Wired News The Case for Coolie Labor

"Despite the growing backlash over shipping American IT jobs to less-expensive overseas firms, the practice is necessary to help U.S. companies remain competitive, said a Department of Commerce representative here on Tuesday."

""A lot of analysts' reports about offshore outsourcing are overblown," Miller told panel attendees Tuesday. "They all have their own agenda.""

redux [10.08.03]
The New York Times As It Tries to Cut Costs, Wall Street Looks to India
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"Global companies have long taken advantage of India's large college-educated, low-cost work force. Now Wall Street firms, including J. P. Morgan, Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley, are joining the chase for more highly skilled Indian labor."

"This shifting of more sophisticated work to India comes on the heels of a rush of call center and other back-office nonmanufacturing jobs here, and is seen by many experts as yet another phase in the latest drift of jobs to low-cost countries that began in the early 1990's with Silicon Valley companies."

redux [10.05.03]
The New York Times A Missing Statistic: U.S. Jobs That Went Overseas
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"The Labor Department, in its numerous surveys of employers and employees, has never tried to calculate this trade-off. But the "offshoring" of work has become so noticeable lately that experts in the private sector are now trying to quantify it.

By these initial estimates, at least 15 percent of the 2.81 million jobs lost in America since the decline began have reappeared overseas. Productivity improvements at home -- sustaining output with fewer workers -- account for the great bulk of the job loss. But the estimates being made suggest that the work sent overseas has been enough to raise the unemployment rate by four-tenths of a percentage point or more, to the present 6.1 percent."

redux [10.03.03]
The Sydney Morning Herald Blame India for that jobless recovery

"Employment in the US services sector has remained unchanged over the past 21 months as the economy has recovered; usually the services industry headcount has grown 5 per cent by this stage of the cycle. The employment growth is happening in India instead.

It is mostly a labour cost arbitrage play. An Indian PhD costs less than $US10,000 a year - 80 per cent below the starting salary of a similarly qualified person in the US. Indian universities are producing 2 million graduates a year, all of whom can speak perfect English."

CNN Jobs abound in India's tech sector

""The market is booming. I can pick and choose a firm of my choice," said the 28-year-old engineer, who has been in the industry for about five years."

"ndia's software sector, including the back-office services industry, added 130,000 -- nearly 25 percent -- to its workforce in the year to March, taking the sector to 650,000. Wage costs are rising but are not yet a threat for a nation that churns out about 200,000 engineers per year, analysts say.""

redux [09.17.03]
Wired News Protesters Mourn Tech-Job Drain

"Despite the rhetoric from protesters and initial estimates from analysts, the long-term effects of sending jobs offshore may not be as devastating as they are made out to be. Some proponents believe that IT investments in other countries actually will lead to increased exports of computers and other equipment from the United States to help support other countries' burgeoning IT industries.

Deloitte Consulting's chief economist, Carl Steidtmann, recently released a position paper arguing that U.S. companies that outsource IT work will not only remain competitive, but also will have more money to invest in research and development.

A similar report from the McKinsey Global Institute concluded that the United States eventually captures between $1.12 and $1.14 for every dollar that a domestic company spends abroad."

redux [09.01.03]
Newsforge Why offshore IT outsourcing can't be stopped

"In the end, like it or not, we here in the U.S. are going to have to learn how to deal with a truly worldwide IT economy. Some IT workers here may be forced to leave the "computer industry" and move into non-offshorable jobs, but this may not mean they give up doing computer work, because as our economy continues to shift away from manufacturing and toward services, we may see just as many non-portable IT "support" jobs created as we would if we decided our economic future was best served by trying to turn our economy back to its traditional dependence on manufacturing.

The upshot: Even though hundreds of thousands of programming and other IT jobs are likely to leave the U.S. over the next few decades, the vast majority of U.S. IT workers will survive, and possibly even prosper in the end, although they may have new employers and work in new fields."

redux [08.26.03]
USA Today Offshoring fad has a dark side

"The wages that programmers are pulling down in New Delhi won't be paying for any Ford Explorers. Foreign workers often get wages and work in conditions that make America's early 20th-century sweatmills look good.

Instead, U.S. corporations are making lots of short-term cash by dumping larger salaries in favor of lower-paid workers in other countries. In this case, short-term cash couldn't be more shortsighted."

"Politicians in Washington should listen to Robert Perrucci, an author and sociology professor at Purdue University. Perrucci, who along with Earl Wysong wrote The New Class Society: Goodbye American Dream? , says we should tax companies for offshoring."

redux [08.13.03]
USA Today USA's new money-saving export: White-collar jobs

"Almost any professional job that can be done long-distance is suddenly up for grabs. Jobs done by financial analysts, architectural drafters, telemarketers, accountants, claims adjusters, home loan processors and others at higher levels of the labor food chain are being farmed out to workers in other countries.

"We're not just talking about call-center jobs, but all kinds of jobs," says Deloitte Consulting analyst Christopher Gentle. "It doesn't leave any part of the corporation untouched.""

redux [07.30.03]
CNN Report: 1 in 10 tech jobs may go overseas

"One out of 10 jobs in the U.S. computer services and software industry could shift to lower-cost emerging markets such as India or Russia by the end of 2004, a top computer consultancy said on Tuesday."

""Suddenly we have a profession -- computer programming -- that has to wake up and consider what value it really has to offer," Diane Morello, a Gartner vice president and research director who studies work force issues said in an interview."

redux [07.17.03]
ZDNet India group: Outsourcing saves U.S. jobs

"Citing statistics from market research firms such as McKinsey, the body said the United States stands to save over $300 billion over the next six years by shifting some business operations overseas."

""US banks, financial services and insurance companies have saved $6 billion to $8 billion in the past four years owing to IT outsourcing to India," Nasscom claimed. "Helped by these savings, companies have prevented layoffs and instead added 125,000 more jobs.""

redux [07.12.03]
Wired News IT Sweatshops Breaking Indians

"Laxmikant Purohit, a 34-year-old services manager at SoftTel Information Services who works from 4 p.m. to 2 a.m., says he suffers from constipation and acid stomach. In the past eight months he has put on 29 pounds, he said.

"It's difficult to have a positive outlook toward life because everything seems dark and gloomy when you work at ungodly hours," he said. "It's the first month that is the most terrible. One or two weeks after joining, new recruits throw up in the middle of work.""

redux [07.08.03]
Salon How outsourcing will save the world

"There is no better form of trade a developing nation can engage in than to sell services provided by an educated population. Compare it to anything else a developing nation can sell -- natural resources like oil or minerals or agribusiness, hard labor in manufacturing, for instance -- and you'd probably find that white-collar jobs would be the most sustainable and most eco-friendly of any of them.

Those concerned about solving the world's problems should be falling over themselves to encourage developing nations to build a white-collar workforce, and to open that workforce to the world."

redux [07.03.03]
Salon White-collar sweatshops

"Napier says that neither the bursting of the late-'90s tech bubble nor the doldrums of a poky recovery from the recession explain his layoff and ongoing unemployment. He places the blame for his woes on globalization: the double whammy of American companies flooding an already soft job market with foreign workers brought into the United States on H1-B visas while at the same time employing non-U.S. workers still in their home countries to write code or perform other high-tech services.

The latter practice, known as "outsourcing" or "offshoring" or even "near shoring" when it takes place in a neighboring country, is based on a simple economic rationale: Cut costs by sending work overseas to someone who will do it for less money."

redux [06.12.03]
AlwaysOn Software Development Goes Abroad - For Good

"How efficient is it to pay a software engineer in the Valley a loaded salary of $170,000, the average salary reported in the fourth quarter of 2001, when Asian engineers provide a much better value? We've all read the cost differentials between US and Indian, Vietnamese and Chinese workers. And one of the main reasons this work went overseas is because clients knew they were being gouged by US engineers and consultants. After all, programming is, essentially, production work. And is labor not the most expensive variable component of a software product?

It's easy to recognize that we're witnessing the demise of an industry that had a nice run in the Valley."

BBC India warns US over outsourcing

"India has warned the US and other developed countries that if they limit the extent to which information technology is outsourced it will damage their domestic industry.

"India's Information Technology Secretary Rajiv Ratan Shah said outsourcing was a huge international movement and that it was unstoppable."

Wired News Jobs Squeeze for Indian Workers

"U.S. companies such as IBM, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and PeopleSoft are already exploring countries with even cheaper sources of technical labor, says a report from research firm IDC. The new destinations include Romania, Russia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

As a result, India, which some have blamed for the loss of American jobs, may soon lose jobs itself."

redux [11.27.02]
SiliconValley.Com Job migration is draining Silicon Valley

"The export of IT jobs from America to English-speaking Third World countries is a worrying new trend. First predicted more than a decade ago in Ed Yourdon's book ``The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer,'', Yourdon went on to suggest that American programmers could avoid unemployment by becoming more productive with the help of software tools. His identification of the trend was correct, but his solution was wrong."

"The export of IT jobs has a permanent vicious cycle effect. As the jobs migrate, there are more and more unemployed people chasing fewer opportunities here."