Indian prime minister says opposition to job outsourcing will hurt West

[sujan]

NEW DELHI (AP) - India's prime minister today said Western workers' opposition to the outsourcing of jobs to India will hurt their companies and their countries' economies.

Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee attributed the recent surge in outsourcing to visa restrictions blocking the movement of skilled workers to rich countries.

Companies in the United States and Europe are cutting costs by tapping cheap labor in India and other developing countries, particularly in software development and in so-called ``back office'' work such as the handling of customer calls and payroll processing.

Tens of thousands of technology jobs in Europe, mostly Britain, are moving overseas. In the United States the numbers are even bigger.

But Vajpayee said outsourcing means savings and profits for Western economies.

http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/7375962.htm

[Don_G]

1. Savings And Profits

Compared to the 2.8 Million jobs lost to outsourcing to India and China?

[SharonAnn]

32. So, since agreeing to outsourcing is already hurting the West,

What's the alternative?

[SaveElmer]

2. Outsourcing is backfiring

This outsourcing to India is backfiring on companies. I've worked for a couple of high tech firms that tried this, and can tell you that they regretted it. We outsourced some of our coding operation and found that the quality of the software was pretty poor. That , combined with the difficulty communicating effectively actually slowed down a number of projects, and ended up costing our company more money. I've heard alot of anecdotal evidence from others that this is a fairly common occurrence.

It also lowered morale with workers in the states, There were always wondering if their job will be the next one to be outsourced.

And, so much business has gone to India over the last few years, that Indian workers are in higher demand and are drawing higer salaries, thus removing the one advantage to sending the work over there.

[Don_G]

6. It's Backfired On Them Big Time

I'm on my second Dell Notebook and I'll never buy another. Customer support was excellent with my first one; the second was supported by the techs in India for the most part from both Dell and Micro$haft with BIG communications problems.

They can save all the money they want to but I'll never buy another procuct knowingly to be victimized by their corporate practices.

[okieinpain]

29. I spoke to a dell tech last week and I informed him that I use to

recommend their computers all the time, but that I would do it anymore. he asked why and I informed him that I had just spent close to an hour speaking to someone either in india or mexico, and let me tell you it was a diaster. he stated that dell was getting out of that arrangement because of the very problem that I had just described.

I'm not being a racist but the translation is just too much of a problem. I'm pretty tech savy, so I've always wondered what happens when someone that's not so techie talks to one of the india techs.

[ikojo]

38. I called AOL member services early in November

and at first got someone from India who I could barely understand. After being put on hold and then losing my connection, I called the number again. This time I ended up with an English speaking person I could understand. Before I started to explain my problem (I wanted to cancel my AOL service) I asked him if he was a native speaker of English. He answered yes. I then asked him if he was within the United States to which he responded in the affirmative and said he was in Jacksonville, FL.
I apologized for the interrogation and then explained my previous encounter with someone from India who could barely understand me. He did not deny that AOL uses Indian customer service.
He was able to assist me with my problem and I asked to talk to his supervisor to commend his service.
A primary problem with using Indian customer service is that they may speak English but they do not speak AMERICAN English. They do not understand cultural idioms and such. Also, scripted responses is not customer service and that is why Dell is moving CORPORATE customer service back to the US. I suspect that non corporate customer service will return only when people stop buying Dell computers.

[foo_bar]

13. I wish that were true

Maybe it is in the long run, when ClearChannel and Walmart collapse on themselves for failing to provide the quality and service of the mom'n'pops (i.e., not in our lifetimes).

I passed up an "opportunity" last week on a partnership to "outsource" 5,000 $50/hour jobs from the NYC area to India @$0.25/hour while pocketing half the difference. I didn't walk out on moral pretext; telling people to forego money for enlightened self-interest is like telling water not to osmose. This is the future, and there ain't a damn thing we can do about it, except find new careers as coordinators, translators, implementers, and designers. This perpetual state of retraining has always been the norm in high tech, COBOL programmers aside, so we might as well adapt.

[harpboy_ak]

20. This outsourcing to India is backfiring on companies.

Well, I wrote to Michael Dell about the "service" I had received when trying to get them to fix a CPU fan. I *knew* what the problem was, and didn't want to go through some stupid scripted diagnostic procedure that "Raj" wanted me to follow, since I have 20 years of PC support experience and a degree in the field.

His "supervisor" insisted that I *had* to follow procedure until I told her that I had *never* encountered this kind of idiocy with *American* Dell support folks, and if she didn't just issue me a trouble ticket and order the damn fan, I would complain loudly and longly to Dell HQ in Texas the next day.

She issued the number and ordered the part after going offline for a minute, I presume to get permission. Sheesh!

So I wrote a letter on company letterhead to Michael Dell before leaving the office, and lo and behold, got a call a week later from a US Dell support supervisor, the day after Dell announced that they were cancelling one of their big Indian outsourcing contracts because of complaints.

So Dell, at least, has learned that business folks don't have the time or patience to put up with inept script readers who can barely speak English, and certainly can't think for themselves. As the Dell support supervisor (who seemed gratified that the Indian support "experiment" had failed) said: "They don't know when they can skip some steps in the script".

[nannygoat]

33. My sister works for a subsidiary of GE

and they outsourced a lot of their accounting functions to India. Boy, she was pissed because she had to train them and then a bunch of Americans lost their jobs as a result. She said that it was really difficult training these folks on a lot of levels (communication, resentment, etc.). One thing that pissed her off was that these folks would get paid American holidays plus Indian holidays (albeit at very low US wages)!

[bleedingheart]

41. Same here...outsourcing doesn't work so well

it makes a few quarters look good financially due to less cost but a large project that had been largely outsourced for my company (fortune 500) tanked and it cost a few VP's their jobs.

The key problem is lack of communication...as anyone knows it is hard enough to foster communication within an old fashioned office..mix that in with a bunch of people in a different time zone who you can not communicate with as well....and disaster reigns down.

[pinkpops]

3. some things people just gotta figure out for themselves n/t

[SoCalDem]

4. So...people should be HAPPY when they lose their job to

"Judy" in Delhi?? I find that hard to believe..

It may be "good" for the corporations, but it really sucks for the employees who count on those jobs to feed and house their families..

I find it hard to believe that companies cannot make a profit anymore without $2 hr employees.. It's all about the GREED !!!

[Muddleoftheroad]

21. Not greed

We compete in a world marketplace. If an American company uses relatively expensive U.S. labor and a foreign company uses cheap 2nd or 3rd world labor, the foreign company will make cheaper products. Americans are price conscious and will buy those cheaper products. So for firms to survive, they need cheap labor.

[nannygoat]

35. Why then don't prices come down for the products

made with cheap labor? What happens instead is those greedy companies keep the profits they make while people in third world countries get taken advantage of and we lose our jobs. What happens to the communities that gave these pigs huge tax incentives and built roads, etc. for them to come into their communities? What happens to the US taxpayer who probably picked up a big tab in terms of R & D for these companies (through university research)? What happens when these pig companies want our soldiers to fight and die for their companies and their profits?

Give me a break, Muddle...

[Muddleoftheroad]

43. How do you suggest they remain competitive?

I mean really? I want to know.

OK, suppose I own a company that competes with companies in the world market. They all decide to outsource, so I either A) do the same and, even if I pay top LOCAL dollar, I am paying a lot less than I would here or B) My products are a lot more expensive than my competitors. And, then, of course, my firm goes out of business and we lose ALLL the jobs.

But just because ALL of our products are cheaper to make doesn't make them cheaper to sell. Prices might go down but in the process we might spend more on marketing vying for market share. Same cost to us, but divided differently.

[impeach the gop]

5. I read somewhere

We were starting the overseas (this time India not UK) Nurse program. Seems we have a shortage of nurses again. Could be because nobody here can work in the lousy conditions without benefits or job security corporate owned drive thru hospitals we have now. Like these nurses are temps, with option to extend visa if hospital buys her contract out from some company that buys and sales desperate workers willing to take crumbs that their master tosses to them for their submission.

Guess this is opposite of out sourcing, it IN sourcing. same thing, same game.

[SharonAnn]

9. We've had a shortage of nurses for quite a while now.

Of course, we could pay well and give them a manageable patient load but then there would be less money for the executives' bonuses.

So, we're back to shortage and importing cheap labor from Ireland, South Africa, Puerto Rico, and the Phillipines to try to fill the gaps.

[Don_G]

22. Why Not?

Edcuation in their countries are on a par with our own, but a heck of a lot less expensive.

Why should the Health Care system pay for the degrees the Docs and nurses have labored so long and hard for?

Or is it because there's always a cheaper bastard out there that dosen't fully understand the laws and customs in the US?

[cap]

31. why not, indeed...

education for nursing in other countries is NOT on a par with our own. Why do people from the Third World come here to study? If the degrees were truly on a par with our own, wouldn't there be mass numbers of doctors and nurses from the US getting educated for $700/year? I don't think you could be a native American and show up with a Third World university degree and expect to go very far in your career. Third World countries do not have the high tech equipment that we have here in our hospitals and these people do not know how to use them!!! Third World hospitals are not heavily computerized! They use older technologies and older modalities of treatment. Our nurses have to train these new comers.

[ikojo]

40. Yes, the NYT had an article about Philipino women moving

to the US to fill vacant nursing positions. With overtime pay they can make $80K per year as opposed to what they made in the Phillipines. As an ethnic group Philipinos are well represented in nursing.

While there is a nursing shortage, I think hospitals import Philipino nurses for the same reason Silicon Valley employers imported Indian computer programmers, as visiting workers they don't have the same rights as American workers. They can be more easily exploited and tend not to say anything because the money is so much better than what they can get in their home countries.

What many Americans do not realize is that many countries provide free government subsidized education through the university level. American students who are not from rich families are increasingly coming out of school with huge debt burdens and this could be leading to the nursing shortage as well. Nursing school is not cheap. It is not the two or three year program it was 20 years ago. Increasingly it demands a bachelors degree in nursing.

[rucky]

7. From one caste system to another... (n/t)

[aquart]

8. The speaker is equating corporations with national economies.

Apples and oranges.

A corporation can be a helpful symbiont, aiding the body of a nation, or, unregulated, it can become a deadly parasite, leeching the wealth and resources of a nation, crippling its population, and moving on in search of the next national body to destroy.

Outsourcing doesn't do one helpful thing for the American nation. It helps corporations and corporations only. In doing so, it reduces the ability of the American nation's population to maintain itself. The loss of jobs in America kills Americans. It isn't a terrorist bomb but it works just dandy. It's parasitic behavior on the part of corporations and should be regarded as such.

[dvddrone]

10. Deadly parasites, indeed.

Earthlink outsourced to Manila, for fuck's sake. I've had to call them twice for customer service since I found out. Both times, regardless of how pissed off they get (and they get PLENTY pissed off), I insist that I am an American customer, using an American service within the United States and I repeatedly demand to speak with an American representative. They argue, I feel like an asshole doing it, but eventually they transfer me to Las Vegas. I'll cancel the service eventually, but for now - I'll just give them massive amounts of shit about it every single time.

Elizabeth

[ldf]

24. that's it.

american corporate terrorists, that release slow acting bombs on the american economy, by outsourcing, based on pure greed.

it will stop when someone figures a way to outsource CEO positions to a cheap labor market somewhere. talk about changing a tune midway through the song.....

[JoeMemphis]

11. Screw 'em ...

... we can pull the plug on our trade with them and shut down the H-1B/L-1 program at a moments' notice if our lawmakers actually had spines.

[coloradodem2005]

12. For those of you for outsourcing, F*ck off!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[akitamata]

18. And those of you

for globalization and "lower prices and bigger savings at Walmart" as well. Capitalism doesn't give a shit about you, coloradodem2004, neither do "your" politicians, or "your" rich, or "your" competitors. If you want to have a future, start thinking about what socialism REALLY means and stop being a dupe for the (un)free market crap spewed in your nation.

[DemVet]

30. Meaning?

Please explain. :)

[snoochie]

14. We're losing the middle class

As the tax base erodes, guess what happens to our country? The least fortunate among us?

Welcome to the Brave New World, where it's all about the bottom line, and nobody dares even dream about stopping the rot at the top. All adjustments are made on the backs of the lowest.

Caste system, indeed.

[akitamata]

19. "Welcome to the Brave New World,..."

should actually read New World Order and is brought to you courtesy of Bush,Sr. (or as I like to think of him, The Angel of Socialized Death).
Nice discounted cup of poverty for you? Brother can you spare a sympathetic response?...

[fabius]

15. WTF?

:wtf:

So, outsourcing will hurt American workers because it will hurt their companies' profits...

earth to Vaj,

They are losing their JOBS. Who gives a crap about the profits of a company that just laid you off and won't ever hire you back? HMMM?

[FormerOstrich]

16. Mr Vajpayee,

How can the recent surge be attributed to the visa restrictions blocking skilled workers to rich countries when there hasn't been any restrictions yet? I believe you are talking out your ass. I believe you are threatening us but you personally have not way to back it up.

I keep threatening to start an entire thread with a bunch of my thoughts on this but haven't yet. However, I do want to cover a couple of things on this thread.

1) I believe that the upper echelons thought that IT workers were dumb and lazy. They believed this was reflected in the dismal success rate of projects.

Thus, outsourcing was viewed as the silver bullet.

What they haven't taken into consideration is even though we as IT people are not without fault, management was responsible for the fialed projects. Our skills were not what forced those projects on the shelf. Outsourcing our skills will not correct the problems. It may help divert the attention, but it will not correct.

2) The consumers are obviously willing to accept faulty software. You can see this all over the place. I have very little patience for software errors, but they are literally everywhere.

Worse yet, we are moving more towards a market demanding features versus quality. My experience indicates that a customer is a lot less willing to wait for new function and feature than something to correct their errors.

3) I believe in some cases there is a mindset that outsourced costs less even when that may not be true. With jobs as hard to find as they are I have been augmenting my income with tech support work. Finally, the company asked me if I would do some programming for them.

I picked up the initial stages of the project and that part had been off-shored. Seeing it as an oppurtunity to get my foot in the door, plus not being overly worked I took on that project with zeal. Ultimatly, I ended up charging almost nothing for the work I did. It was so severly discounted it was not funny.

This company is a small business and the co-owner is a developer himself. He should be more astute than a non-technical principal. Well when he recieved my bill he immediately complained that he could have off-shored it for half the price. He stressed that he thought I'd done an excellent job and it wasn't my fault he is just accustomed to the lower rates.

Well, the Indians don't have anything on me at this point because I had worked for peanuts on that task. I have managed software development projects for many years. Yes, I even did some off-shoring development as early as 1997. I have a very good understanding of the effort required for a task. I would have bet him double or nothing on my bill there was no possible way that he could have had that worked performed for less no matter where he sent it. I would have won to.

4) I believe that there has been virutally no analysis on the amount of business practices and personal infromation that is being sent off-shore to countries that do not have to adhere to any of our laws. We do not have to worry about hackers compromising national security when a terrorist could go to work for an off-shore firm and a) learn a wealth of information about a company, their operations, weaknesses, and vulenerabilites. In theory, they could just write their "bomb" into the next version of the software. b) Sell any of the information to those that wish to do us harm.

Remember post-9/11 they were removing documents from the internet because hackers could obtain information from them. Well they can put them all back because sending the software out is probably much more comprehensive and accurate.

5) The low costs are obtained with practices other than cheap wages. I am familiar with and have read of many instances where the off-shore development firm is pirating the intellectual property that is used in developing the software. That include programming tools and other things like the compilers/editores and etc.

This may prove to come back to haunt the companies that have entrusted their intellectual property to those that demonstart a lack of regard for guarding it. This may very well introduce more black market competing products. In other words it might ultimatily hurt the revenue of the company that is outsourcing.


I have more to say about this topic but will let it rest for now. Theres a lot of exposure in this area if it is realized or not. The candidates need to start talking about that angle to it, as the exposure is largely ignored by all.

[ibegurpard]

17. Thanks for your insight on this.

It is absolutely astounding to me that such decisions are being made without seeming to consider the long-term ramifications.

[Cronus Protagonist]

23. Every time I post a job I get three or four people demanding I outsource

Usually to India or Pakistan. I always tell them the same thing, "You must think I'm a Republican". They always go away after I make that comment.

FUCK BUSH Buttons, Stickers & Magnets

[VolcanoJen]

25. Kick!

:dem:

[reprobate]

26. Flame me all you want, but I said it before and I'll say it again.

And I mean it this time.

CAPITALISM IS A SELF DEFEATING SYSTEM!

Or perhaps I should have said "CORPORATISM".

It constantly seeks to lower costs and the only factor of production that is at all flexible is labor. It will always drive labor costs toward the lowest possible level. The real goal of corporatism is the forcing of labor into a slave status, whereby labor costs are negligable and stockholder profits maximized.

This of course must lead to lower quality products. Slaves never have the same goals as their masters. With lower quality comes lower sales, (and the problem of who can afford the product). With lower sales come lower stockholder return, which leads to lower stock prices and the bailing out of investors. The system must collapse at that point.

In my view, the only way out of this death spiral is to remove the "personhood" from corporations and bring them back under the control of law. Of course this probably won't happen until after the collapse, when people can actually see what they've done.

May the gods save america and the world.

[cthrumatrix]

27. corporations own the damn system...and they are runnign the US into

the ground...my fear is that it's on purpose...who does the war benefit?

[Guaranteed]

28. What? Shut up, you idiot.

What hurts our economy is the fact that so many of us don't HAVE jobs. It's a CONSUMER BASED economy, here in the US, and for THAT you need CONSUMERS.

[ikojo]

42. Think about this...if corporations are only interested in profits

then in the minds of their CEOs and shareholders it doesn't really matter if the US falls into third world status.

There are a BILLION people in India. There are TWO BILLION people in China. Corporate America and the US government are doing all they can to encourage both countries to take a more consumer and capitalist oriented life. They want both countries to adopt the American way of living.

Imagine if that happens. If only ten percent of both countries adopt the American way of life (cars, homes, TVs, computers et.al) then that is 300 MILLION consumers, that is far more than what exists in the US.

Just for greeds sake it makes more sense for US corporations to create a vast Indian and Chinese middle class.

[doc03]

34. Wesley Clark

Just saw rerun of the last debate General Clark said, "let them have the software jobs", we'll find other things to do. I have been hearing this same thing for the last 20 years and we just keep raceing to the bottom. Clark just lost my vote!

[KittyWampus]

36. Those Jobs Are Already Gone

Those jobs are already gone-Clark had nothing to do with that

No new jobs have been created- Clark had nothing to do with that

If you'd listened to the rest of his statement he went on to say he'd create new jobs by investing in Science/Technology... specifically Alternative Energy.

Then he said he'd use tax code to keep those jobs here.

Why are you blaming Clark for the jobs lost under Bush?

[doc03]

37. Didn't blame Clark

As I said, we have been hearing this same argument for the last 20 years. How many jobs are we going to let go before someone wakes up.
Those people probably thought they were safe while they watched all the other jobs leave too.

[doc03]

39. No job is safe anymore

I read a newspaper story this week about Mexico putting a 500%
tarrif on Chinese imports. It said the average wage in Mexico is
$1.20 an hour and $.48 in China. I don't know about everyone else
but I don't want to live on $.48.