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more on As It Tries to Cut Costs, Wall Street Looks to India
From: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2003 02:26:29 -0400
Delivered-To: dfarber+ () ux13 sp cs cmu edu Date: Thu, 09 Oct 2003 20:40:26 -0700 From: Thomas Leavitt <thomas () thomasleavitt org> Subject: RE: As It Tries to Cut Costs, Wall Street Looks to India To: dave () farber net Cc: Declan McCullagh <declan () well com> Dave, While I share some of Bob's concerns (it certainly doesn't thrill me to see systems administration jobs being shipped to India), I have to say that it is ironic of Bob, who has benefited by the choice of a Finnish company to "outsource" various chunks of its operations overseas, to criticize American companies for finding inexpensive but high quality talent in India. Does anyone really think that the Ivy League graduate whose potential job is taken by the $35,000 year Indian research analyst is going to suffer tremendously? The likely outcome of a significant number of new hires in India is wage inflation there... eventually, what we're going to get is wage equalization on a global scale - as we have to some extent today across Japan, North America, and Europe. It may not be all happy days for American workers in these sectors, but they're certainly not going to be reduced to penury. Unlike manufacturing workers paid 35 cents an hour, these folks in India have a heck of a lot of other options if they feel abused - including migrating to the U.S. or Europe, or setting up shop on their own - and the employers can't just up ship and relocate shop to a lower wage area when people start demanding wage increases (as is happening in Mexico, where workers paid $1.26/hour are being out competed by Chinese labor paid a quarter of that or less) - India is pretty unique in that it has the educational infrastructure and the widespread knowledge of the English language necessary to make this happen at all. We managed to absorb the entry into the labor marketplace of half the nation's populace (women) over the last fifty years without catastrophe for the incumbent labor force, I'm confident we'll be able to do this with India as well. And, ultimately, what we'll have is a that many more people capable of buying American products because they're being paid first world wages. I should also point out that people should get some perspective here - the fact that these folks are being paid $35,000 a year, already, says a lot about the likely ultimate outcome - while Ivy Leaguers may shudder at the prospect of working for $35k, a hell of a lot of Americans would be quite happen to be paid anything close to that. The companies in question have already implicitly realized that in a global marketplace, they've got to pay people a decent wage, or risk losing them to the competition. Regards, Thomas Leavitt From: Dave Farber <dave () farber net> Subject: Date: Wed, 08 Oct 2003 17:29:02 -0400 >From: Bob Hinden <hinden () iprg nokia com> > >Dave, > >Doesn't anyone understand that this doesn't scale. First it was the >manufacturing jobs, now it is the well paying knowledge based jobs. If >most of the good jobs are outsourced there won't be anyone here with the >money to buy the products and services that these companies >product. Everyone will loose. > >Henry Ford raised the wage he paid his workers to give more people enough >income to buy the cars he was producing. This outsourcing trend is just >the opposite. > >Bob -- Thomas Leavitt, Sr. Systems Admin For Hire Resume at http://www.thomasleavitt.org/personal/resume/ Phone: 408-591-3342 / Email: thomas () thomasleavitt org / Fax: 815-371-2804 Wired since 1981. Internet-enabled since 1990. Web-enabled since 1993. Older, wiser, and poorer, post-crash. :) Join the System/Database/Network Administrators Job Search Community: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sdnadminjobs/
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