One economic factor has not been working as predicted: American upper management is compensated at extraordinary rates, on the grounds that each company needs to do this to compete with other companies.
We don’t see English-speaking MBA equivalents from other countries being drawn in by this economic force. Why is this?
Contrary, a question, does your employer’s name start with S and end with T?
Not mentioned above- sending medical & legal transcriptions from US to ( mostly) Philippines, & India. I know of several firms of recent vintage now doing this. You need English speaking transribers who work cheap. The dictatation is sent via FTP & returned as an email attachment. It definitely does require 1st & 2nd drafts, but most US transcriptions do too.
MaryEfooYou wicked thing, you! Don’t you know that CEOs are simply not replaceable? They are sent down to us from heaven, that’s why we have to give them golden parachutes after they destroy the company and ruin so many, many lives.
A significant portion of our IT department went over there years ago. Then, a substantial amount of our engineering was relocated to India (to the John F. Welch Technology Center).
Now, a number of our engine components have been outsourced to India. I happened to notice your location and found it interesting because we refer to a lot of these parts as Poona - for example we get intercoolers from Poona, India and just call the Poona intercoolers for short.
When this first happened there was a reaction of getting lesser quality parts, so the work would be back eventually. Wrong. The quality is at least that of what we would get in the US, and at a lower cost.
Nobody really said much when IT went, people grumbled about the portion of engineering leaving, but now that parts of manufacturing are going the people I work with are starting to get concerned. I say starting to get concerned because we are ridiculously busy at the moment. Many manufacturing facilities are hurting, but we are running at record numbers - well above designed capacity of the facility. Hell, we realize we can’t get enough people in the place so something had to be outsourced - just hoping it comes back.
There is also the fact that we do very little business (selling our product) with India and this might give us a foot through the door. By the way gouda who is the major supplier of locomotives in India?
Overall, the people that have come over from India to get trained are very nice and very capable. Locally, there isn’t any resentment or anger directed towards them - they just want a good job like everyone else. But there will be hell to pay with upper management when work slows down if we don’t bring that work back.
And finally, we have rumors about payroll being shipped over to India. No offense, but that is not going to fly. I don’t want to have to call halfway around the world if my pay is screwed.
We moved much of it over, and moved much of it back already.
Time zone and language barriers. Also, we weren’t getting what we expected. Cycle time increased. All in all, it cost us less per hour, but we lost money in lost opportunity and that it didn’t cost as much less as we thought it would, as it took longer.
Have seen much the same with my husbands company. They still have a lot of it over there finishing out the big project they are working on, but I don’t know that they’d make the same choice next time.
MaryEFoo, it does indeed.
I am actively looking to leave this industry since I think any turn-around is years off (if it ever happens).
MaryEFoo, it does indeed.
I am actively looking to leave this industry since I think any turn-around is years off (if it ever happens) – and my job is not in danger of being outsourced.
Fortunately I have a good set of transferable skills, so now all I need is the right opportunity.
If I go to a walmart and pick up something at random, it will probably say ‘Made in China’ or ‘Made in Mexico’ or some such thing… very rarely is it ‘Made in USA’. Now that is a lot of jobs moved to places with absymal working conditions and wages and a true exploitation of poverty. The US economy survived this outflow of jobs didn’t it? It will survive the outsourcing wave also… IMHO.
If I go to WalMart, I’d be buggered to find out where it was really made. But it is true that despite their “made in America” campaign, they still more often seem to choose out-sourced made in other country goods (cite to be posted when I find it … it was from a bit I heard on NPR a couple years back).
As for things ‘improving’ over in India, while no doubt it is, it’s not going to keep going up … first off, there are only so many jobs that can be outsourced them (though I’m close to immune in my little corner of the tech world, I’m not completely irreplacable by any stretch) and there is fierce competition there as well … I was listening to MarketPlace (PRI) the other day when someone put up a piece about being called by a telemarketer … he struck up a conversation with the fellow, who was working in a call center in India … the best job he could find, stuck there with a computer science degree he couldn’t use (glut, no ability to get a visa to do computer work elsewhere … etc).
Where I’ve heard of India outsourcing that touches my family … one family member’s company laid off folks to move a call/processing center there, another was actually laid off a couple weeks after being offered a “contract” and starting to work … the “contract” bound him to the company but not the company to him, of course, and this is the second time they’d hired him and his mates to cover the call center until the India center could be brought online. Another family member has been at a company that had layoffs apparently unrelated to a later outsourcing of some work to India.
This is an interesting thread. My company is currently in negotiations with an Israeli based company and once again I find myself faced with the possibility of having to find work. Sorry if this is a hijack, but a little rant is in order.
Several years ago I was taking a class for my employer. This class was about paradigm shifts and how people are opposed to change (Ironically this class was pre-merger. A first of many for me.). Anyway they talked about how the public wouldn’t buy Swiss watches, and Japanese made electronic items, etc. because they simply were not ‘Made in America’. Granted most of this resentment occurred after periods of conflict, but eventually Americans did begin to flex their paradigm and that is why, as ravib pointed out, it is accepted that most of our products are made in foreign countries today. Funny thing is I would bet that most people do not even know or care anymore.
However these products are tangible goods. Yes labor cost is cheaper in other areas and so is the cost of materials in some cases. But with IT or intellectual property, IMHO there is or should be a difference. Being in the IT industry for 20 years I have seen a lot of change (As I am sure most of you have.) and I never would have thought that this business would have been outsourced. (Dummy me!) I started in the business on the hardware side, as a service technician, and moved into programming. Today it looks like the best place to be is back in the service/repair side of things. As more and more companies begin to outsource their programming to other countries it does not leave a lot of hope for American programmers to maintain steady employment. Almost every industry is either outsourcing or considering it in some form or another. Even the government has outsourced areas.
In some cases they say it is due to education levels. Perhaps that is the case, but I wonder if America were to have some of the same education programs would we be in a better place. How many people come into this country for college, paid for buy their respective government? Only to then be hired and replace an American worker. How many people come into this country earn an education and return to their homeland to use that education? Eventually taking jobs by outsourcing.
In the 80’s you couldn’t hire enough people. In the 90’s, the decade of mergers and acquisitions, employees found themselves looking for employment in the shuffles (I went through 5 of these mergers). This left a lot of people either changing careers or competing in a saturated market. Today with outsourcing IT workers are once again faced with unemployment and competing in an already saturated market.
I noticed in several posts that economic factors are discussed. My question is what are these businesses going to do when the American employees they laid-off can no longer afford to purchase their products? While I am sure that we as Americans will survive, IMHO we should have some form of restrictions that limit the amount of outsourcing that occurs. Some states are already looking into this. We should be protecting our own jobs and economy, rather that aiding and building other countries economy. Lets not forget, with lost wages, comes lost taxes, lost businesses revenues, increased unemployment expenditures, both on the government and businesses, increased bad debt and an ever downward spiral to the American economy.
Again I apolgize for the rant and thank you for letting me vent.
My coworkers and I are also saying the same thing. When you read the daily news articles about the companies in the US that are outsourcing IT. It seems like this is definitly not the business to be in right now.
If I have guessed correctly we are in the same industry/business different company.
Same thing recently happened to another company in our industry back in December. The west coast in particular was hit hard.
The outsourcing world is a mess, at least in IT. I worked in a huge data center, where companies who decided to outsource would send their work. Of course, the work wasn’t done by the company who they hired to do it, they outsourced it themselves. We were actually seperated by about 3 degrees from the actual company whose stuff we were working on. We’d be trying to tie together people from India, Brazil and various US locations together just for permission to issue a stupid command, because no one knew who exactly was in charge, and none of them could understand each other. (Yes they all spoke english, but with all the different accents and talking over each other on conf. calls, it was a mess)
I left the outsourcing world to work for a nice company who will never outsourse and can’t move away. The pay isn’t what it was back in the glory days of IT around here, but at least I have job security and a pension waiting in 2031.
Its not just IT. Many firms are outsourcing their tax returns too.
In my personal situation, I see outsoucing as very, very bad for me. On the whole, though, I see it as positive for the global economy. So I’m torn. 
If you consider turning the United States into a nation of minimum-wage service employees “survival,” sure.