Posted on 08/03/2009 3:06:46 PM PDT by anymouse
U.S. IT providers continue to push jobs offshore, while Indian firms work to refine the amount of work they complete overseas. Although Congress may force the Indian firms to hire more Americans -- and Indian companies have been telling investors that they may have to indeed do that -- the change won't likely affect the overall trend and the shift in jobs outside the U.S.
Okay, so where are U.S. jobs going? What's the data show? Data prepared by Everest Group Inc., a research and outsourcing consulting firm, shows in broad brush fashion the shift of jobs overseas by some major IT services vendors. In 2006, U.S. and European firms typically had less than 20% of their workforces offshore; Now, for most companies that figure may well be generally over 30%. (See chart below; yellow indicates onshore percentage; blue, offshore percentage.)
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How dependent are Indian offshore firms on H-1B and L-1 visas? In a word, very. These companies' business models are based on their ability to move Indian and other foreign nationals in and out of the U.S. Here's a more direct answer: The "majority of [Indian] companies that operate here have significantly more [than] 50% of their workers on H-1B/L1 visas," Som Mittol, the president of the National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom), an Indian trade group, SAID in a recent interview.
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This data doesn't say what happened to the workers who were displaced by U.S. companies or Indian firms in the offshore shift, or the displacement of U.S. workers by H-1B holders, as the government pointed out in recent court papers.
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(Excerpt) Read more at computerworld.com ...
I look for in the near future for zero to outsource DoD contractor IT jobs.
I look for in the near future for zero to outsource DoD contractor IT jobs.
Indeed - we are training our competition.
Of course what’s at stake here is access to the US market. These Indian firms get 50% of their revenue from the US market, but hire the bare minimum of employees inside the US, and use H1Bs for as many of those jobs as possible.
So called free traders in the US have spent decades giving away access to the US market while getting little if anything in return. These polices, in goods and services, are the reason we have seen our trade deficit mushroom from <$100 billion to around $700 billion annually, and the ongoing movement of US plants to cheap labor offshore and the outsourcing of US service jobs to cheap labor.
And the increase in our trade deficit has paralleled the increase in our federal budget deficits. Some day, even the most theory bound free traders and free marketers will have to admit that we have neither free trade nor free markets internationally, and that pretending we do has caused massive harm to the US economy and our ability to finance our own governmental obligations, and it has put our sovereignty at risk with such huge amounts of debt held by less than friendly nations.
I’m not sure I believe this. Offshoring of call centers and programming to India and China was a fad for a while, but it hasn’t turned out to be worth the trouble. In IT pubs I’m reading more and more that that stuff is coming back home more than it is going away. Differences in culture, communication, and even merely time zones have proven to be dealbreakers.
And when they get all the business, will they take advantage of their position and raise prices?
Actually the Indians and Filipinos have become pretty adept at faking American chit chat for helping moron computer users. When they get more challenging technical issues they transfer them to the level 2 tech support back in the States, where some college dropout computer geeks get to field the call.
But before you even get to the Indian or Filipino call centers, you will get routed through a maze of automated "help" menus, which will give standard basic Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) answers.
That sign's not helping much while I'm standing out at the interstate off ramps.
The only solution is for American consumers to identify and punish heavy outsourcers (or for the American standard of living to fall continuously until it reaches the new, much lower, global mean). I can’t tell you how many things I’ve decided not to buy because there was no American option. It’s amazing how much you don’t need. Let them sell to the Indians and Chinese. It’s trickier with services, but I think there are organizations beginning to identify and out the worst offenders there as well.
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