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."
Fair enough...actually, this hits home: .. not too long ago, I, too, was a Free Trader.
It took this new offshoring phenomenon and the good arguments of fellow freepers -
- plus a little research -- to finally understand that I might have been wrong all along.
I've been going through this myself on the free trade issue. I'm about convinced that if the free
trading is not between reasonably equivalent economies, then someone is going to get screwed.
If it is profit you seek, start a new career where you do what you like, and can make plenty of coin doing it.
Right now, all you're doing is wasting time making excuses for people who don't need excuses in order to succeed and a string of incoherent arguments from a decidedly weak position.
If the heat's too hot you might want to write another swan song like you did a few weeks ago, swearing off FR again for a time, just so you can do some thinking before the next time you try to post something.
Surely this is 'exageration for the sake of emphasis'. Certainly not all jobs will be gone. The point seems to be though,
that more and more of the jobs not requiring some high level of creativity or some other special talent are going.
The music is stopping, and there are fewer and fewer chairs. And many who have chairs
are being forced out of them. What happens when the Total Available Chairs number is
15% less than the workforce? 20%, 25%..?
Again, a lot of jobs (plumber, electrician, all the trades, retail clerk, food service, etc) can not
go offshore. But will that kind of job maintain a world-leading economy?
Well, there was that whole marriage mistake, but yeah, besides that.... :o)
But do you really think that all jobs will be gone in 15 years?!
I exaggerated to make a point. There is a possibility that if we relentlessly automate and send jobs to the cheapest, slave-based labor nations that we could end up there.
Look, IT has just gone through a boom and a bust. It was over-hyped in the beginning, and it's being pessimistically oversold in the present.
Well, I cannot disagree with both assessments. They predict a 10% outsourcing level by 2010. If that is true, then we'll still have a net-increase in IT jobs, just some siphoning off of some of them. However, don't tell the kids at school -- I like that they are fleeing IT in droves! ;^)
And while it is true that menial, repetitive jobs (be they in IT or in most anything else) **are** going to be mechanized and automated away, that's not cause for doom and gloom in my book.
We automated and mechanized farming, if you'll remember, and now we produce better food, safer, in larger numbers, at less cost, and with fewer people than ever before.
Yes. But I question the wisdom of automating and outsourcing EVERYthing. People need to earn a living, because without this economic mechanism, the only alternative to distribution of goods and services is communism. And we sure as s**t don't want THAT.
Certainly banning the automation of farming would have been a net negative for America 20 years down the road (picture 1930 to 1950).
I'm not advocating the banning of technology, or even offshoring. I'm advocating a return to tariffing said offshoring, which is in the rich tradition of America for the last 200 years -- and has, in part, made America the strongest economic powerhouse in the world.
In fact, the foreign IT competition will force state, local, and perhaps even the federal government to reconsider their ponderous, onerous anti-business legislation (descrimination laws, anti-right to work union laws, pension funding laws, tort reform to rein in out of control lawsuits, EPA regulations, OSHA nonsense, et al).
Not a chance in hell. I mean, maybe they will look at it, but there will never be a set of reforms like the ones you mention. Once government has adopted laws, special interest groups and trial lawyers, as well as Democrat scare tactics, make sure the law, tax, or benefit is never repealed. Do you know we STILL have a boll weevil subsidy on the books for farmers, which dates from the 1930's -- this, when the boll weevil threat has been almost eliminated?
The other side of the coin is that lots of so-called "high-tech" IT jobs were nothing of the sort. A code slinger putting together an order-entry web page ain't cutting edge, much less high tech. Ditto for system administrators installing software updates, checking for infections, and setting up new user accounts. It shouldn't really surprise anyone to see such jobs either being automated by robotic software and/or being outsourced to 3rd world grunts.
Some of the jobs were not very hightech at all, granted. I might debate you a little about the order entry page, but that is because I would expect a coder to put together something a little more sophisticated and innovative than one of those stupid Shopping Cart systems I see too much of.
But innovative software, that's another story. Look at the game and utility markets. Plenty of entrepreneurial efforts from the little guy make it into the American system, and those guys are being handsomely rewarded. Why aren't we seeing Indian and Chinese programmers come out with such games and comercial utilities?! But we certainly see the Americans doing it, and I don't see that trend stopping.
Well, I have to grudgingly concede that -- IT recession or not -- it took me about the same amount of time to land a job at nearly the same pay as the one in Birmingham (only this time, the client seems to have his s**t together -- grin). So perhaps the IT situation is not as dire as advertised, or perhaps I have the skills and innovative ability to compete, or maybe I just got lucky geographically. Things might be different for me were I to be situated in California or Washington state.
I do strongly believe that a little tariff activity on exportation of labor might be in order to slow the trend towards offshoring. We both know that tariffs won't reverse the trend, but slowing things down might give people a chance to figure out WTF they are going to do if most of the jobs go overseas!
I'm not as sanguine as you are about innovation being a solely American quality, as well, BTW. I expect that will change over time, and that -- if the rote jobs are gone, and if the manufacturing jobs are gone, and then if other nations begin beating us in innovation -- well then, we'll be in a world of feces.
OutSTANDING pun. Did you intend it, or was it unintentional?
Why wait that long! Dribble tapioca today! I do and it gets me all the chicks, baby.
So what is your conclusion?
You're wasting your breath trying to tell some folks to be responsible for their own lives. Some get it, some don't. Most are walking around, umbilical cord in hand, looking for a place to plug it in...
O, and they get very hostile when you invalidate their entire life experience...
ampu
The estate tax has been repealed.
The dividend double tax is gone in less than 4 months.
The income tax is now trivial ($45 per year for a family of four earning $40k/yr).
OSHA home office "ergonomic" regulations are now dead.
Clinton's CO2 regulations for electricity providers are now dead.
Surely you aren't claiming that laws and taxes never get repealed...
Laz bitter? You really are a clueless twit.
Better do it soon because the pubs want to make it hard as hell to do so.
Much as I hate to say it, Agamemnon does have a point, in that bellyaching here on FR does not solve the problem. What will solve the problem is a greater reliance on the American culture of entrepreneurship. More of us need to figure out ways to start new ventures and sell new products.
What created the Reagan recovery in the 1980's were all the new startups that were taking advantage of the capital gains tax cuts, and what we need right now is to work on getting the barriers to entrepreneurship removed: regulatory burdens, complex tax laws, EEOC requirements, and states that are hostile to small business interests
It's just that Agamemnon has a way of expressing this in a sufficiently obnoxious way that you're too busy wanting to punch him out to examine what he's saying. This is also why I'm wondering if Agamemnon is really running his own company -- he doesn't display the charm and tact that an independent businessman tends to need to make habitual in order to manage his clients and workers, and to get his pitch across.
And the burden of lawyers and litigation.
And the fact that total regualtion under Bush has increased is a good indicator that the structural excesses that you have so aptly enumerated have not been relieved, and therefore why I can believe little in sustained economic recovery.
Check the math again: Three machines and every customer!
BTW, I think the home-ergonomics OSHA reg was merely floated, and never had force of law, so you need to strike that one from the list.
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