Posted on 08/03/2003 7:42:08 AM PDT by RockyMtnMan
Michael Emmons thought he knew how to keep a job as a software programmer.
"You have to continue to keep yourself up to speed," he said. "If you don't, you'll get washed out."
Up to speed or not, Emmons wound up being "washed out" anyway. Last summer, he moved his family from California to Florida for the Siemens Co., makers of electronics and equipment for industries. Not long after, Emmons and 19 other programmers were replaced by cheaper foreign workers.
Adding insult to injury, Emmons and the others had to train their replacements.
"It was the most demoralizing thing I've ever been through," he told ABCNEWS. "After spending all this time in this industry and working to keep my skills up-to-date, I had to now teach foreign workers how to do my job so they could lay me off."
Just as millions of American manufacturing jobs were lost in the 1980s and 1990s, today white-collar American jobs are disappearing. Foreign nationals on special work visas are filling some positions but most jobs are simply contracted out overseas.
"The train has left the station, the cows have left the barn, the toothpaste is out of the tube," said John McCarthy, director of research at Forrester Research, who has studied the exodus of white-collar jobs overseas. "However you want to talk about it, you're not going to turn the tide on this in the same way we couldn't turn the tide on the manufacturing shift."
India Calling
Almost 500,000 white-collar American jobs have already found their way offshore, to the Philippines, Malaysia and China. Russia and Eastern Europe are expected to be next. But no country has captured more American jobs than India.
In Bangalore, India, reservation agents are booking flights for Delta; Indian accountants are preparing tax returns for Ernst & Young; and Indian software engineers are developing new products for Oracle.
They are all working at a fraction of the cost these companies would pay American workers.
For example, American computer programmers earn about $60,000, while their Indian counterparts only make $6,000.
"It's about cost savings," said Atul Vashistha, CEO of NeoIT, a California-based consulting company that advises American firms interested in "offshoring" jobs previously held by Americans. "They need to significantly reduce their cost of doing business and that's why they're coming to us right now."
Vivek Pal, an Indian contractor for technology consulting group Wipro, whose clients include Microsoft, GE, JP Morgan Chase, and Best Buy, is hiring 2,000 Indian workers quarterly to keep up with demand. Pal knows American workers resent the "offshoring" trend but says all Americans will benefit in the long run.
"Globalization — whether it's for products or services — may feel like it hurts, but at the end of the day, it creates economic value all around," said Pal.
At the end of the day, Emmons has a different view: "If you sit at a desk, beware," he said. "Your job is going overseas."
Another question: Do you have the mistaken impression that outsourcing only effects IT workers?
The offshore outsourcing trend has affected not only the high-tech (IT) sector, but is expanding in the financial services and telecommunications areas as well. American companies are hiring foreign workers at a fraction of American wage and benefit rates because it makes perfect, rational economic sense for them to do so in a globally competitive economy. What does NOT make sense, and what will (IMHO) ultimately result in a US financial crisis is that an increasing share of workers are paying no US taxes nor are they subsidizing the ever-expanding entitlement programs that Congress has mandated (SSI, Medicare, etc.) In turn, these same workers are not reinvesting their earnings in American goods and services, which means that future growth and job creation are being stunted. Meanwhile, our convoluted and literally insane tax code combined with bloated Federal spending is choking off opportunities for new American companies to produce new American jobs.
Even though the Democrats' likely prescription for all of this (more government/higher taxes) would surely be worse than the disease, many people will be receptive to politicians who seem to recognize problems rather than to those who seem to ignore them. Right now, the Republicans are ignoring them.
.....what will we be doing?
The most successful will be managing those businesses and be trying to find new and better things from the opprotunities that spring up and not lamenting their so-called salad days of going into work 9-5 at a desk job. Look I lived through this type of thing before when I was teen in the Pittsburgh area in the late 70's and early 80's when the steel mills shut down. The whiniest mill workers were all lamenting how the "Japs" had taken away their good paying jobs and how that they couldn't pilfer tools from the mill and make 30g pushing a broom, others moved on and prospered.
The area survived, because people found new opportunities, even with the incessant moaning of those who wistfully wished for a time that has passed.
This has happened all through recent human history. Maybe you should do a google search of the British Luddite movement.
There'll be no government intervention, except to limit the H1-Bs coming into the US.
It is possible, you know, for a business to completely offshore a particular function, thus taking it completely out of the country.
Competitiveness is the issue here: find lower-priced labor and costs and survive, or leave the function here and risk losing the entire business.
The danger of a socialist populist political movement to 'correct the social injustice' under those circumstances seems real enough, but how far in that direction can things go;
how can increasingly poor people be customers for the factory-owners products? Isn't it in the capitalists interest to have customers able to buy what's being produced?
Or are we tipping over into a 'tragedy of the commons' scenario with no one able to stop the destruction?
Is what's happening in the world economically the same thing happening in much of Africa physically: the exploitation of the weak by the strong?
I prefer using the supermarket self-checkouts because I get through much faster than if a gum-snapping teenager rang up my purchases. Also, they always seem to get stuck for one reason or another. Either the machine runs out of tape or they need to get a price-check. Odd that I've never had this issue with the self-checkouts.
Speaking of supermarkets, my pet peeve is the baggers. Now I used to bag groceries at a supermarket when I was a teenager and I remember working quickly and efficiently and I was always done at just the time the cashier was ringing up the purchase. Now they are so freaking slow! Nine times out of 10, the cashier has to help with the bagging after ringing up the purchases because the witless bagger got backed up. When I bag my groceries at the self-checkout, I probably get it down in 1/3 the time. I am also not afraid to fill the bags to the top. So my groceries fit in five or six paper bags intead of a dozen and a half plastic bags - another pet peeve of mine. Plastic grocery bags suck! And it really annoys me when the bagger bleats "Paper or plastic" and gets visibly annoyed when I say paper.
Somebody help this WC geinus develop a less annoying analogous summary statement. What a pencil-necked, geeky thing to say! The Fred Blassie award goes to this loser, for sure.
Okay, you've accounted for about 2% of the workforce.
What about the other 98%?
You seem to think America can be a nation of CEO's.
Look I lived through this type of thing before when I was teen in the Pittsburgh area in the late 70's and early 80's when the steel mills shut down.
Leaving aside for a second that I simply do not believe you were alive in the 1970's and early 1980's, this differs greatly from the loss of blue collar jobs then. See, at that time we were told that we'd be able to get white collar jobs, even the lesser-skilled people.
Now there is nothing to fall back upon, except maybe pink collar jobs, since we will not be able to afford shirts.
So do I. Zip right in and out. I don't think that I have had to wait in line once to use the self-serve check out line.
As allways anyone who wants on or off this ping list let me know.
Something else.
As pointed out on another thread the supermarket has not outsourced they have invested in productivity here in the USA. The key is to make the investment in american workers productivity more likely. Tariffs are one of the means of achieving that goal. Tariffs are Constitutional and should be so used. This was also pointed out on another thread which you did not answer.
Nope but it can be a nation of small businessmen and women. People who see opportunities and are willing to work to prosper for themselves.
OH BTW, small businesses employ the majority of people in the US.
Leaving aside for a second that I simply do not believe you were alive in the 1970's and early 1980's, this differs greatly from the loss of blue collar jobs then. See, at that time we were told that we'd be able to get white collar jobs, even the lesser-skilled people.
Looking at your first sentence of the above italicized passage, I would reccommend that you don't enter stand up comedy. Second, it is the same mentality of the steel workers who got caught up in the explosive change that went through the US manufacturing sector in the late 70's and early 80's.
Some whined incessantly, the vast majority moved on and prospered in other areas.
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