India: Work

Michele Hogge and Joe Daniels met me in main restaurant at the Taj West Inn. They looked at me and said, “A good night?” I shrugged my shoulders as I ate my breakfast. Soon enough it was off to work. The people that they already hired for the financial analyst position were there. Michele, Joe, and I walk into our, per say, classroom, everyone is at their desk. We do the introductions and I will be honest there is no way except for a couple that I will ever be able to pronounce their names, they just appreciated me trying. I asked before training started, “Does anyone know where Headquarters is located?” One student raises their hand, “United States,” I replied “Good, where in the United States?” Every student bobbled (which I will get to later) their head with no answer. I said “Ok, we are going to watch a video. It was a video I saw in Germany. A little rabbit calls into Tech Support where his computer isn’t working and the Indian employee is not helpful at all. Where the rabbit is very frustrated because he finds out while he is on the phone that the computer bought in the US was built in Malaysia and the tech support is in India because it’s cheaper…and the computer never gets fixed. The students were floored. As I turned on the lights I explained to the class this is how Americans already view you. I made clear in this training I will not only teach them what they need to know about this job, but American culture, and how to think without a script. They shook their heads in excitement. I said “Ok great, we are going to play a game separating the North half of America will be one team and the other team being the South half of America. I want you and your team to figure out the following:
• What states are considered the South and North
• And something that you found out on Google.com about the state
I go out for a cigarette. I see Ashlee out there also. There are many men that smoke there but women it is very rare. I walked up to her and asked how her day was and she told me how frustrated she was because of the power outages, the telephone lines not working correctly. She asked “Your day?” I said great, just showed my class a video why Americans hate them. She looked at me shocked. I said “Question for you why does everyone call you Bubbles?” She looks me and goes “Bubbles – who calls me that?” I said every client service manager, service delivery coordinator, and even the vice president, Bob Smith.” She replies, “Don’t know but I need to get back in there.”

I got back into the classroom and walked around. They were so eager to find more about America. I discussed with them baseball, soccer, football, foods that are very particular to that state or region. Then after the hour I separated the room and Michele and I explained the civil war and separated the team the South and the North. We had so much fun going back on their findings that security came down and asked us to keep it down.

So we got to work and opened the almighty training manual that a group that had no idea what they were doing put together. None if it made sense. Soon enough one would be teaching from and the next person was taking notes of what the group that made these manuals up needed to change.

I have to revert back to before I left for India to have you comprehend my mind set every day I worked there.
Journal Entry: July, 6th, 2006
It was very hard every day to wake up seeing more and more of my friends losing their jobs. I saw people who worked countless of hours, dedicating their lives to this corporation. As each group has been called on to conference calls, or into certain rooms, everyone know what is coming; either gone that day or gone within the next few months after the transition took place. Some have been told “Your replacements are on the way in from India, and to make sure that you welcome your replacements with open arms,” while others of us are heading overseas to train and do risk assessment. When you see the people training their replacements you recognize others whose lives are suddenly bettered are now exchanged for one whose life had taken unexpected turn for the worse.

But this story has been going on for years. Starting decades ago with low skilled manufacturing jobs in basic industries, followed be textiles, cars, semiconductors, and now services, the agility of the world’s economy has allowed us to reduce costs by moving production to wherever its least expensive. The benefits to our economy increased productivity, lower prices, and greater demand for American products are touted by corporate America as the only way to remain competitive.

Whether you believe such disruptions are ultimately good or bad, they're here, they're real, and they're happening at speeds and levels unforeseen just a few years ago. In December 2003, IBM decided to move the jobs of nearly 5,000 programmers to India and China. GE has moved much of its research and development overseas. Microsoft, Dell, American Express, and virtually every major multinational from Accenture to Yahoo has already off shored work or is considering doing so, with 40% of the Fortune 500 companies expected to have done so by the end of this year, according to the multiple research firms. The savings are dramatic: Companies can cut 20% to 70% of their labor costs by moving jobs to low-wage nations--assuming that the work is of comparable quality.

Equally dramatic are the displacement, downward mobility, and suffering of the people left behind. So far, at least, that enhanced productivity hasn't translated into jobs at home. Off-shoring is steadily eating its way into the educated classes, both in the United States and elsewhere, affecting jobs traditionally considered secure. People whose livelihoods could now be at risk include everyone from IT experts to accountants, medical field to customer-service representatives. In IT alone, Gartner estimates that another 500,000 positions in the U.S. may leave by the end of this year (2006); in one scenario, as many as 25% of all IT professional jobs could go overseas by 2008. If just 40% of those people never find another job in their field, which could be more than 1 million whose careers are altered forever.

The implications of this colossal transformation are only just beginning to be understood. This time around, these categories cover a much greater share of our economy; manufacturing accounts for just 14% of US jobs, while services provide 60% and employ two-thirds of all workers. It's happening much faster, than in manufacturing; there is fewer capital investments required in outsourcing a services job.

Wait a second. Wasn't it this transition to a service economy that was supposed to give us a lasting edge over our global competition? And weren't technology jobs supposed to offer a secure refuge to other displaced workers? So far, things haven't worked out that way. There are now millions of trained and educated people abroad who can do many of our jobs at a fraction of the price. And this upheaval has many people worried. Industrialization happened and people moved from farms to factories. In this round of globalization, people aren't moving to anything. Skills do not grant ones immunity anymore. Some argue that the shift will free resources for the innovations that will create the next big boom; others see it as an admission that our competitive advantage is gone. It’s more than just outsourcing IT or anyone's job; we're outsourcing the American middle class.

It's no surprise, then, that off-shoring is suddenly one of the hottest topics around. Blogs and Web sites have sprung up to rail against evil corporate interests, and some antiforeigner groups have seized on this issue as a way to promote their beliefs. Off-shoring has reenergized an ugly strain of nativism in the United States, with anti-immigration groups using it to argue against work visas. Other groups, often company-sponsored, use the dirty word "protectionist" against opponents and the pandemonium grows louder every day.

Yet much of this discussion is beside the point. Off-shoring is here to stay, as long as the cost savings are for real, and there's little point in hand-wringing over whether it should or shouldn't take place. Equally useless--and disingenuous--are the bland, marginally empathetic statements of business leaders alluding to the "short-term pain" as if it were a stubbed toe or a nick from shaving. From reading some articles, a Microsoft person, for example, disputed one person's claim to have been off-shored, saying it was just "part of the ebb and flow of business."Drowned out in all the hype are the voices of those on the bleeding edge of the change--the real people caught in the crosswinds of this massive global shift. The macro outlook seems irrelevant when the goal is to pay the rent.

That's the challenge faced by the adults that are from sixty years old and above.
This age group, which has worked at corporations for years, is now seeing their jobs overseas, and a lot of them are not finding permanent work after the riff has happened. I mean really at the end of the day, if you are 60 years old who is going to hire them? They will have to make ends meet one day at a time. As one of my co-workers told me “Unisys, it was once a place once famous for treating its workers with loyalty and respect and for fostering lifelong careers--makes the human impact all the more poignant.” It's easy to argue that people should have seen it coming and ought to have constantly upgraded their skills. But as off-shoring eats away at ever more sophisticated jobs, is it safe to assume that there is a skill level or point in the food chain at which jobs can no longer be outsourced? No one's immune, not the lower class, not the middle class, and nowadays not even the higher class.

Everyone in every class of this country has been wondering are we next?"
Job insecurity, of course, is hardly limited to victims of off-shoring.And there is less sympathy for well-educated IT workers, many of whom benefited from a dramatic run-up in salaries during the bubble. The cost of technology inside the U.S. and the salaries along with it are outrageous. Companies are paying people that were in California close to 150k and off shoring these jobs and only paying the employee 65k, and that employee is smiling ear to ear. To corporations people are really a dime a dozen now a days.

With that kind of pressure, even those who keep their jobs are feeling the squeeze. Everyone is out bidding the next competitor; everyone is looking for the lowest price. There's no way to stay competitive, no matter how hard you work, when you can get 8 to 16 heads for the price of one.

So is there any such thing as a safe refuge? There are some that have been lucky to have found some government help. While the Trade Adjustment Assistance Reform Act of 2002 provides federal aid for those whose jobs have moved overseas, it is aimed at manufacturing jobs; most software developers and other white-collar workers aren't eligible. In January, a group of former IBM programmers filed a class action suit against the U.S. government to change that, and they are too now eligible to apply for this act.
For many multinationals, in fact, off-shoring can be a public-relations nightmare at both ends of the pipeline. They fear being associated with the loss of U.S. jobs, of course--but they also worry about offending huge markets if they pull back from employing workers in places such as India, China, and Indonesia. Dell, for example, has tried hard to downplay its decision to bring back some of its call-center operations to the United States from India after criticism about the service quality. The irony is that off-shoring is not an American-only concern. In manufacturing, the jobs have trampoline from country to country. In a world where people are treated as any other factor of production, scape-goating one country is pointless.

Already, jobs that just five years ago companies went to Ireland are now in India; as wages rise there, new, cheaper sources of well-trained workers are springing up in such places as the Philippines and, of course, China. People in India, of course they're happy, they're getting more money. But when companies pull out and say, Thank you so much but we found someone cheaper, will they be feeling like we do? Where will it all end? Some people believe that population trends make the whole debate a waste of time. Even if the worst-case scenario for off-shoring comes true, they say, the departure of boomers from the workforce will create a demographic earthquake so severe that filling, not finding, jobs will pose the biggest challenge.

But other observers see a bleaker prospect ahead. "As centers of skilled high-tech professionals build up in other parts of the world, the U.S . . . . may no longer dominate the next wave of innovations. Or perhaps it doesn't matter. Anyone who is looking at this current debate isn't looking down the road far enough. The future is a computer sitting in a dark room spitting out money. It won't involve any people, because, computers, are way more repetitive, reliable, and much lower cost than any human. We've had throwaway clothes, throwaway cars, and now we have throwaway people. Is that what globalization was supposed to be all about?

Off-shoring jobs are now an old story in the manufacturing sector. Now, service jobs once considered safe are being shipped overseas. Lawyers, accountants, journalists, engineers, take heed. Any knowledge-worker job is at some risk.

At the end of the day, as I go on my travels to India, I think about all of the above things, but the train has left the station and there is no turning back. All we can do is realize where we are, what we can do, and go from there. I am in hopes with this transition to India, that I can perform the correct risk assessment, to ensure that the jobs that remain will be as successful in the future.