Posted on 02/23/2004 7:56:36 PM PST by yonif
BANGALORE, India -- We grew up with the hippies in the 1960s. Thanks to the high-tech revolution, many of us became yuppies in the 1980s. And now, fasten your seat belt, because you may soon lose your job to a "zippie" in the 2000s.
"The Zippies Are Here," declared the Indian weekly magazine Outlook. Zippies are this huge cohort of Indian youth who are the first to come of age since India shifted away from socialism and dived headfirst into global trade, the information revolution and turning itself into the world's service center.
Outlook calls India's zippies "Liberalization's Children" and defines one as "a young city or suburban resident, between 15 and 25 years of age, with a zip in the stride."
"Belongs to Generation Z," it continues. "Can be male or female, studying or working. Oozes attitude, ambition and aspiration. Cool, confident and creative. Seeks challenges, loves risks and shuns fears." Indian zippies carry no guilt about making money or spending it. They are, says one Indian analyst quoted by Outlook, destination driven, not destiny driven; outward, not inward, looking; upwardly mobile, not stuck-in-my-station-in-life.
With 54 percent of India under age 25 -- that's 555 million people -- six of 10 Indian households have at least one zippie, Outlook says. And a growing slice of them (most Indians are still poor village-dwellers) will be able to do your white-collar job as well as you for a fraction of the pay. Indian zippies are one reason outsourcing is becoming the hot issue in this year's U.S. presidential campaign.
I just arrived here in Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley, to meet the zippies on the receiving end of U.S. jobs. Judging from the construction going on on every block here, the multiple applicants for every new tech job, the crowded pub scene and the families of four you see zipping around on a single motor scooter, Bangalore is one hot town.
Taking all this in, two things strike me about this outsourcing issue. One, economists are surely right: The biggest factor eliminating old jobs and churning new ones is technological change -- the phone mail system that eliminated your secretary.
As for the zippies who soak up certain U.S. or European jobs, they will become consumers, the global pie will grow, and ultimately we will all be better off. As long as the United States maintains its ability to do cutting-edge innovation, the long run should be fine. Saving money by outsourcing basic jobs to zippies, so we can invest in more high-end innovation, makes sense.
But here's what I also feel: This particular short run could be a real bear -- and politically explosive. The potential speed and scale of this outsourcing phenomenon make its potential impact enormous and unpredictable.
As we enter a world where the price of digitizing information -- converting it into little packets of ones and zeros and then transmitting it over high-speed data networks -- falls to near zero, it means the vaunted "death of distance" is really here. And that means that many jobs you can now do from your house -- whether data processing, reading an X-ray, or basic accounting or lawyering -- can now also be done from a zippie's house in India or China.
And as education levels in these overseas homes rise to U.S. levels, the barriers to shipping white-collar jobs abroad fall and the incentives rise. At a minimum, some very educated Americans used to high salaries -- people who vote and know how to write op-ed pieces -- will either lose their jobs, or have to accept lower pay or become part-timers without health insurance.
"The fundamental question we have to ask as a society is, what do we do about it?" notes Robert Reich, the former labor secretary and now Brandeis University professor. "For starters, we're going to have to get serious about some of the things we just gab about -- job training, life-long learning, wage insurance. And perhaps we need to welcome more unionization in the personal services area -- retail, hotel, restaurant and hospital jobs which cannot be moved overseas -- in order to stabilize their wages and health care benefits."
Maybe, as a transition measure, adds Reich, companies shouldn't be allowed to deduct the full cost of outsourcing, creating a small tax that could be used to help people adjust.
Either way, managing this phenomenon will require a public policy response -- something more serious than the Bush mantra of let the market sort it out, or the demagoguery of the Democratic candidates, who seem to want to make outsourcing equal to treason and punishable by hanging. Time to get real.
Thomas L. Friedman is foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times. Copyright 2004 New York Times News Service.
Unions are more or less an aristocracy. They limit the supply of workers to the benefit of their members -- and the cost of everyone else.
Many moons ago I kindda got sick of turning wrench's and started driving a truck (18 wheeler OTR).
A friend of mine (Andy) was an O/O and was leased on with NAVL (not a bed bugger but, with their HVP crane division). We bought another truck ('89 freight shaker COE 9 spd. His other rig was a 94 International condo box hood) and we got outta the crane division and started doing dedicated Xerox runs (still leased to NAVL).
At any rate. We used to haul a lot of freight outta their main plant in Webster NY. The dock workers (union) were making an unbelievable salary. Around $30 per hour to load freight unto the trailers. The shipping area was mostly automated. They'd punch in some numbers on the computer and then the automated rack system would bring the machines down from wherever they were and than the dock worker would shrink rap them (via another machine) and then via forklift put them into the trailer.
One extremely cold winter we were up there (Andy in his condo box, I in the Freight shaker) and we were talking to the dock supervisor and we asked him about Christmas and what they were planning to do. He said (now get this) that Xerox had offered the entire plant triple time if they'd work up to 3 days before Christmas, take off, and come back 3 days after Christmas. Work until a day before new years day, take off new years eve, new years day and the next day. The reason was they had a lot of orders that had to be shipped out.
TRIPLE time. That meant $90 per hour for the dock workers. The union had a meeting and take a wild guess what they voted, yep they voted NO. They wanted their 2 1/2 weeks off.
Andy and I told the supervisor that we'd work those two weeks for 1/2 ($45 per hour each) and that we'd work in two 12 hour shifts. I'd work the night shift with the night supervisor and Andy would work the day shift with the day super.
The supervisors (both are management) said they'd love that but, the union would consider that bringing in scabs and they'd call a strike.
Now I can't stand seeing our jobs being out sourced to other countries but, I can understand it (in some instances) because of the above encounter.
When I heard that Xerox was closing down their Webster plant and moving to Mexico, I felt bad for the family's of the workers but, I still cheered. I felt (and still feel) that if anyone would turn down $90 per hour, they deserved to loose their job.
Nah. That's not how it works.
After ten or twenty years, when almost all American jobs have been outsourced, America will be filled with unemployed poor people.
An since no one will have any money, the price of everything will fall.
It will become very cheap to live in America.
And then India will start outsourcing its jobs to us, for us to do them more cheaply than in India.
See?
Great! You just have proposed the maximum wage limit for the CEOs.
They are allowed to do that?!
Ah, there's the rub. Where do we get the talented people to do cutting-edge innovation once we have destroyed their training grounds? Excellent System Architects do not spring full-formed from the brow of a University. I wouldn't give you two cents for someone who billed himself as a System Architect but who never wrote a line of code in the real world. Likewise, how many people can successfully lead an engineering project at the technical level if they've never been a practicing engineer? Where will the innovators in computer science and engineering come from if a climate is created that discourages Americans from pursuing those fields in the U.S.? Sure, there will always be a few people who will do this, but we will have a progressively smaller pool of potential innovators to draw from. Moreover, you will have a smaller pool of supporting talent to support those innovators, and the fruit of even that reduced intellectual innovation will move overseas. The spiral will tighten.
We are actually abetting the creation of a climate where the next round of innovations and innovators will be from India and China.
They'll be too smart to do that.
Now that Gen X, Y and Z are used, I'm looking forward to seeing if the next will be Gen AA.
Great! You just have proposed the maximum wage limit for the CEOs.
Don't forget trial lawyers!
Just think of the great new lifestyle you can have making $2 an hour.
India, the country itself, may not have had much to do with the development of IT...but Indians and various flavors of chinee working here sure as hell did. Something like 45% of all startups in the area were started by chapatis.
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