Friedman: U.S. can't, and shouldn't, keep every job

It's called a "paragraph." Look into it.

Discussed by Roger Hedgecock today.

This was "cut and paste"; I did no modification from the source. Look into it.

BANGALORE, India -- I've been in India for only a few days and I am already thinking about reincarnation. In my next life, I want to be a demagogue.
    Yes, I want to be able to huff and puff about complex issues -- like outsourcing of jobs to India -- without any reference to reality. Unfortunately, in this life, I'm stuck in the body of a reporter/columnist. So when I came to the 24/7 Customer call center in Bangalore to observe hundreds of Indian young people doing service jobs via long distance -- answering the phones for U.S. firms, providing technical support for U.S. computer giants or selling credit cards for global banks -- I was prepared to denounce the whole thing. "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, says Nagarajan, 90 percent of the shares in 24/7 are owned by U.S. investors. This explains why, although the United States has lost some service jobs to India, total exports from U.S. companies to India have grown from $2.5 billion in 1990 to $4.1 billion in 2002. What goes around comes around, and also benefits Americans.
    Consider one of the newest products to be outsourced to India: animation. Yes, a lot of your Saturday morning cartoons are drawn by Indian animators like JadooWorks, founded three years ago here in Bangalore. India, though, did not take these basic animation jobs from Americans. For 20 years they had been outsourced by U.S. movie companies, first to Japan and then to the Philippines, Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The sophisticated, and more lucrative, pre-production, finishing and marketing of the animated films, though, always remained in America. Indian animation companies took the business away from the other Asians by proving to be more adept at both the hand-drawing of characters and the digital painting of each frame by computer -- at a lower price.
    Indian artists had two advantages, explained Ashish Kulkarni, COO of JadooWorks. "They spoke English, so they could take instruction from the American directors easily, and they were comfortable doing coloring digitally." India has an abundance of traditional artists, who were able to make the transition easily to computerized digital painting.
    Explained Kulkarni: "We train them to transform their traditional skills to animation in a digital format." In short, thanks to globalization, a whole new generation of Indian traditional artists can keep up their craft rather than drive taxis to earn a living.
    But here's where the story really gets interesting. JadooWorks has decided to produce its own animated epic of the life of Krishna. To write the script, though, it wanted the best storyteller it could find and ended up outsourcing the project to an Emmy Award-winning U.S. animation writer, Jeffrey Scott -- for an Indian epic!
    "We are also doing all the voices with American actors in Los Angeles," Kulkarni says. "And the music is being written in London. JadooWorks also creates computer games for the global market but outsources all the design concepts to U.S. and British game designers. All the computers and animation software at JadooWorks have also been imported from America [H.P. and IBM] or Canada, and half the staff walk around in American-branded clo- thing."
    "It's unfair that you want all your products marketed globally," Kulkarni argues, "but you don't want any jobs to go."
    He's right. Which is why we must design the right public policies to keep America competitive in an increasingly networked world, where every company -- Indian or American -- will seek to assemble the best skills from around the globe. And we must cushion those Americans hurt by the outsourcing of their jobs. But let's not be stupid and just start throwing up protectionist walls, in reaction to what seems to be happening on the surface. Because beneath the surface, what's going around is also coming around. Even an Indian cartoon company isn't just taking American jobs, it's also making them.
   -----
   New York Times News Service

What a strange point of view. Doesn't he understand that the conventional wisdom is that each and every last Manufacturing Job (=the best kind of job in the world) must stay here forever and ever?

I know I want my children and my children's children gluing soles onto Nikes, instead of continually having those jobs "lost" to China or someplace. Don't you??

Same goes for the jobs we're "losing" to India (e.g. 24-hour telephone customer service); those are such WONDERFUL jobs. Haven't we all dreamed of being able to answer phones from irate computer users in a 24-hour call center? Spending our entire working day with a headset on our head, explaining that there isn't really an "Any" key, etc?

We must bend over backwards and spare no effort to ensure that these dream-jobs stay here indefinitely as a legacy to pass on to our descendants as their American birthright!! And Bush should PERSONALLY see to it that this happens, otherwise he gets all my blame (because everyone knows that the U.S. President is SINGLEHANDEDLY in charge of each and every new job that is "created" or "lost"), and I'm going to vote for Kerry even though I think he'd be worse on a silly little thing like national security. This "losing jobs" thing is THAT important!!!

/sarcasm

Thanks for the formatting

I'd like to see some outsourcing of NYT columnist jobs. Dowd, Krugman, etc. The Chinese could promote communism, which the NYT obviously desires for the US, so much cheaper.

Funny.

I used to work for a company (Spherion) that staffs call centers (for Equifax, in this case).

The quality of available workers was so poor, it's no wonder these co's look elsewhere for these positions.

You'd be lucky if 10% of that call center worked everyday in a given month.

This article had some good points. Then again, im one of the people that's for a global economy. Isolationism has never been my cup of tea.

Well if you are an uneducated factory worker, not willing to obtain any sort of training, you don't want any jobs leaving. We need to retrain workers and make the educator's "life-long learning" the reality. Then these workers would be ready for the high-paying jobs that they really want!

Well if you are an uneducated factory worker, not willing to obtain any sort of training, you don't want any jobs leaving

Well, if you're not willing to upgrade your work skills, you shouldn't expect the government to protect you.

Well if you are an uneducated factory worker, not willing to obtain any sort of training, you don't want any jobs leaving.

Slight correction: you want a *job*. Whether some particular job "leaves", per se, is really neither here nor there. If another one (maybe even a better one?) "came", then all would be even-steven, no? But finding/getting another job can also require training on the part of the person (as you point out); it also may require looking outside of one's prior field (which is why I don't quite understand the myopic focus on "Manufacturing Jobs" per se... if someone loses a "Manufacturing Job", does their next job have to be another "Manufacturing Job"?). Obviously it's true that anytime any person loses their job due to whatever reason, it's bad for that person. The only thing that bothers me is how truly dumb platitudes about the jobs situation seem to infect Presidential (and other) politics. Sometimes I just can't resist sarcasm in response, sorry about that :)

not willing to obtain any sort of training

Ooops, and I somehow missed this qualifier phrase. I'm with Modernman, my sympathy begins to dissipate in the face of a person who loses their unskilled job and yet huffs "I'm not willing to obtain any sort of training!" If there are any such people.

If free trade is so good - why don't China and India practice it? Why are their economies growing much faster than ours?

But then, we're not suppose to ask that, are we? Free trade is the answer, no matter what the question is! (/sarcasm)

my sympathy begins to dissipate in the face of a person who loses their unskilled job and yet huffs "I'm not willing to obtain any sort of training!" If there are any such people.

There are such people, unfortunately. Some people want to keep working in one job for their entire lives. You used to be able to pull that off, I suppose. These days, people have to realize that there is no such thing as a lifetime job (well, maybe a few exceptions).

If free trade is so good - why don't China and India practice it? Why are their economies growing much faster than ours?

They're doing what the US did- protecting their economies behind a tariff wall. Eventually, they will have to lower tariffs as their populations get richer.

And the reason their economies are growing so much faster than ours is because they're starting from a much lower level. Anyway, why is it a bad thing if the Indians or Chinese end up rich?

These out-sourced jobs would be excellent for the uneducated welfare bums who say they cant find work, so they must suck off of working taxpayers.

I say bring these low-paying, low-demand, jobs back and make the welfare people work at them.

These out-sourced jobs would be excellent for the uneducated welfare bums who say they cant find work, so they must suck off of working taxpayers.

Economists believe that a certain percentage of the workforce (maybe 1-2%) is so useless and unproductive, that it's cheaper for society to pay their unemployment benefits since they are actually a net drain on an employer who is unfortunate enough to give them a job. They actually decrease productivity and increase costs so much when they are working, that it's cheaper to keep them on the dole.

It is important to rememeber no one reporting on outsourcing actually has to worry about it happening to their job.