If the current flood of articles and news items from mainstream publications - both trade and general audience - is any indicator, corporate elites have decided that significant numbers of so-called "knowledge worker" jobs will be permanently relocated to low-wage locales.
Although discussion of this topic has most often centered around IT workers, the targeted job categories are not limited to that field. Anyone in the US who works in front of a computer and pushes data points about, not just those whose jobs involve management or manipulation of the machines, can, it is apparently believed, be replaced by someone sitting in front of a computer in Bangalore, India or perhaps Moscow.
Good news, I suppose, for aspiring white collar workers in the favored nations but unpleasant for the Americans left wondering how they went from a lovely home in the burbs and an SUV to a cold water flat and a vintage Buick LeSabre.
This surely has some long term and important meaning that is hidden to all but the most perceptive at the moment. To the biz types, it means 'greater efficiency' and 'added value' for the customer. To economists in general, who, as usual, will remind us that the US has a 100 Ka-jillion dollar economy and is, therefore, still top dog and quite healthy, it will seem to be the merest of blips on an astronomically large radar screen.
To Marxists, it will mean that these discarded American workers will be forced to shrug off their false consciousness and realize that they're working class after all.
To Marxist economists, who always liked the few remaining steel and auto workers better anyway, it will grudgingly be acknowledged as a problem but in their secret hearts, there will be a bit of a smile that, at last, these arrogant "professionals" are feeling the heat.
Meanwhile, an interesting process of globalization - the spread and nation-specific tweaking of computer culture - is underway.
Two Examples Of the Media Frenzy
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REUTERS
One in 10 U.S. Tech Jobs May Move Overseas, Report Says Tue Jul 29, 7:20 PM ET
By Eric Auchard
NEW YORK (Reuters) - One out of 10 jobs in the U.S. computer services and software industry could shift to lower-cost emerging markets such as India or Russia by the end of 2004, a top computer consultancy said on Tuesday.
Gartner Inc., the world's biggest high-tech forecasting firm, said in a report entitled "U.S. Offshore Outsourcing: Structural Changes, Big Impact" that 500,000 of the 10.3 million U.S. technology jobs could move just in 2003 and 2004.
While professionals in the computer industry itself are likely to bear the brunt, the report predicts that one in 20 tech jobs in industry-at-large also could be moved overseas.
This is especially true in industries with high concentrations of knowledge workers such as banking, health care and insurance, the author of the survey said.
"Suddenly we have a profession -- computer programming -- that has to wake up and consider what value it really has to offer," Diane Morello, a Gartner vice president and research director who studies work force issues said in an interview.
"Offshore outsourcing" is the euphemism the computer industry uses to describe the transformation of software development, computer services and customer call-center work.
As a global economic recession has hit hard over the past two years, U.S. companies have embraced as never before a decades-old trend to hire educated workers overseas who can be employed for a fraction of the cost of U.S.-based programmers.
Just last week, software maker Siebel Systems Inc. (Nasdaq:SEBL - news) of San Mateo, California said it would cut 9 percent of its work force, or 490 jobs, and planned to move some operations overseas.
[...]
full at
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20030729/tc_nm/tech_jobs_dc_1
TIME MAGAZINE
Where the Good Jobs Are Going
Forget sweatshops. U.S. companies are now shifting high-wage work overseas, especially to India
By JYOTI THOTTAM
Little by little, Sab Maglione could feel his job slipping away. He worked for a large insurance firm in northern New Jersey, developing the software it uses to keep track of its agents. But in mid-2001, his employer introduced him to Tata Consultancy Services, India's largest software company. About 120 Tata employees were brought in to help on a platform-conversion project. Maglione, 44, trained and managed a five-person Tata team. When one of them was named manager, he started to worry. By the end of last year, 70% of the project had been shifted to India and nearly all 20 U.S. workers, including Maglione, were laid off.
Since then, Maglione has been able to find only temporary work in his field, taking a pay cut of nearly 30% from his former salary of $77,000. For a family and mortgage, he says, "that doesn't pay the bills." Worried about utility costs, he runs after his two children, 11 and 7, to turn off the lights. And he has considered a new career as a house painter. "It doesn't require that much skill, and I don't have to go to school for it," Maglione says. And houses, at least, can't be painted from overseas.
<snip>
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SOFTWARE PROGRAMMER U.S. $66,100 INDIA $10,000
Mechanical Engineer U.S. $55,600 INDIA $5,900
IT Manager U.S. $55,000 INDIA $8,500
Accountant U.S. $41,000 INDIA $5,000
Financial Operations U.S. $37,625 INDIA $5,500
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full at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101030804-471198,00.html
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