Posted on 02/04/2004 12:58:36 PM PST by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
Recently, a programmer at a US company lost his job when it was outsourced to India . This man, with years of experience lost his job to a person who probably was not as good as him but came a lot cheaper. This programmer was my friend who just happened to be from India and he was a US citizen, having lived there for the last 10 years. He did not like losing his job to someone from a foreign country. But, his story, it appears now is the typical American techie's story.
Laxmikant Mandal, 27, is also heading back to India. A tech engineer, he had moved to the Silicon Valley during the boom, holding jobs at Nortel Networks, Cisco Systems and Cypress Semiconductor. Laid off in March, he returned to Bangalore, India, and received two job offers in three months. Ultimately, he decided to pursue an MBA in Canada. But when he graduates, he wants to start a company in India. "Bangalore is thriving the way Silicon Valley was in 1999," he says.
Sona Shah, a US citizen, is fighting against Wilco Systems, a New York-based financial services company, filing a lawsuit on behalf of US workers who are discriminated against in favour of foreign workers, and on behalf of foreign H-1B visa workers who are paid less than the prevailing wage for US workers with similar qualifications.
A recent link found on a Web group: Writes a H1-B worker, "I am out of contract and want to change employers, since the one I have is very bad. He doesn't pay me a salary. Under the new Bill, is it possible to transfer H-1Bs, even if I haven't been working in the US? Some people tell me that I need a pay stub to prove that I have been working for my current H-1B-sponsor. Is this true! If that is a fact, I will travel back to India where you at least get paid."
These are not unrelated events. The American job factory is closing down and it is closing fast. The hopeful techie on the American pilgrimage, who had worked hard for his green card and after years of work, who is a now a bona fide US citizen, is facing the harsh truth. The jobs are gone . All the successful technocrats, drawing six-figure salaries, who once thought that they are invincible, are finding one morning that their desks have been cleared and they are out, just like that!!
It is only ironic that these jobs are moving over to India. Here, Rahul and Ralph are brothers under the skin. They are both facing the same enemy, the low-wage techie from India, Russia or Mexico.
The Indian-born techie, who is now an American citizen, has the same enemy as the US born techie, the Indian who is stealing his job.
Wait, there is a difference. Rahul and Ralph are both losing their jobs, but while Rahul can move back to India to start his second innings, there is no way out for poor Ralph, who is stuck in America.
In fact, Rahul just did that. He has had to sell off his house in America and he is looking for jobs in India. He knows he will not draw the same level of salary that he earned there, but at least his `honour´ would be saved. It is another matter, that his American-born wife Alice has left him. She has also taken her two children along with her.
But what about Ralph? Last heard, he was earning $10 an hour in some shop, selling stuff he couldn´t care less about. Earlier, in his heydays, he used to charge $115 per hour .Rahul and Ralph used to keep in touch with each other. Now, they have both stopped.
Last year, the first-ever campaign to lure Indian ex-pats away from high-tech industries in the Silicon Valley took place, showing which way the wind is blowing.
The front page of the Silicon India magazine boldly declared that India is Hiring" - the subtext being that Silicon Valley is not.
With the US software companies increasingly shifting work to India, a lot of Indian IT pros working abroad are coming back. Nasscom says nearly 35,000 IT professionals (a little under 10% of the total Indian IT workforce in the US) have returned since 9/11.
One of the biggest economic events of recent times have been the emergence of the outsourcing sector.
As India emerged as the jobshop of the world with low-end IT jobs leading the way, the world has turned a full circle and after the blue-collar jobs, the white-collar jobs have also come India's way. Oracle and Intel of late are hiring a lot, but mostly in India.
The result: hundreds of thousands of American jobs have been coming to India. And the casualties in this battle for jobs in the US have been Indians as well.
The world has truly become global. Today's Indian can be tomorrow's American. As the boundaries blur and populations move, today's necessity can become tomorrow's headache. Here Rahul and Ralph are one. Perhaps, at the cost of sounding stupid, we do have to spare a thought for the American techie.
see Walter Williams on the issue today.
Just because the hero of the story was once paid 115 per hour does not mean that was his real value, it was temporary; as part of supply and demand. Even without outsourcing the wage scale and home prices in the valley dropped by half.
Indeed. I am one of those programmers displaced as a direct result of 911. I am at an age where I will never again be hired by a large corporation. But most job creation in this country in now in small business, startups, and among entrepreneurs. The big fat corporations will hire at the cheapest rate, but there are still opportunities. The jobs are just different.
It's not complex at all.
I just wish I hadn't invested 27 years of my life in a dead end job. My golden years are beginning to rust.
Why would I want to read Walter's simplistic gibberish?
oh, I dunno. Perhaps so you could learn something.
Exactly. About six years ago I almost left my job for a higher paying tech job, but didn't because I had some gnawing concerns about job security and my third kid was just born. The job I almost took paid about 8k a year more than I was making at the time, with promises of rainbows, happiness, and big raises in the future.
POP Goes the Tech bubble.
Now that job, and the entire company, I think, is gone. I'm still where I was doing tech work at a non-tech job, and making a fair living. We're picking up some good employees who are formerly from the tech industries. Like you said, the jobs are there, just different.
I heard somewhere the other day someone using Logitec as an example...There are a couple hundred people employed in So.Cal in Logitec's marketing department. There are a couple thousand in their assembly plant in China. Out of a Forty dollar mouse, between one and two dollars go to China, the greatest percentage goes to those marketing people (Americans) and the rest is spread around other areas of the company (Some in the US, some not.) Those Logitec Marketing people, who make more than the entire factory force in China, wouldn't have their marketing jobs without the Chinese labor.
The economy is changing to a service economy and those who are most able to flex a little and find a niche will fare just fine.
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