A Passage to India Services to Follow Manufacturing Jobs Exodus

PHOENIX, July 22 - Remember the "giant sucking sound" of American jobs heading south? That's what the former presidential candidate Ross Perot said would happen if NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) were implemented.

The "south" Perot was talking about was Mexico. And NAFTA was (mostly) about manufacturing or "blue collar" jobs, which account for less than one-fifth of the U.S. payrolls.

Ten years later, however, American "white collar" workers face a far greater threat. It is a "giant sucking sound" of American services jobs heading south... all the way to India. Services (including software) account for nearly three-quarters of all American jobs

Services were thought to be the future engine of job creation back home. Yet they are now also on "A Passage to India" [title of the E.M. Forster's (1879-1970) book, written in 1924], according to a front page Business Day story in today's (July 22) New York Times.

Two IBM executives speaking to Big Blue employees around the world in a March 2003 teleconference said that "IBM needed to accelerate its efforts to move white-collar, often high-paying, jobs overseas even though that might create a backlash among politicians and its own employees," the Times reported.

During the call, the IBM executives said that three million service jobs were expected to shift to foreign workers by 2015, and that IBM should move some of its jobs now done in the United States, including software design jobs, to India and other countries, the Times reported.

Nor is IBM alone on the latest "Passage to India." Microsoft, Oracle, EDS, Accenture, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, Unisys, BearingPoint Inc... were also among the passengers, to mention only some leading IT vendors.

Oracle, for example, plans to increase its jobs in India to 6,000 from 3,200, while Microsoft plans to double the size of its software development operation in India to 500 by late this year. Accenture, a leading consulting firm, has 4,400 workers in India, China, Russia and the Philippines, the Times said.

Electronic Data Systems (EDS), for example, has predicted it will have 20,000 employees providing offshore IT services in various countries by the end of 2004, according to the Dow Jones report.

All in all, about 450,000 computer industry jobs could be transferred abroad in the next 12 years, representing eight percent of the nation's IT jobs (per Forrester Research, an independent market research firm).

What's the sudden attraction of India? Christopher Columbus set sails for it six centuries ago "only" to discover a new continent - America. Are the global IT providers also looking for some new heretofore undiscovered treasures?

No, it's not the riches of Taj Mahal, nor a splash in the holy Ganges river, nor many other of this country's resplendent cultural and tourist attractions. It's its cheap labor. And well educated.

"You can get crackerjack Java programmers in India right out of college for $5,000 a year versus $60,000 here," a Forrester analyst told the Dow Jones Newswire today (July 22).

Some IT firms are almost entirely based on the offshore model, the Dow Jones report noted. Wipro Ltd. and Infosys Technologies Ltd. are based in India and provide services to U.S. companies. Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp. is based in Teaneck, N.J., but has most operations in India.

As a result, employment in India's IT services and software industries jumped 24% to about 650,000 in March from a year earlier, according to Nasscom, an Indian trade group.

The offshore specialists have put pressure on the more established U.S. IT- services firms. Under competitive pressure to offer lower prices to clients, American firms say they've had little choice but to move some IT work offshore, the Dow Jones report said.

Of course, we've heard such arguments before, including two years ago, when China's entry into the WTO (World Trade Organization) was being discussed. And 10 years ago, when NAFTA was being debated.

It was November 1993. Perot and former vice president Al Gore were facing off in a nationally televised debate on the pros and cons of free trade. The Clinton administration, then it its first year, was eager to to please its globalist masters, and push through Congress its first major international trade legislation. And did.

NAFTA passed. Wall Street cheered. Main Street mourned. At least its non-stupefied citizens did who had not yet been anaesthetized by the globalist media.

Congress passed, too... on a chance to do something good for America for a change.

But there were some honorable exceptions. Senator Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, for example, was one of them. Although a Democrat, he voted against the Clinton administration on "free trade" issues. Hollings said that "free trade," beginning with GATT and NAFTA, equals foreign aid, according to the Senator's web site:

He (Hollings) contends that U.S. agreements have done nothing more than encourage American companies to relocate abroad and take the jobs with them. This has resulted in a drastic erosion of America's manufacturing capacity and, ultimately, the loss of hundreds of thousands of well-paying jobs for middle America.

South Carolina's textile communities have been especially hard hit, having lost nearly 60,000 textile jobs since the passage of NAFTA. Hollings argues for better enforcement of existing trade laws, improved efforts to leverage the lucrative U.S. market for more competitive agreements, and a longer-term vision for the U.S. economy, which includes a strong manufacturing sector and efforts to protect the American jobs.

Yet it was all "much ado about nothing." Or close to nothing. Unfortunately for Main Street America, even the well-meaning senators like Hollings have a blind spot. They equate American jobs with manufacturing jobs (emphasis added by Annex). Yet as we have been saying since a decade ago, more than 72% of American jobs had been already in the services sector (see Annex Bulletin 93-53, Nov 12, 1993):

Gore said that free trade would help increase the U.S. manufacturing base. That's sheer nonsense. The U.S. manufacturing jobs are headed the same way as were the agricultural ones more than a hundred years ago. It's a one-way trip into oblivion. No trade agreement will stop it anymore than the Luddites prevented the British industrialization by destroying some of its textile factory equipment between 1811 and 1816. It was an act of desperation, perhaps understandable considering the low level of computer penetration back then. But for the Clinton Administration to argue our manufacturing job losses can be reversed - with or without NAFTA - is either irresponsible or just plain stupid. Just consider the following statistics.

At the turn of the 19th century, the U.S. manufacturing and farm workers accounted for over 73% of the total U.S. job market. Today, they represent less than 22%. By the turn of the 20th century, their share is likely to dwindle into the single-digit range. And even the biggest and the most successful industrial corporations are no exception.

The FORTUNE 500 industrials' employment, for example, has been declining since 1979. Their share of all U.S. jobs has been dropping ever since 1969! The downsizing is actually accelerating in the 1990s. In other words, the loss of manufacturing jobs is an irreversible, technology-driven trend, just like the move from the farms to the cities was a hundred years ago. It's the "Third Wave," as Alvin Toffler put it in his 1980 book of the same title. Administrative deals such as NAFTA, from which multinational companies will benefit the most, can only affect the rate of decline, not the ultimate outcome. From Piece Work to Brain Work

Which brings up an interesting anachronism. As economic power incumbents, the leaders of multinational industrial companies still wield the greatest political influence in our society. Yet, that's like having had the farm heads preside over the industrial revolution! To be sure, many industrials are trying to transform themselves into service businesses, where most of the new wealth is being generated these days. Already 72% of all U.S. jobs are in service activities. And small and medium size companies are leading the growth.

But, transforming a manufacturing company into a service business, a task which Lou Gerstner at IBM is facing among other top executives, is no smaller a challenge than was to have remade "Elmer the Farmer" into a "City Slicker." A century ago, progress was made by turning farm labor into piece work. Today, the challenge is converting piece work into brain work.

The industrials who are prepared to act like an amoebae, splitting themselves up into many smaller business units, each catering to a particular group of customers in a discreet market, have a chance of making it. Those who don't, will probably have to look for their reserved plots in the "Jurassic Park" of the 21 century.

Of course, shifting work around the world is not a new phenomenon. Multinational companies have been doing it for decades. Nor is the latest trend a guarantee that India will remain a programmer's Mecca forever.

Hungary and Israel, for example, used to be the "India's of the 1980s." Remember the "goulash communism," a term coined for Hungary's newfound "capitalism," while this country was still under the Soviet yoke?

As the once cheap labor force got richer, however, the Hungarian and Israeli programmers, among others, discovered that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence - in the West. So many skilled software developers upped and left their home countries in pursuit of higher salaries in America and Western Europe.

But while "free trade" assumes unrestricted movement of money and goods around the world, there is no such thing when it comes to "free labor movement." Most countries have more or less restrictive immigration laws, designed to protect the interests of their indigenous work force.

Up to a point, of course. For, lowering the domestic labor costs can be just as attractive to employers as is exporting jobs overseas, if not more so. Enter immigration.

Even if that Hungarian, Israeli or Russian programmer does not get an American or a Western European IT job on the first try, he/she will help lower the wages in those markets by merely competing for it. Which is why we have seen an unprecedented explosion of immigration from third world countries in the last several decades.

Meanwhile, let us hope that the sometimes volatile Indian political landscape, including occasional nuclear saber-rattling between Pakistan and the world's largest democracy, remains stable long enough for the western IT companies to cash in on their plans. Otherwise, the latest "Passage to India" passengers may end up like some on the "Ship of Fools" J [by Katharine Anne Porter (1890-1980), first published in 1962].

IBM, for one, should remember what happened with its investments in the former Soviet Union during a thaw in East-West relations in the 1970s, when the former IBM CEO (Tom Watson, Jr.) was the American ambassador to Moscow. (The money went down the drain after the USSR invaded Afghanistan in late 1979). Or perhaps that's a page from history the Big Blue would rather forget?

A Reader Mourns An American Programmer Who Lost His Job -And Took His Life
FROM: Gene Nelson him]

On May 13, The Contra Costa Times reported on an event that should trouble us all-the suicide of Kevin Flanagan, 41. ("Job losses sap morale of workers," by Ellen Lee - elee@cctimes.com) Kevin was not a drug addict, a convict, or a ne'er-do-well; he was a trained computer programmer with years of experience whose job was sent overseas. The Contra Costa Times story reports that "led by the information-technology industry, 3.3 million service jobs and $136 billion in wages will move from the United States to such countries as India and Russia over the next decade or so."

At the same time, the federal government is cooperating with hugely-profitable computer companies to relax H-1b visa restrictions, so thousands more programmers from India, Pakistan, and other impoverished countries can pour into the U.S.-to compete with American programmers like Kevin. In 2002, Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman characterized H-1B visas as a "government subsidy program."

A month ago, Kevin Flanagan found out that he'd be losing his job at the Bank of America's Concord Technology Center. That same day, he took his life-in the parking lot of his former employer.

It wasn't that Flanagan was surprised to lose his job-he'd seen it coming for months, as his father told the paper. Flanagan had watched as veteran co-workers were forced to train newcomers from India-then fired and replaced by the immigrants. One former employee told the CC Times that employees at Concord feel like they're "on death row. Every day you think, 'Is this the day I'm gone?' he said."

Typically, the Contra Costa Times story did not draw the connection between the loss of high-tech jobs and immigration. But one of the story's sources did; Peter Bennett, a refugee from the technology consulting industry, who founded a group called NoMoreH1B.com. On its site, Bennett estimates that "approximately 800,000 highly-skilled U.S. workers are now unemployed as a direct result of Congress' H-1B visa legislation."

The story also gave the impression that the Bank of America was shifting jobs overseas and hiring immigrants to preserve its competitiveness. But the numbers tell a different story-that of a prosperous bank which has let greed trump any sense of patriotism or social responsibility.

The Bank of America (Chairman and CEO Kenneth D. Lewis) is a public company. According to its most recent report to Securities and Exchange Commission (10-Q), the company's first quarter revenues this year were $8.85 billion-up $0.3 billion from the same quarter last year. Data processing expenses consumed only 2.94 percent of revenue-hardly a drain on profits.

But that hasn't stopped Bank of America from using immigrants to undercut American workers. The U.S. Dept. of Labor H-1B website shows that in just two years, the company has imported about 200 technical professionals, mostly managers. Many received low pay for the work they perform-for instance, one "Securities Operations Analyst" who is paid only $38,100 annually.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, since most of the bank's newly imported employees are likely to be contractors who report to the imported managers.

How do I know this? I've read it in press releases from "outsourcing" firms, mostly based in India, with names like as Syntel, Cognizant, Tata (TCS), Exult, HCL Infosys, Wipro, and Satyam-all list Bank of America as a client. Between them, they employ thousands of Non Immigrant Visa (NIV) holders who don't appear in the above Federal tabulations.

In fact, many new Bank of America contractors fail to appear on California or Federal tax rolls at all, since they are paid by foreign firms with foreign currency via the L-1 program. (But they and their families use government services, so U.S. citizen taxpayers pay those bills.)

More than 17.2 million such visas have been granted since 1985. Nice work, if you can get it.

To learn more about the H1B program and how to fight it, see www.ZaZona.com and www.numbersusa.com.

[Gene Nelson is a U.S. citizen and a computer programmer, who has been seeking employment since 2001. His former employer still employs H1B immigrant. Nelson has testified before Congress on the H-1B program. His upcoming book is An American Scam - How Special Interests Undermine American Security with Endless "Techie" Gluts. E-mail him c0030180@airmail.net for a 22 - page special Congressional Summary.]

Regardless of who's actually responsible, Bush will take the blame for this. Here in NC, IBM is talking elminating 100's of IT jobs and sending them overseas.

I just came back from a trip to Asheville and the local paper had multiple articles each day about Pillowtex pretty much closing up shop and sending all manufacturing work overseas. The only thing amusing about it was John Edwards trying to explain his being pro- NAFTA (or letting China get Most Favored Nation status) as he couldn't foresee this happening. Yeah, its hard to see what's going to happen when you open up a foreign market with thousands of people working for 1/100th of yours do. Gee, they don't have money to buy our products? What a surprise.

Maybe Asheville is a model for the future of the US. You can't really outsource service jobs at a hotel unless you bring in H1b workers. But people paying $250 a night probably would like to speak to an American that speaks English, so maybe that leaves all the face time jobs for US citizens.

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