[lbo-talk] offshoring vs technical visas, was: IT, Other White Collar Jobs FloatingTo Cheaper Locales

Dwayne Monroe idoru345 at yahoo.com
Wed Jul 2 10:03:43 PDT 2003


Ulhas wrote:

India's market share is a tiny fraction of global market. Even if Indian software industry continues to grow at current rates (annual growth of 25%), exports would be $40-50 bn by 2010, still a small share of global market.

I don't understand why there is this scare about job losses in the US.

********************

"Scare" is not the right word. Insecurity, I think, more accurately describes the situation.

The numbers on India's share of the software market (services included) are of some interest but do not tell the story that actual workers are witnessing. Besides, "knowledge work" of various sorts (financial analysis, call center, programming, remote monitoring, etc) is being sent to places other than India.

China and the Philippines, to name two up-and-comers, are starting to make their mark.

If it was merely a scare, workers would be seated at their desks in their cubicles, staring at their flat screens while feeling a sense of dread of a problem they heard their sister's cousin's nephew's friend with a head wound discuss while drunk at a party. The key here is that these rattled workers would still be at their desks, employed, and the fear would be a hobby of sorts, like riding roller coasters.

But this is not the case. 3-D, flesh and blood workers are losing jobs and having a hell of a time finding new ones. When you learn that the Bank's e-this or i-that project was given to Wipro of Bangalore, India, and, when your colleagues have similar tales to tell you've left the world of idle scares and landed on Castaway Island.

The fear that no boat is coming to rescue you (and that your chances of building your own are very slight) is not a 'scare" it is, I would say, a realization.

As others have said, this has happened to other groups of workers and is nothing new. Ever and thus has it been since the maturation of capitalism. So, we displaced IT types can claim no special status in the annals of discarded persons.

But the concern is not motivated by phantoms. The losses are real and perhaps permanent.

Being scared seems appropriate I'd say.

D.

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