[RockyMtnMan]

It appears the government of India is conspiring with American corporations to lobby our legislatures. This looks to be the action plan for taking away our jobs to enhance the Indian economy.

"The ITES/BPO industry has great potential to transform India into a global power by reducing unemployment thereby raising the overall standard of living of the masses. Undoubtedly, a joint industry-government partnership is essential to attain this."

I had to reformat the document from PDF so there might be some quirks, but it is word for word. The link is a PDF so make sure you have acrobat.

[L`enn]

Csnnot blame India for doing so. It is in their interests. The onus is on the traitorous US corporations for their role in this farce. BTW how come since all these brilliant MBA CEO's started shipping jobs overseas has the economy went in the sinkhole? Any correlation? Like to see what these "brilliant" strategist can spin to 'splain that away.

[big bad easter bunny]

We wouldn't want to help over a billion people find thier way into the high tech world. Why they might become consumers instead of well educated people with no way out. Lets bring back the cotton gin, think of all the new jobs we could create in the south.

[sinkspur]

From the editor of INFORMATION WEEK:

Business Technology: Let's Remake Future, Not Relive The Past April 7, 2003

By Bob Evans

I grew up in a small industrial city in western Pennsylvania some 40 years ago. Many thousands of men and some women worked in the plants and factories there that churned out rolled steel, pipe, tubing, transformers, specialty copper, and more. At the end of the high-school year, my older brothers could walk down to the mills and get high-paying jobs for the summer. The local radio station had a program around 3:30 every afternoon called "The Factory Whistle" that more than 10,000 workers listened to on their drives home. Grocery stores restocked their shelves on Friday mornings because paychecks arrived home Friday afternoons. The pervasiveness of those jobs and their interrelationships with the lives of everyone in the surrounding community--the interwoven fabric created by those steady, essential, vital jobs--was something we took as normal, natural, and unchanging.

And then those jobs began to disappear--slowly at first, and then with a suddenness that in hindsight is hard to imagine. From just that one small city, 15,000 jobs disappeared. Forever. In some cases, the work moved to specialty mills or to lower-cost foreign producers; in others, the demand for the types of steel and other products that those plants were superb at making suddenly changed, and the mills were hopelessly unable to adapt and evolve as quickly as the markets they served. We had perfected our past but were woefully unprepared to create our future.

In that context, what I'm about to say could well anger and perhaps even alienate some people very near and dear to InformationWeek, but it needs to be said because it is the truth. For a variety of reasons, many parts of the IT industry--and along with them, tens of thousands of jobs--as we have known them are disappearing, and they will not return. Lots of work in applications development, programming, call centers, integration, operations, and other jobs requiring skilled technologists are leaving or have left this country, and they're never coming back. What, then, is to be done?

Well, we can seek regulatory relief or legislative intervention or tariff strategies or lawsuits, but they're all a waste of time. Because buyers will seek the highest quality at the lowest price, and some producers in other countries have clearly demonstrated that for some projects, they can match the quality of our software and services while also beating us--badly--on price. Not surprisingly, the global market is rewarding those other countries for that.

So no, this challenge isn't about legislation or taxation or regulation--it's about innovation and forward thinking and the courage to change. Not just knee-jerk change in reaction to what someone else is doing and that is patterned after the past but, rather, forward-looking change that helps to create the future in which companies are truly connected in real time with their customers through the power of new types of software that today are merely prototypes, in which business-technology workers become businesspeople with indispensable technical prowess, in which IT professionals judge themselves not by technical certifications but rather by how relevant and valuable they make themselves--constantly--for their employers and customers, in which business technologists make possible today what couldn't be done yesterday, and in which CEOs and CIOs aggressively lead the transformation of their phenomenal business-technology organizations from keepers of the old central flame to lighters of new fires of revenue opportunity, market insight, industry knowledge, customer value, and optimized business processes.

We cannot recapture the past, but we can surely make the future. And the time to start is now.

[sweetjane]

Here is another strategy for them:

They should use their resources to bring India from third- world to industrialized country as fast as they can. That way India can generate its own demand for these services.

I know a small company (owned by a family member) that uses Indian programmers. They have since 1998. In one of my many debates with this family member, I tried to explain that it was just another form of imperialism. He's a big-time lefty and I thought he'd get the imperialism thing. But he didn't get it at all.

[LibertyAndJusticeForAll]

Outsourcing ping!

[sandpit]

I work for one of the nation's largest companies. In dealing with systems admins, programmers, etc, I see that almost all of them have names like Muhammed, Chin, Vasaprinatathong (or some other tongue twister name).
Now maybe some of them are good ol' red-blooded American citizens, but I doubt it.
I am a helpdesk contractor. My pay was cut 8% last year, after going on 3 years, I'm still getting only 5 days of vacation, no sick days, no raises, and they just cancelled our health insurance (guess it was too expensive). I stay because the job is very easy and I don't mind working the graveyard shift. If they could find some sort of instant language translation machine, we will probably be replaced by foreigners, too.

[SteveH]

The old paradigm consists of what we today regard as conventional governments at the national level.

The new paradigm is "The Company" in the movie "Alien."

Under global free trade, corporations dominate conventional governments.

Following this train of thought, it explains why individual freedoms in the US will undergo increasing attacks in the name of "reducing costs."

In the new paradigm, there will not be countries as we recognize them today. There will only be classes.

Large corporations will dictate public policy on a global level. "Harmonization" will continue to occur under global free trade, the corporate Nirvana. Jobs will continue to be "displaced."

Next we will learn, or be told, that in order to remain competitive, we will need to sacrifice benefits gained in the previous century regarding workplace safety, retirement, privacy, environment, and individual freedoms.

To the extent that the US Constitution is antithetical to international corporations, it will be modified or interpreted away (BTW, with the active help of Democrats and Republicans alike... I believe the trend was well underway by the time of FDR).

To the extent that individualism is doomed via international corporate dictates, socialism will prevail.

That which makes the US unique in the world today will be "harmonized."

Want to see the US of tomorrow? --- if current trends continue, it is the Bombay or Shanghai of today.

The only class that will survive in its current form is the investor class.

For the rest of us (those who don't attempt to assert their individuality in some way or another and become headline news), it's "will you be having fries with that today?"

[eniapmot]

There is nothing that can stop this. It is not just that the foreigners are cheaper. Based on what I have seen coming out of CS depts in this country, it will soon be the case that only foreigners will be able to do the work. Already it is well-known that IIT in Madras is more difficult to get into than MIT.

[Paul Ross]

Strategy #8: Make a case under various WTO agreements that these bills will act as trade barriers and not allow a fair movement of services. However, the opinion of BPO Steering Committee members and survey responses indicate this option should be used only as a secondary measure.

Note they are now contending how our GOVERNMENTS spends their tax-payer money is a 'trade barrier'. They don't seem to mind that there will be no tax-payers footing the bills for these jobs if we don't protect jobs.

[Paul Ross]

Strategy #8: Make a case under various WTO agreements that these bills will act as trade barriers and not allow a fair movement of services. However, the opinion of BPO Steering Committee members and survey responses indicate this option should be used only as a secondary measure.

Note they are now contending how our GOVERNMENTS spends their tax-payer money is a 'trade barrier'. They don't seem to mind that there will be no tax-payers footing the bills for these jobs if we don't protect jobs.