> As a senior tech writer with lots of seniority and making big bucks , I
> figure I'm first in line to be replaced by someone in India or China.
> Are they equally qualified? Not very likely; it took me two solid years
> to begin to do decent work and I'm pretty smart nerd-wise. But give that
> writer a few years and she will probably do fine work. She will most
> certainly be equally qualified.
[...]
> In the meantime, I'm supposed to get incensed and "do" something about
> my job disappearing. But in the face of everything I see, fighting for
> my job will do what? Stem the tide for another five minutes? I will
> humbly stand corrected if I am wrong, but what am I supposed to fight
> for? A kinder, gentler capitalism?
Tech writing and programming are probably easier to move offshore than network administration or systems administration. I know the situation is known to me very well, the infrastructure (capital) is NOT there in India, or wherever, would take a long time to get there and we'd have plenty of warning. How much capital does it take to sit down and program or write? Not much. But to repair a Cisco router or Sun Enterprise 6500, you're sitting in the midst of a lot of capital, and it is not going to be in India.
Of course, this is why we have 195,000 people coming into the US on an H1-B visa every year, so even these people's jobs aren't safe. Being for H1-B visas is ridiculous for any IT worker, progressive or not. They are underpaid. They can't vote. Among one million other things. The lobby that brought them in was the ITAA which is financed by the IT employers. Any IT worker who wouldn't want to fight this is a fool - if someone's for it, what does that mean, they want people to come into the country who can be sent back to India witht heir family on the whim of their employer, to be underpaid, to be unable to vote and so forth?
Stemming the tide for five minutes does little good. But stemming the tide for five years does a lot more. Fifty years even better - from what I understand the revo will happen in thirty-eight years so there will be nothing to worry about past that point.
I really don't understand this concept, especially from progressives, that a job is a fixed entity like a Picasso painting. Why does a job have to move? Capital is increasing all of the time, why not just move the new capital to India? Of course this is an economically naive way of putting it, but less so than the idea that jobs are a zero-sum game. I see no reason why workers should be let into the US except as citizens or people on green cards who have the option of becoming citizens at THEIR discretion.
IT work has mushroomed recently and in many ways it is a new profession, or at least a small profession that has become a large profession. There is very little in the way of IT worker organization. Some IT workers in government, aerospace and telecommunications are unionized, but a very small percentage of the overall industry. As far as professional associations like lawyers (ABA) and doctors (AMA) have - there really is nothing. IEEE-USA is a big joke - it's corporate sponsored for one thing. Outside of CWA efforts for unionization like WashTech, the only group of significance I've seen is the Programmer's Guild, and they are still a nascent effort. The employers are organized, the workers should be organized as well. If you think this is pointless, voting, political organizing, thinking about politics, or getting involved in society in any manner is probably pointless as well.