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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
"Welcome to class warfare": A roundtable discussion of global labor issues in which readers respond to Katharine Mieszkowski's "White-collar Sweatshop."
Jul 8, 2003 | [Read the story.]
First, right off the bat you need to know I take a great deal of offense when you call what I do for a living running a sweatshop.
Your article is not an objective telling of a story, [but] I do not deny that there is a story here. While tacit mention is given to other countries, it still reads like an attack on Indians. I am obviously not a disinterested party either and have been following the debate as closely as possible through online editions of major newspapers.
I run a small company with 20 employees, and we get projects from all over the world, so it's not just the U.S. (Actually it's mostly Canada and Europe. U.S. companies tend to only work with the biggies, Infosys, Satyam, Wipro, TCS.) Do you know the cost difference in smaller work? It's not the two times difference you quote; it is much, much more. I provide Web and mobile development skills for $8 to $20 an hour. The contractors, whom you seem so fond of, charge clients $50-$100 an hour. Now when someone says these are America's highest-paying jobs, you tell me if they should be.
Most of my employees travel 2-3 hours a day in trains that are supposed to carry 50 people in a compartment and [end up] carrying 250. They get to work at 10 in the morning and regularly stay at work past 9 p.m. They don't look at this as a sweatshop. They see this as their opportunity to get ahead in the world and make a decent living. These men and women are the sons and daughters of truck drivers and factory laborers and tailors, people who spent their life never making more than four or five thousand rupees a month. But they educated their children so that they can have a better life. And it paid off for some of them. Today their kids make 10, 15, 20, 25 thousand rupees. That's a lot in India.
Yes, it's not desirable that American tech workers lose their jobs, but why does the U.S. have the right to these jobs? That's the fundamental question, and it is this implicit sentiment that is apparent in all the people who are fighting against "outsourcing." I think it's a very rare company that does not have operations in this country. If it's OK for them to operate here and make money here (as I doubt they do it out of charity), it's OK for us to go after their software work. I am not an economist and don't really know anything about how economies work, but it's supposed to be a global village, isn't it? Or is that only when we are talking about buying stuff from Microsoft and Oracle and Adobe and not when we are trying to sell?
As for the protectionist hysteria in N.J. and Washington, India has been there and done that... trust me, it doesn't work.
-- Amit Doshi
The author ends her story on a rather placid note, implying that the numbers of jobs being sent overseas are "inflated." I rather doubt that, because I myself lost a high-paying job precisely because my workload was sent to a new "satellite" office in India, and this happened in late '99, before the tech boom went bust. You can just imagine what's happening now.
Three others in my Technical Publications group quit because they could see what was coming (I was naive). The documentation of our product was outsourced to India, but I met this staff of Indians, and there were six of them to do the work of four people, who also handled other, side projects as the need arose!
This isn't about cutting costs; it's about pure greed, untrammeled in its avarice. Corporate America is not only firing its own customers, it's eating its own seed corn.
-- Rob Anderson
I read your article about American workers' fears of losing their jobs to globalization with interest.
As a data analyst at a large Bay Area corporation, I work side by side with programmers from India every day.
The real question is not, should we be giving high-tech work to non-U.S. citizens, but rather, why are they so good at it?
They must be putting something in the water in Bangalore, because every single Indian national I've had the pleasure to work with is a crackerjack programmer with a good work ethic and a healthy curiosity about life on this side of the globe.
High-tech workers are unique in the American workforce in their ability to improve their skills, further their education, and increase their value easily. The whole field literally changes every five years (or less).
I think blaming the guy in the next cube for your problems smacks of plain old entitlement. It's not becoming for a sector that was once and may again be the envy of the rest of the economy.
-- Justin Neisuler
Truth be told, I applaud the idea of outsourcing any number of highly paid positions to India, China and Antarctica... so long as for every IT or customer-support position that goes, at least one upper-management position goes as well. Considering the flood of room-temperature-IQ MBAs chirping about the joys of globalization, I'd like to think that they'd be glad to sacrifice their jobs so Indian managers can participate in incessant meetings to prepare for meetings, backstabbing, butt-kissing, three-hour lunches and then a nap, screaming at the employees about not leaving two adjoining parking spaces available for their SUVs, and all of the other benefits indulged by their American counterparts. Hell, maybe by paying one-eighth of what an American-trained MBA makes, the outsourced companies can save a bit of money on cocaine rehab treatments and sexual harassment legal costs.
Admittedly, I can see one major problem: Those Indian managers will have to learn that leadership in the IT business means "blaming everyone else when things go wrong" and that failure is to be rewarded and not punished. However, if we can teach the rest of the world about other American values, we can teach those two values that made American business what it is today.
-- Paul Riddell
