Mon, 01 Mar 2004

The Full Outsourcing Discussion

What a disingenuous crock -

"How can it be good for America to have all these Indians doing our white-collar jobs?" I asked 24/7's founder, S. Nagarajan.

Well, he answered patiently, "look around this office." All the computers are from Compaq. The basic software is from Microsoft. The phones are from Lucent. The air-conditioning is by Carrier, and even the bottled water is by Coke, because when it comes to drinking water in India, people want a trusted brand. On top of all this, Nagarajan said, 90 percent of the shares in 24/7 are owned by U.S. investors.

The Compaq computers were assembled in Malaysia from Chinese and Korean parts, Lucent phones are assembled in Mexico, Brazil and Pakistan, and alot of the software in done in Ireland, the Microsoft software was probably still done here, but that'll change as M$ ramps up it's operations in Bangalore, the Carrier unit was made in Mexico and the bottled water was bottled locally - not shipped in from the US.

Of course US investors still win - US workers are the ones getting screwed.

Thomas Friedman of the New York Times recently did an interesting Op-Ed piece about the "silver lining of overseas outsourcing": the growth that it generates in the US job market as Indian companies outsource work that US workers are better at. Apparently total exports from US companies to India have grown from $2.5 billion in 1990 to $4.1 billion in 2002 as well. So maybe this outsourcing thing isn't so bad after all.

(link) [Slashdot]

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