loses a node—one fewer experienced professional available to mentor, to hire from, to contribute to the regional knowledge base. The social fabric loses a thread—one fewer person connected to the community through employment, through professional networks, through the civic engagement that employment makes possible.
These losses are diffuse, which makes them easy to ignore. No single offshored position creates a visible community impact. But 1,800 eliminated positions across a restructuring—many of them relocated to lower-cost geographies—creates a cumulative impact that shows up in the data cities track: unemployment claims, social service utilization, retraining program enrollment, the subtle indicators that a community is absorbing costs that were generated by corporate decisions made in boardrooms the community has no access to.
The transfer is particularly stark in a city like Pittsburgh, which has already undergone one massive economic dislocation when the steel industry collapsed. The city rebuilt itself around eds, meds, and corporate headquarters—institutions like PPG whose presence was supposed to anchor the next economy. When those institutions offshore the professional positions that were supposed to replace the manufacturing jobs, the community absorbs a second wave of displacement without the industrial-scale social safety net that (inadequately) cushioned the first. The scale is smaller. The individual impact is identical: a person who structured their life around a job in a specific city discovers that the job has moved to a country they've never visited.
The trajectory I described isn't hypothetical. People who contribute to community organizations through time and money find themselves, after termination, accessing community organizations for support. The food bank volunteer becomes the food bank visitor. The charitable donor becomes the unemployment claimant. The professional who mentored young people in emerging leader programs becomes the job seeker competing with those same young people for the same positions. The reversal is specific and personal, and it represents a transfer of cost from the institution that generated the job loss to the community systems that absorb its consequences.
Corporate social responsibility reports don't capture this transfer. PPG's community investment narrative—the donations, the partnerships, the volunteer programs—exists alongside the restructuring that offloads costs onto the same communities being invested in. The donation creates the appearance of community commitment. The offshoring transfers costs that exceed the donation by orders of magnitude. The net effect on the community is negative, but the CSR report only counts the positive side of the ledger.
When Efficiency Erases Empathy
I don't think anyone at PPG made the decision to offshore my role with malicious intent toward me personally or toward Pittsburgh as a community. The decision was made through the lens of global efficiency—labor cost arbitrage, workforce optimization, the rational allocation of resources across geographies. These are legitimate business considerations. Companies operating in competitive global markets face real pressure to manage costs, and offshoring is one tool for doing so.
But the efficiency lens is incomplete. It captures the cost savings. It doesn't capture the knowledge loss. It captures the labor arbitrage. It doesn't capture the community impact. It captures the position relocated. It doesn't capture the person eliminated. And when efficiency becomes the only lens—when every decision is evaluated on cost and none are evaluated on the human, relational, and community dimensions that don't appear in the financial model—the organization optimizes for a narrow set of outcomes while generating costs it can't see in categories it doesn't measure.
Empathy requires proximity. Not necessarily physical proximity—distributed teams can function with genuine empathy and relational care when the organizational design supports it. But the proximity of attention. The proximity of regular communication. The proximity of knowing the people affected by your decisions well enough to weigh the human cost alongside the financial benefit. When one-on-ones are canceled, when management is six time zones away, when the feedback loop between decision and consequence is severed by organizational distance—empathy doesn't just decline. It becomes structurally impossible. You can't empathize with an abstraction. And distance makes people abstract.
Empathy doesn't cross borders by itself. It requires organizations to carry it—to invest in the relational infrastructure that keeps human beings visible across geographic and organizational distance. To maintain the communication cadences that make management relational rather than transactional. To evaluate decisions not just on cost but on the full spectrum of consequences, including the ones that show up in communities rather than spreadsheets.
When efficiency becomes the only shared language, everyone loses their accent. The specific, local, contextual knowledge that makes work meaningful and communities functional gets flattened into metrics that measure output and ignore everything else. The position in Pittsburgh becomes a resource allocation in Wrocław. The employee with four and a half years of organizational knowledge becomes a line item on a restructuring charge. The community that absorbed the professional's contribution absorbs their displacement instead.
Globalization promises efficiency. And it delivers—for a while, and in the categories the financial models measure. But the long-term cost is disconnection. When you offshore work, you're betting that institutional memory, local knowledge, and human relationships don't matter as much as labor cost arbitrage. Sometimes that bet wins in spreadsheets and loses in every other way that matters.
This is where Part II ends: with distance. Not the drama of a termination meeting or the anger of a denied accommodation. Distance. The quiet, structural, deliberately maintained gap between the people who make decisions and the people who live with them. Every harm I've described in the preceding seven essays was made easier by distance—distance between policy and practice, between leadership and workforce, between corporate narrative and employee reality. Closing that distance is the first requirement for the reconstruction that Part III attempts.
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