Posted on 03/06/2004 10:04:03 PM PST by AM2000
BOMBAY, March 2 — India has finally arrived on the global economic scene. Unfortunately, like a debutante suddenly told she is wearing the wrong dress, it is not exactly the triumph India imagined.
In recent weeks, the outsourcing of white-collar service jobs to places like this financial capital on the Arabian Sea has become the focus of the American presidential campaign, the brunt of jokes on late-night shows, the subject of angry Web sites, and the target of legislation in more than 20 states and Washington.
Long caricatured in many American minds as home only to snake charmers and poor people, India is now being caricatured as a nation of predatory brains set on stealing American jobs.
The strong reaction to the shifting of jobs is spawning frustration in India, a country the United States was cheering not so long ago as it began to open a largely socialist, closed economy and enter the global arena. It is also surfacing as a potential irritant in relations between the countries. Indians say they are doing exactly what the United States wanted, and bridle at the new criticism as a double standard.
"The U.S. is propagating capitalism — we don't really understand why they are so scared," said Ravi Shankar, 36, an employee of Tata Consultancy Services, India's largest technology services company. "If you're going to talk about competition, you should have no fear — may the best man win."
But now India's pride has become America's pain. Over the last decade, riding technology advances, India's engineers and English-speaking college graduates have been taking on more work — from credit-card complaints to software programming to research for American companies half a world away.
The uproar over outsourcing shows no signs of abating, because outsourcing itself is only likely to grow. India's success has both contributed to and coincided with stagnating employment in the United States. Both countries face elections this year. As a result, an issue that would largely be confined to corporate America has become politicized and emotional. "India has joined the ranks of other big job thieves — Japan, China and Mexico," the Indian magazine Outlook wrote this week, citing a "barely concealed racism" in Internet debates. Senator John Kerry, the likely Democratic nominee for president, has called chief executives who shift work abroad "Benedict Arnolds."
"Whenever such issues are taken up in competitive politics, the economy suffers," said Arun Shourie, India's minister for disinvestment, communications and information technology. He has spent the last two years fighting to privatize India's bloated state-owned enterprises, facing fierce political opposition along the way.
Indeed, the furor in the United States is highlighting India's own ambivalence toward the economic reforms that began here in the early 1990's. The competitiveness of India's new industries stands in sharp contrast to the high tariffs and red tape that still shelter many other parts of the economy.
American officials have repeatedly expressed frustration at the relatively low level of American imports to India. While total exports from American companies to India grew to $4.1 billion in 2002 from $2.5 billion in 1990, the United States still has a trade deficit of about $9 billion with India. On a visit to New Delhi in February, United States Trade Representative Robert B. Zoellick cited India's high tariffs — like a 38 percent applied agriculture tariff, which is three times as much as America's. "We want to keep our markets open," he said, "but to do so we need to be able to open markets abroad."
His comments were interpreted here as evidence that the Bush administration would seek to use the reaction toward India as a lever to pry open wider India's economy.
Mr. Shourie said that when India finally opened its agriculture markets, it would affect "millions of people" — far more than are being affected by India's success in information technology. "If the United States feels we must understand their political compulsions," he asked, "why is it that American politicians or trade negotiators sitting at the table would not understand our political difficulties?"
He worries, he said, that the reaction in the United States will strengthen the opponents of India's own economic reforms. "It gives a very strong handle to persons in India who oppose opening up," he said.
Indians say that the beneficiaries of outsourcing are far fewer than Americans realize. Well under a million people work in information technology services. Most of India's population of more than a billion, still largely rural, has never heard of outsourcing or benefited from it. Unemployment in India — far higher than in the United States — is at its highest level in decades, many economists say. Officially pegged at 7 percent, with more than 40 million registered job seekers last year, the real unemployment rate is probably three times that, economists say.
Vivek Paul, vice chairman of the Bangalore-based Wipro Technologies, calls it "perceptual amplification."
"If three million jobs have been lost in the U.S., and 100,000 jobs created in India, every one of those three million thinks, `That's my job,' " he said.
The danger is that anger in the United States will affect relations with India that otherwise have only deepened in recent decades. There are nearly two million Indian-Americans in the United States today — with the highest income of any ethnic group — and India is the second largest country for legal migration to the United States, after Mexico.
The United States now has more foreign students from India — more than 70,000 — than from any other country, and the information technology industry itself seems to represent a sort of synergy, with many Indians working in Silicon Valley, and innovation flowing both ways.
That spirit is showing strains. While Indian officials have decided that their best strategy is to let American corporations fight the political battle in the United States, they cannot resist the occasional rhetorical flare-up. "Those who lecture about free trade," Mr. Shourie said, "should practice it."
But not everyone here cheers India's new identity as what Babu P. Ramesh, writing in the Economic and Political Weekly, called "one of the prominent electronic housekeepers to the world." Indians say they face the same forces churning the American job market. As the use of information technology increases here, so, too, will the labor displacement that America has experienced. And over time, many of the jobs that have come to India could move on. As new competition emerges from other countries, Mr. Paul of Wipro said, "we'll have to swallow the same medicine of globalization."
Really,darling, that's so...so blue collar of you to ask.
These outsourcing companies have forgotten a few things about their precious low cost new sources;
1. Copyright and patent protection? - a fiction,
2. Security of files against identity theft? - a joke,
3. Ethics in management? - They think we are chumps,
4. Respect for our laws including tax? - Something to ignore until caught
5. Integrity of data? - India alone is the source of major computer viruses and worms.
The "short-run maximizers" who run so many of todays corporations have sacrificed every value, every standard, and most of the ethics on the blood soaked altar of the conventional wisdom of the short run dollar.. They are sowing the wind.
Regards,
The real problem is this: if you want to go to India and chase your job, you are free to go; no one will stop you - no one in the US, that is. IF you get hired by an Indian company (don't hold your breath), you will have to work for Indian wages; substantially less than American wages. And, as a foreigner working in India, a socialist country, you will likely not receive the subsidies from the Indian government that Indian citizens doing the same work will recieve, which means that you will really be working for slave wages and have the opportunity to discover the joys of poverty in a foreign country. Not a good idea.
The problem is that, as of today, the playing field is NOT level. India and China (among other nations that our jobs are being shipped to) have imposed a tariff/tax subsidy that makes it difficult to get American goods INTO India (for example) for sale at an affordable price and take jobs away from them. To level the playing field so that Americans are not at a disadvantage in this marketplace, we need our government (at a minimum) to eliminate corporate income taxes and introduce a national sales tax. If the corporate income tax AND a lot of the regulations on American businesses are eliminated, the job climate will change drastically. Jobs will be flowing to America faster than we can fill them and all those illegal aliens occupying the country will even have a shot at better jobs than busing tables or construction.
Surprisingly, there is growing interest in Congress to do this. More, however, the Congress simply wants to make it harder for corporations to ship jobs offshore. IMO, that's the wrong approach, but it is A solution; just not the best one. Trying to force American corporations to keep the jobs in America is counter-productive. What we need is an incentive that makes American corporations WANT to keep the jobs here instead of forcing them to keep them here. That incentive is the elimination of corporate income taxes and the imposition of a national sales tax.
Santosh Verma for The New York Times
The call center of Wipro Technologies in Bombay. The outsourcing of jobs to India has provoked an emotional reaction in the United States.
Santosh Verma for The New York Times
In Bombay, two Wipro employees
took calls recently from
Americans. Despite such service
jobs, Indian unemployment is
relatively high.
No, it's not at all unfair.
The wages these Indian employees get are actually quite high for the Indian labor market.
Bingo! The key words here are "QUITE HIGH FOR THE INDIAN LABOR MARKET,"which means that they are prostituting their skills to greedy American corporations for wages that are MUCH LOWER WITH NO BENEFITS! That's NOT competition. IF they demanded the same wages and benefits that Americans were getting, the companies never would have relocated to India.
That's why you have Indian MBA's clamoring for telemarketer positions with U.S. based multinationals! As for greedy American corporations - I can't say you don't have a point, but I will say this... if some of them do it, they all have to do it, just to stay competitive.
The ONLY competition that Indians have done is the competing they do against each other as American companies are deciding which Indians they are hiring from the pool of Indian applicants. I don't feel sorry for their MBA's having to work as telemarketers. If they can't get one of the American jobs that are now in India, it's because of the competition between applicants IN INDIA!
That's liek saying Walmart isn't really competing with more expensive mom-n-pop shops because their prices are lower. It's like saying, let's see if they get all that busienss if they charge just as much as the competition! The whole point of competition is to provide a similar service at a lower cost and that's precisely what the Indians are doing.
NO, I didn*t say that YOU did.
That*s liek saying Walmart isn*t really competing with more expensive mom-n-pop shops because their prices are lower. It*s like saying, let*s see if they get all that busienss if they charge just as much as the competition! The whole point of competition is to provide a similar service at a lower cost and that*s precisely what the Indians are doing.
LOL...NO, it isn*t. Walmart is a business and it competes with the mom and pop stores and they are businesses too. That has NOTHING to do with Indians competing with Americans for jobs that are located in India. Don*t compare businesses to people. The ONLY people competing for those jobs are INDIANS. They are competing against each other, NOT against Americans!
The Indians did NOT take jobs away from Americans because they*re more qualified. GREEDY AMERICAN CORPORATIONS TOOK JOBS TO INDIA. Why? Because the Indians prostitute their skills out to those GREEDY AMERICAN CORPORATIONS for cheap wages.
Let me assure you these companies will bring them back to American workers IF our government gets rid of the corporate taxes, etc that make it more costly to do business in America.
Unfortunately, many of the Indians CANNOT speak good English AND even those that can don*t have a good comprehension of English. It*s too difficult to talk to them. They don*t understand what you are asking them. I KNOW this for a fact. They have NO business working in customer service.
Incorrect. Americans are competing as well, it just so happens that we've managed to price ourselves right out of the market.
...IF our government gets rid of the corporate taxes, etc that make it more costly to do business in America.
Exactly. Due to business conditions in this country - conditions that have been imposed by our elected representatives, we've priced ourselves too high. The Indians are competing with us, but we just can't match their prices.
Unfortunately, many of the Indians CANNOT speak good English AND even those that can don*t have a good comprehension of English.
I'm in IT and deal with Indian tech help desks for our vendor products all the time. Many of them do not speak good English, but many of them do - and they can comprehend just fine. You're exaggerating.
You are such a chump.
The laws may be in place. My point is, they don't give a damn for them.
I am content to wait and be proven correct.
Regards,
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