New Outsourcing Twist: Sending Employees, Too

NOVEMBER 10, 2003 ( ) - A London-based travel agency has taken outsourcing to a new level, shipping both call center jobs and the workers who perform them to India.

Starting with five young Finns who moved to New Delhi in July 2002, Ebookers PLC is sending Europeans to answer phones and e-mails at a call center in India for wages that are roughly one-fourth what similar jobs fetch at home. Now Ebookers' Indian subsidiary plans to expand and sell the idea as a service to other businesses.

The company is pitching the jobs as a way to see the world, the Information Age equivalent of joining the Peace Corps or the Foreign Legion. So far, it has drawn more than 50 adventure-seeking recruits from Finland, Norway, Sweden, France, Switzerland, Ireland and Germany.

The program is the latest twist on the migration of work to the developing world, a phenomenon reshaping the service sector in the U.S. and prompting hand-wringing about job losses in corporate and political circles. In India, exports of software and services grew 26%, to $9.5 billion, in the year through the end of March, according to the National Association of Software & Service Companies, an Indian IT lobbying group.

Ebookers' program is also a possible road map for how multinational companies with operations in continental Europe could move more jobs offshore, where language barriers have been an obstacle. English is widely spoken in India, the Philippines and other outsourcing centers. But the languages of small European countries aren't spoken in those lands, posing a built-in brake to moving work such as call centers abroad.

The online travel agency's Scandinavia manager, Tera Komulainen, a 52-year-old Finn, came up with the idea during an April 2002 visit to New Delhi. On that trip, she was looking for a way to cut costs by shifting customer-service work to Ebookers' Indian subsidiary, Tecnovate eSolutions, as her U.K. counterparts had done. continued>>

US Workers Charge Treason in Outsourcing US Missile Technology to China
Posted by Naum on Monday October 27, 2003 at 11:50 am MST http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair10252003.html

Magnequench is an Indianapolis-based company. It specializes in the obscure field of sintered magnetics. Essentially, it makes tiny, high-tech magnets from rare-earth minerals ground down into a fine powder. The magnets are highly prized by electronics and aviation companies. But Magnequench's biggest client has been the Pentagon.

The neodymium-iron-boron magnets made by Magnequench are a crucial component in the guidance system of cruise missiles and the Joint Direct Attack Munition or JDAM bomb, which is made by Boeing and had a starring role in the spring bombing of Baghdad. Indeed, Magnequench enjoys a near monopoly on this market niche, supplying 85 percent of the rare-earth magnets that are used in the servo motors of these guided missiles and bombs.

But the Pentagon may soon be sending its orders for these parts to China, instead of Indiana. On September 15, Magnequench shuttered its last plant in Indiana, fired its 450 workers and began shipping its machine tools to a new plant in China. "We're handing over to the Chinese both our defense technology and our jobs in the midst of a deep recession," says Rep. Peter Visclosky, a Democrat from northern Indiana.

It gets stranger. Magnequench is not only moving its defense plants to China, it's actually owned by Chinese companies with close ties to the Chinese government.

Magnequench began its corporate life back in 1986 as a subsidiary of General Motors. Using Pentagon grants, GM had developed a new kind of permanent magnet material in the early 1980s. It began manufacturing the magnets in 1987 at the Magnequench factory in Anderson, Indiana.

Most of the Indians I know who moved to the west wanted to imprive their standard of life and although they love their old country, don't suggest moving back to work at child-sweatshop wages.

Indians haven't been subjected to decades of socialist indoctrination in their school systems. The Euroweenies, OTOH, have been taught that such materialist dreams and aspirations are EVIL.

What a bizarre development. The Euroweenie teens are in for a rude awakening.

Here's an ad from the Sunday Chicago Tribune....

IT Opportunities - In Hyderabad, India.
Computer Associates is looking for:
Sofware Engineers
Level II Support
Quality Test Engineers
Tech Writers

The question that puzzles me is: Didn't US Companies outsourcing their IT to India cite "lack of qualified...{name the position}" as one of the reason for outsourcing ?

Luuuuucy............you got some 'splainin to do.

You have to be kidding me. Most of the Indians I know who moved to the west wanted to imprive their standard of life and although they love their old country, don't suggest moving back to work at child-sweatshop wages.

Aye, but these aren't 'mericans, they're Eurozoners. Who knows, it might actually be better to get anywhere outside the EU, what with all the 'bortionShips, etc.

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