Posted on 07/28/2003 11:01:09 AM PDT by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
Little by little, sab maglione could feel his job slipping away. He worked for a large insurance firm in northern New Jersey, developing the software it uses to keep track of its agents. But in mid-2001, his employer introduced him to Tata Consultancy Services, India´s largest software company. About 120 Tata employees were brought in to help on a platform-conversion project. Maglione, 44, trained and managed a five-person Tata team. When one of them was named manager, he started to worry. By the end of last year, 70% of the project had been shifted to India and nearly all 20 U.S. workers, including Maglione, were laid off.
Since then, Maglione has been able to find only temporary work in his field, taking a pay cut of nearly 30% from his former salary of $77,000. For a family and mortgage, he says, “that doesn´t pay the bills.” Worried about utility costs, he runs after his two children, 11 and 7, to turn off the lights. And he has considered a new career as a house painter. “It doesn´t require that much skill, and I don´t have to go to school for it,” Maglione says. And houses, at least, can´t be painted from overseas.
Jobs that stay put are becoming a lot harder to find these days. U.S. companies are expected to send 3.3 million jobs overseas in the next 12 years, primarily to India, according to a study by Forrester Research. If you´ve ever called Dell about a sick PC or American Express about an error on your bill, you have already bumped the tip of this “offshore outsourcing” iceberg. The friendly voice that answered your questions was probably a customer-service rep in Bangalore or New Delhi. Those relatively low-skilled jobs were the first to go, starting in 1997.
But more and more of the jobs that are moving abroad today are highly skilled and highly paid—the type that U.S. workers assumed would always remain at home. Instead Maglione is one of thousands of Americans adjusting to the unsettling new reality of work. “If I can get another three years in this industry, I´ll be fortunate,” he says. Businesses are embracing offshore outsourcing in their drive to stay competitive, and almost any company, whether in manufacturing or services, can find some part of its work that can be done off site. By taking advantage of lower wages overseas, U.S. managers believe they can cut their overall costs 25% to 40% while building a more secure, more focused work force in the U.S. Labor leaders—and nonunion workers, who make up most of those being displaced—aren´t buying that rationale. “How can America be competitive in the long run sending over the very best jobs?” asks Marcus Courtney, president of the Seattle-based Washington Alliance of Technology Workers. “I don´t see how that helps the middle class.”
On the other side of the world, though, educated Indian workers are quickly adjusting to their new status as the world´s most sought-after employees. They have never been more confident and optimistic—as Americans usually like to think of themselves. For now, at least, in ways both tangible and emotional, educated Americans and Indians are trading places.
Uma Satheesh, 32, an employee of Wipro, one of India´s leading outsourcing companies, is among her country´s new élite. She manages 38 people who work for Hewlett-Packard´s enterprise-servers group doing maintenance, fixing defects and enhancing the networking software developed by HP for its clients. Her unit includes more than 300 people who work for HP, about 90 of whom were added last November when HP went through a round of cost-cutting.
“We´ve been associated with HP for a long time, so it was an emotional thing,” Satheesh says. “It was kind of a mixed feeling. But that is happening at all the companies, and it´s going to continue.” Satheesh says that five years ago, computer-science graduates had one career option in India: routine, mind-numbing computer programming. Anything more rewarding required emigrating. “Until three years ago, the first preference was to go overseas,” she says. Nowadays her colleagues are interested only in business trips to the U.S. “People are pretty comfortable with the jobs here and the pay here”—not to mention the cars and houses that once seemed out of reach. Employees in her group earn from $5,200 a year to $36,000 for the most experienced managers.
And as American companies have grown more familiar with their Indian outsourcing partners, they have steadily increased the complexity of work they are willing to hand over. Rajeshwari Rangarajan, 28, leads a team of seven Wipro workers enhancing the intranet site on which Lehman Brothers employees manage personal benefits like their 401(k) accounts. “I see myself growing with every project that I do here,” Rangarajan says. “I really don´t have any doubts about the growth of my career.”
Her experience with a leading brokerage will probably help. Financial-services companies in the U.S. are expected to move more than 500,000 jobs overseas in the next five years, according to a survey by management consultant A.T. Kearney, and India is by far the top destination. U.S. banks, insurance firms and mortgage companies have been using outsourcing to handle tech support for years. Now these firms are using Indian workers to handle the business operations—say, assessing loan applications and credit checks—that the technology supports. Kumar Mahadeva, CEO of the thriving outsourcing firm Cognizant, explains the appeal: “It becomes logical for them to say, ‘Hey, you know everything about the way we do claims processing. Why not take a piece of it?´”
The next logical step, says Andrea Bierce, a co-author of the A.T. Kearney study, is jobs that require more complex financial skills such as equity research and analysis or market research for developing new business. Evalueserve, a niche outsourcing company in Delhi, already performs research for patent attorneys and consulting firms in the U.S. In April, J.P. Morgan Chase said it would hire about 40 stock-research analysts in Bombay—about 5% of its total research staff. Novartis employs 40 statisticians in Bombay who process data from the drug company´s clinical research.
But as educated workers in India are finding new opportunities, those in the U.S. feel the doors closing. Last week Bernie Lantz drove 1,400 miles from his home in Plano, Texas, to begin a new life in Utah. He is 58 years old, a bachelor, and had lived in the Dallas area for 24 years. “I´m leaving all my friends,” he says with a sigh. “It´s quite an upheaval.” Lantz used to earn $80,000 a year as a troubleshooter for Sabre, a company based in Southlake, Texas, whose software powers airline-reservations systems. But over the past two years, Sabre has gradually standardized and has centralized its software service. As Sabre began to outsource its internal IT services, Lantz says, he became convinced that jobs like his were becoming endangered. He was laid off in December. (A company spokesman denies that Lantz´s firing was related to outsourcing.)
Discouraged by a depressed job market in Dallas, Lantz realized he would have to do something else. In the fall he will begin teaching computer science at Utah State University in Logan, and in the meantime he has learned a lesson of his own: “Find a job that requires direct hands-on work on site,” Lantz advises. “Anything that can be sent overseas is going to be sent overseas.”
Pat Fluno, 53, of Orlando, Florida, says she, like Maglione, had to train her replacement—a common practice in the domestic outsourcing industry—when her data-processing unit at Germany-based Siemens was outsourced to India´s Tata last year. “It´s extremely insulting,” she says. “The guy´s sitting there doing my old job.” After 10 months of looking, she is working again, but she had to take a $10,000 pay cut.
To protect domestic jobs, U.S. labor activists are pushing to limit the number of H-1B and L-1 visas granted to foreign workers. That would make it harder for offshore companies to have their employees working on site in the U.S. “Those programs were designed for a booming high-tech economy, not a busting high-tech economy,” says Courtney of the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers. Courtney and his allies are starting to get the attention of lawmakers. Several congressional committees have held hearings on the impact of offshore outsourcing on the U.S. economy, and lawmakers in five states have introduced bills that would limit or forbid filling government contracts through offshore outsourcing.
Stephanie Moore, a vice president of Forrester Research, says companies are concerned about the backlash but mainly because of the negative publicity. “The retail industry is very hush-hush about its offshoring,” she says. But within the boardroom, such outsourcing enjoys wide support. In a June survey of 1,000 firms by Gartner Research, 80% said the backlash would have no effect on their plans.
The advantages, businesses say, are just too great to ignore. They begin with cost but don´t end there. Jennifer Cotteleer, vice president of Phase Forward, a Waltham, Massachusetts, company that designs software for measuring clinical-trials data for drug companies, has for the past two years used offshore employees from Cognizant to customize the application for specific drug trials. Lately she has been relying on their expertise to develop even more-tailored programming. “I certainly couldn´t have grown this fast without them,” Cotteleer says. Her company is growing 30% annually, on track to reach $65 million in revenue this year. “What I´ve been able to do in very tough economic times is manage very directly to my margins,” she says. “I´m providing job security for the workers I do have.”
Creative use of offshore outsourcing, says Debashish Sinha of Gartner Research, offers benefits that outweigh the direct loss of jobs. In an economy that has shed 2 million jobs over two years, he contends, the 200,000 that have moved overseas are less significant than the potential for cost savings and strategic growth. But he concedes that “when you´re a laid-off employee who can´t find a job, that´s hard to understand.”
Perhaps some will follow the example of Dick Taggart, 41, of Old Greenwich, Connecticut. After 18 years in financial services, most recently at J.P. Morgan Chase, he now works for Progeon, an affiliate of the Indian outsourcing giant Infosys, as its man on Wall Street. One week out of every six or seven, he takes securities firms to India to show them the savings that are possible. He knows the transition is painful for the workers left behind, but he has seen it before. “It was the same thing when we moved from Wall Street to New Jersey and then to Dallas,” he says. “Guess what? This is next.”
—With reporting by Sean Gregory/New York City
I hope you have your towel...
Most of Japan's problems were caused by its protectionism, not by its laudible frugal citizenry. The huge amounts of foreign capital thay amassed became utterly worthless as their trade barriers made it impossible to spend. A cab ride in Tokyo got to be $50. A small hotel room $300. They were playing with Monopoly money, having collected vast amounts of foreign currency with no way to spend it. Sooner or later, it had to implode.
Contrary to your thesis, Japan is a perfect illustration of the failures of trade barriers, not the proof of their legitimacy.
He isn't a loser. He's bitter. Can't say that I blame him. I went through childhood with parents who lived through the depression. Until I barked back, I got a bath on saturday, just one bath a week. Water was expensive. The gas to heat the water is too expensive. The electricity used to power my little transistor radio was....too expensive. I still run around shutting off lights, and keeping the furnace off, because I went back to school, we're living on child support and alimony....and it's too freaking expensive. Forget about Scouts, soccer, band, and ballet, I'm looking at going on food stamps because my two kids at home are like locusts.
I'm hoping that I can eventually get a job in publishing, or newspapers,proofreading and editing. I'm hoping that being an American will give me an edge in that field. I don't expect to make 70k. I will be happy to make a decent living wage with health benefits. Har har har...
Don't sit and laugh at this man's misfortune, okay?
Preach it brother. On 8 bucks an hour, I can't even rent a motel room. Cable? Dish? Bwaahahha! I went back to school, and hopefully the foreigners won't be able to snatch proofreading or editing. That would be text. Like newspapers and books. There is only so much you can do to cut costs. When I was married and my oldest kids were little, I bought fabric remnants and sewed their clothes. I crocheted doilies and antimacassars for Christmas presents. Then many years later I found out how much my ex husband was actually making. Oh well. I'm self sufficient. Day old bread, half price meat, and dented canned goods. I just hope I can get a degree and a decent job. Hopefully my 89 New Yorker can make it past 300,000 miles.
They feel betrayed. You're talking gold rush and remote controls. Was the govt. stabbing gold rushers in the back? The only way these situations are comparable, is if the govt. was scheming and artificially ended the gold rush early on behalf of a foreign power.
Exactly. We're more expensive to hire? Noooo, If they hire American workers, it will cut into their personal pork. I love George Bush, but he needs to wake up and smell the coffee.
Our economy is being wrecked anyway. Don't quote me figures about joblessness and economic reports. It only applies to the people in power. The middle-class worker is on his way out. When we become a subservient society to the ultra-rich, we will all be battling to see who can cut their rich neighboors grass for a few bucks.
BTW. I don't believe either the R's or the D's give a rat's a$$ about the average American worker. Just as long, as like Huck, they can say they got theirs.
Except that US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, gave assurances to Indian Commerce Minister Arun Jaitley that Washington is against any attempt by state governments to legislate a ban on outsourcing on the lines of what is being considered in New Jersey and other states.
(1) It doesn't measure the vast majority of serices, mostly goods. The service sector in the trade deficit is something like 16 percent. The service sector in our economy is about 75 percent. So we are exporting a lot of services that don't get accounted for. Everything from software, engineering and accounting services, medical treatments, on and on. So virtually no one who is informed thinks the real trade deficit is really anywhere near $500 billion. For most of the last few decades it's likely been positive if services were accounted for.
(2). The numbers aren't real. Just for example, how many eBay dealers ship stuff overseas and report the real value? Yet the numbers on those forms are what's used to calculate the deficit. For the most part, the numbers are fiction.
(3) The real issue is cash transfers. If we are importing more goods than we export, but foreigners are investing the profits and more back here by buying our stocks and bonds, that's a net positive for us in terms of cash flow. Cash transfers have been down over the past few years, but we remain the safest investment in the world. A lot of that confidence would get shaken if we started imposing trade barriers.
(4) Trade is not an equal sum game. Say you have lemons and I have eggs. If we trade we can both make lemon meringue pie. That's a new gain for both of us. If we restrict trade, we only limit our choices. Compound that by thousands of products over hundreds of countries and $500 billion (even if it were real, which it is not) is a spit in the bucket compared to the economic value of expanded trade on our standard of living.
There are quite a few other reasons for supporting free trade, including the need for global competition for American companies, and the avoidance of trade wars. The bottom line is that trade barriers are an artificial constraint on the economy. They are worse than taxes in many respects, and should be avoided at all costs. Educated and responsible economists have known this for several decades and for the most part the political class should be lauded for standing up to the political pressure from special interests that seek to skew the game in their favor at the expense of America's standard of living.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.