Thu, 08 Jan 2004

Group warns of outsourcing backlash
Gee, do ya think?

There is going to be a backlash. I guarantee it. I'm part of it. I listened to the same pundits in the late 70's and early 80's, telling me that manufacturing was dead here, and that to stay competative I'd have to get educated and get into the "information economy". I followed their advice and prospered ...

Where do I go now that the IT jobs are moving to India? What kind of additional skills and training are they suggesting this time? Law school? Is that all that's gonna be left here? Lawyers?

I'm not necessarily wanting "special" treatment here: fair treatment would be good enough for me. Forcing companies to pay the Social Insecurity tax on all workers would be a good start. Mandating equal treatment in working conditions, hours and benefits would be another.

The Computer Systems Policy Project complains

"A growing number of workers in these foreign countries and companies are highly educated, skilled and talented--a competitive challenge in their own right," the report said. "Americans who think that foreign workers are no match for U.S. workers in knowledge, skills and creativity are mistaken."

The problem is not the skills of the foreign workers: the problem is that we are no match for them in wages. The average engineer in Bangalore makes $6000 a year, which puts him (or her) firmly in the Indian upper middle class. That salary here would mandate a move into a homeless shelter.

In case the corporations have forgotten their history, this exact thing was one cause of the rise in unionism in the early part of the 2oth century: companies moving operations to take advantage of cheap labor. The solution imposed then, after a long and bitter struggle, was the union wage scale.

Business today has pretty much successfully eliminated unions as a major force, by treating their employtees better and better, making unions irrelevent at best and obstructionist at worst. With the move to offshoring jobs, that trend is reversing itself. Perhaps it's time for the unions to make a comeback as well.

Feeling pressure over the loss of U.S. tech jobs to offshore workers, the Computer Systems Policy Project releases a report stressing the need to keep international doors open.

(link) [CNET News.com - Front Door]

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