"The question today is whether the case for free trade made two centuries ago is undermined by the changes now evident in the modern global economy.

Two recent examples illustrate this concern. Over the next three years, a major New York securities firm plans to replace its team of 800 American software engineers, who each earns about $150,000 per year, with an equally competent team in India earning an average of only $20,000. Second, within five years the number of radiologists in this country is expected to decline significantly because M.R.I. data can be sent over the Internet to Asian radiologists capable of diagnosing the problem at a small fraction of the cost.""

http://nytimes.com/2004/01/06/opinion/06SCHU.html

"In fact, companies in a number of unexpected industries are now sending work overseas. From scientific lab analysis to medical billing, the service-sector workforce has gone global.

CPA firms are just one example. In the 2002 tax year, accounting firms sent some 25,000 tax returns to be completed by accountants in India. This year, that number is expected to quadruple.

The reason lies in the numbers; accountants in the United States typically earn $4,000 a month. In places like India it's closer to $400, says David Wyle, CEO and founder of SurePrep, a tax-outsourcing firm based in southern California that's employed more than 200 accountants in Bombay and Ahmedabad, India."

http://makeashorterlink.com/?U3C226AF6

"Morgan Stanley's chief economist, Stephen Roach, has coined the phrase "labour arbitrage" to describe what's going on.

Another way of saying that is that white-collar workers in North America and in Britain (so far it's almost entirely an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon) have been turned into pawns to be moved about to suit the convenience — the profits — of corporate kings and queens.

These pawns, though, are made of flesh and blood rather than of plastic or wood. So expect them to fight back."

Though there are educated French-speaking professionals in poor countries, there are few (except perhaps in North Africa) with adequate infrastructures. And I can't think of any in the case of German speakers.

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Good. They can feel the bite now, too.
What has your Republican Party done for you lately, rich boys?

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Call centre operators, computer programmers, radiologists, and more. Republican voting rich boys all! Sheesh.

As for admin assistants, call centre operators, and low-paying office work - I wouldn't call that "white collar" jobs. In fact, I don't know if it's in vogue to call them this now, but they used to be known as "pink collar" jobs, because it was low-paid office work mostly dominated by women.

And we've been seeing our jobs go downhill for years. The big news here is that the high-paying jobs, the ones where folks are earning in the six-digits and higher five-digits for salaries, such as engineers and technologists - THEY'RE the new ones to be feeling the bite.

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Yeah, you'd be surprised at how many people on technology message boards can still say "take it like a man!" even though they themselves have been outsourced.

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I think it's too early to say what the overall effect of offshore outsourcing will be on the wealthy countries. Jobs aren't being lost on a one-for-one basis. Our development center in Kiev has allowed us to increase staffing in N.A. because we can provide services to our customers we otherwise could not afford to and are obtaining more business as a result. Increased employment and incomes in places like Ukraine will create opportunities for N.A. exporters. What the effect on overall employment and incomes will be I can't say, but I think it's safe to say we're in for some big changes.

U.S. business students find opportunity is global (Boston Globe 11.4.2003)

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HANOVER, N.H. -- From where Diane Noyes is sitting, in a modest college cafe near the campus of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, outsourcing is not a threat.

She's thought about it, studied it as a member of Tuck's class of 2004, but instead sees the business trend that is sending thousands of American jobs overseas as a mixture of opportunity and necessity, both for her and the US economy.

"Outsourcing may actually work to the advantage of American-trained business students," Noyes, 29, said. "Management is something that developing nations will probably outsource to us."

Bart Cornelissen, a fellow member of Tuck's class of 2004, agreed. "If you look at it from just a US perspective, or a regional perspective, outsourcing can be daunting," he said. "But from our perspective, it's more like a shifting that moves in both directions.

"There's actually a lot of opportunity hidden in there," he said.

As American companies embrace the outsourcing of jobs and operations, causing widespread concern among employees and suppliers, one group is resolutely focused on the flip side of the trend: business school students and their professors. They are eagerly exploring the "hidden opportunities" that may exist in the midst of this global economic upheaval. And the way these students are thinking about outsourcing, as they start their careers in business, could foreshadow the long-term consequences of this restructuring of the American work force, and an indication of who is likely to win and lose as more jobs and functions move to developing countries.

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The managerial class, and its future members-in-training currently studying at ivy league business schools, benefit from global "labour arbitrage" because they get to be the arbitrageurs.

Tech workers, by contrast, while highly paid, still ultimately fulfil the position of 'laborer' rather than 'manager' in the production process. Their high wages were a premium on the scarcity of their skill, and as soon as possible, the managers find a way to ameliorate that scarcity and ratchet down the tech workers' wages to the level that the rest of the peons have to scrape by at.

While both tech workers and elite managers may have historically leaned 'right' or voted Republican, they did so for different reasons. For the tech workers it was because of a false consciousness evoked by their temporarily elevated incomes (as well as, perhaps, exposure to a macho culture and Randian ideology prevalent in their fields). For the elite managers, political alignment with the neoliberal free-traders was, and continues to be, entirely rational and in accordance with their class-interest.

[ 07 January 2004: Message edited by: robbie_dee ]

Here's another economist's point of view

[Edited to change 'questions' to 'countries'. Don't ask me how I mixed up those words.]

[ 07 January 2004: Message edited by: Oliver Cromwell ]

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Was it a bad thing when call centres started to move to Moncton?

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The thing is that business seeks to maximize profits by lowering their labour costs without any concern whatsoever about the social dislocation it causes.

When dealing with the Canadian market, its necessary to have bilingual English/French call centres and the cheapest place to setup shop at present is New Brunswick.

The US and UK markets are for the most part "English-only" and so they can move call centre work to India or in some cases to the Caribbean.

If there's a low-wage English/French third world country with a communications infrastructure in place I'm sure we'll see the New Brunswick call centres move elsewhere.

If there were adequate labour adjustment policies in place such as severance pay, early retirements, adequate unemployment insurance compensation, access to income supported retraining opportunities and...future job prospects then I'm sure folks wouldn't worry too much about work being outsourced to the third world.

But...that ain't anywhere near the case. So yeah...folks are getting pissed off.

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I think there's a bit of Schadenfreude given that often the people being outsourced held onto aggressive anti-labour viewpoints and were not historically a fertile field for organizing, and held onto excessive optimism that bit them. I too am in that industry, but I am (hopefully) escaping the private sector.

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True. Folks who made say over $75,000 a year had
a tendency to "identify" themselves with Republicans or Conservatives because they figured that the system was serving them quite well...and why rock the boat?

But now that the system has thrown them on the scrap heap just like millions of assembly line workers they're beginning to realize that they're just like everybody else. All I can say is "welcome to the fight folks".

Lou Dobbs from CNN's "Moneyline" ... hardly a lefty did a whole series called "Exporting America" which dealt with the massive job loss going on in the U.S. ... including white collar job loss.

On one of the programmes I saw, he dealt with Sprint moving a call centre from Buffalo, NY to India with hundreds of job losses.

If you do a googlesearch on "Exporting America" you'll find some links to streaming video archives of some of the TV programmes.

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Yeah, take the case of TAs in universities. Who were the most likely to want to go on strike? Arts students. Who were the most likely to jeer at the arts students and proudly proclaim their intention to scab? CS students. Why should they care about those lifelong burger flippers?

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I think you and I might have read the same article, DTR.

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