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I want to see what people's points of view on this forum are about the current accelerating trend of US companies laying off US workers and replacing them with lower-cost offshore employees from countries like India and China. Specifically talking about the skilled-labor (white collar) positions.
Ill get a another warning if I answer this the way I want to....
WTO etc was the start and the Bu$h admin with the tag team of
wactivist, corp shills Roberts and Alito are putting the fork in
the lower and middle classes. History is cylical and we are
going back to the period of fiefdoms, robberbarrons, etc....
This country has always done best when the middle class
was the one that thrived but the 'Haves' are seeing to it that
doesnt happen again any time soon.
Remember this everytime you go into a WAL*MART or drive
a Hummer to the Video store !! $*&$#@##$!!!!!
Wait a second....hafta dry the spit and slobber off of my keyboard
First off, what makes you think the trend is accelerating? Even if white collar jobs are moving to Asia, that doesn't mean that they are moving there at an increasing rate. The basis of this discussion is a little dubious, without any kind of source.
But, in many cases, I don't think that the Indians and Chinese consistently produce the quality of work that is expected in western countries. Some believe that their educational systems rely heavily on memorization, and less on critical thinking skills. I agreem based on my experiences with many Chinese and Indian professors I had in college - which is consistent with the opinions of those who have worked on these big outsourcing projects. Perhaps these differ between India and China, but I've heard some nightmare stories.
Two, communication skills are critical to most white-collar jobs. Even native English speakers who graduate from American universities often have trouble with the verbal skills needed for white collar work. The costs of miscommunication can be very high.
I believe outsourcing has many 'hidden costs', and those are just two among many. You also have to consider the security of sending sensitive information to Communist China, the corruption and bureaucratic mess that you have to wade through in both China and India, and the fact that those countries are gradually becoming more expensive, not cheaper. You also must deal with a foreign (and potentially hostile) legal system. You also have problems with organized crime and intellectual property theft.
If they can legitmately do a job better and cheaper, then more power to them. IMO, if it looks too good to be true, then it probably is.
Last edited by anonymous; 07-17-2007 at 09:40 AM..
Here's a few free online sources of information. Some of it is a bit dated, but for those of you who know nothing of this topic, these sources are pretty good quick primers.
FYI - for ease of writing where I mention India below, you can typically include other countries such as China, Hungary, Costa Rica, and the Philippines as well.
I cannot name specifics but for a company I am close to (which is a leader in providing outsourcing services across all sectors and industries to other companies all over the world), investment into outsourcing to India has ramped up beyond millions of dollars into billions over the course of 3 years - exponentially increasing each year. So it has for our 4 top global competitors as well. Tens of thousands of jobs in the US alone have been lost (actual layoffs happened after the US personnel trained their future Indian replacement) via these companies (and hundreds of thousands of new employees have been hired in India rather than the US as the companies expand with profits and marketshare) and plans are indeed to continue the acceleration.
It is an unfortunate state of affairs, but unless you are an insider, there's no standardized and enforced method to obtain the real hr data changes and share with the public (some of the links below emphasize this point - our government has not yet created a defacto study with the real numbers - they are just getting around to creating reporting guidelines and legislation after determining there's no current way to gather the information!). I also have access to research reports not available outside my company for free which clearly describe the outsourcing trends (sources: IDC, Gartner, Forrester, Business Insights, McKinsey, Aberdeen, and many others) - and they all state the same thing that Outsourcing is accelerating. It really is a moot point and shouldn't be harped on if you just so happen to not know anything about it or are a skeptic (there's plenty of public information available that with little effort you'll find report after report describing outsourcing). What I am interested in are the thoughts you all have since this is going on.
It’s happened twice to me. IT department outsourced to Ireland and India. Each time the majority of my co-workers were 40+ and in order to get a severance package you had to sign a letter saying you would not sue them for discrimination.
DH works for a large electronics firm and has been dodging the outsource and age discrimination bullets for the last 5 years.
I think it is disgusting. Good valuable employees are being put out of work at expense of the product quality and customer service quality to the customer. All in order to jack up the CEOs mega salaries and to please the stock flippers.
This has been discussed frequently in these threads.
I am finding myself more and more shocked over the types of jobs being outsourced versus the fact that outsourcing is happening. It seems like IT jobs and customer service jobs would be easy to export but other jobs that I've heard of going overseas: the guys who read xRays (seems it is easy to take the xRay here, then transmit it via scanner to India where another person interprets it -- for much less $$ than here); lawyers (not trial lawyers but the other kinds of lawyers who just do paperwork); JOURNALISTS (this one blew me away -- a local newspaper hired a guy in India to cover the city council since he could do it via things posted on the internet), etc.
Almost any "knowledge" job that isn't hands-on (like a surgeon, auto mechanic or maid) can be exported. Secretaries, accountants, engineers, etc. -- those are all jobs I can see going overseas.
And if they are not outsourced - they get to come here under the H1B umbrella courtesy of the govt. what is going on in our country anymore? Everything is haywire.
This is truly a palpable problem, regardless of what O'Reilly, Limbaugh, or any other Neocon apologists spew into their gold plated microphones from multi-million dollar broadcast studios. Even with a comp sci degree and genius IQ, I'm now in real estate. Yes indeed, it is that bad. And those of you still in the SW industry...good luck. Tandoori, anyone?
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