Outsourcing reduces businesses’ control over their supply chains. Offshoring firms are difficult to manage and cannot easily be held to account for failings and errors.  Companies that rely on directly hiring new employees to cover their back-office, estates and maintenance needs will not run the risk that the cost efficiency of those services might suffer as a result of union action or state regulation of pay.  Companies that rely on outsourced offshored labour to fill back-office and administrative roles expose themselves to the risk that those relationships will be undermined, damaged or abused by legal disputes or negotiation failures.  When a dispute develops between a business and a worker that it employs directly, the consequences of that dispute- in terms of lost productivity and lost profits- will usually be limited by the nature of the role that the employee occupies. It will be relatively cheap for a multinational firm to settle a dispute with a sacked cleaner. In addition, the loss of a single cleaner from a large facilities department will not compromise a company’s ability to do business.  The situation is quite different when the services and productivity of an entire company department are dependent on a relationship with an outsourcing firm. The collapse of the relationship between the media firm BskyB and its outsourcing partner EDS resulted in combined legal costs of $70,000,000 and a court case that lasted for almost five months [i] . A dispute over the terms of a contract or a crisis within the state in which an offshore outsourcing service is based can cut a company off from the workers and systems that it has hired. If a company has transferred all responsibility for its payroll or customer support operations to an offshore location, it will be completely paralysed by disagreements or emergencies of this type.  Ordinarily, the equity value and insurance liabilities of businesses could only be directly threatened by large scale union action, a failed product launch or the departure of a senior manager. However, the web of high dependency relationships that a business must enter into to remain competitive has now grown. By decentralising their authority and giving up their right to regulate relationships with its labour force on a one-to-one basis, businesses have exposed themselves to a greater amount of risk.  [i] “The trouble with outsourcing.” The Economist, 30 July 2011.