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Voices |
 
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"High-level scientist and
engineering positions are being filled by emigrating foreigners from the
very same nations to where our technical positions are being exported;
namely, India and China.” |
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Outsorcering
LOYALTY TO THE WORKER A THING OF THE
PAST!
Posted March 14, 2004 thepeoplesvoice.org
By: Ted Lang
Along with the growing, disquieting
economic uncertainty of lost high level technical jobs in favor of lower
labor costs overseas, a deliberately induced self-deprecating assessment of
workers reflecting upon their own efficiency is yet another hollow dimension
of job outsourcing to foreign lands that is being advanced by both American
businesses as well as our own government. The message intended:
American workers aren't as good and as efficient as those in other nations.
And while this message is being implanted to further intimidate our populace
as we lose our technical jobs, our high labor costs and worker complacency
must be replaced by "real workers" in the form of illegal aliens
for low-paying farm crop-picking work, and low paying unskilled factory
work. After all, what's more important, protecting the rights and the jobs
of Americans, or enriching the few hundred trillionaires who chose George W.
Bush to be our president? When it comes to rights versus exporting
highly technical jobs while importing illegal illiterates to cut labor
costs, money will always win out in this nation run by the wealthy.
Outsourcing is the latest insult Americans are being saddled with.
Along with "deficits don't matter," and "staying on
focus," downsizing and rightsizing are just economically correct prose
offered to ease the pain of workers losing their jobs. The economic
downturn of the late 1980s required new terminology to replace the bitter
pill of "layoffs."
Nothing like having one or two college degrees and a couple or three kids in
college and having a young snoot three years out of college replace you. The
corporation saves on pension, medical and life insurance payments. Oh,
you don't want to quit - don't think another great American corporation will
hire you at your age? Not to worry - we've got a position for you as a
switchboard operator in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and we'll pay all your moving
costs too!
The analogy of high tech jobs being taken away from Americans while the
nation's laws are being subverted and circumvented by the Bush
administration isn't completely accurate. High-level scientist and
engineering positions are being filled by emigrating foreigners from the
very same nations to where our technical positions are being exported;
namely, India and China. These "Third World" nations are
utilizing that which is a most vital asset in a rapidly, radically
technologically changing world; namely, education.
Even scientist and engineering positions in our nation's Department of
Defense and its numerous research and development facilities throughout the
country, are finding their staffs increasingly replaced by professionals
from these nations. Our educational systems are seemingly unable to
keep up with the volume of graduates offered by these Third World nations in
the fields of science, engineering and mathematics. Even in the field
of medicine, emigrants from these nations are populating positions at
virtually all levels.
Our own government champions another false savings approach that costs
Americans jobs. To cut defense costs, members of the privileged Ivy
League set whose wealthy families take advantage of political patronage
payoffs by arranging to have their recently graduated offspring assume
positions of high responsibility within government, do US a disservice by
"experimenting" with cost-cutting schemes and scams in order to
make a name for themselves and advance through the executive ranks quickly.
This goes a long way to explaining how real workers in the FBI and CIA are
summarily ignored when in possession of life-saving intelligence. They
are ignored by our perfumed princes of bureaucracy who are too busy playing
at administration and executive government management.
It is these arrogant and pompous administrators who cook up cost-cutting
exercises, and whether or not they work, their effectiveness never becomes
an issue after the fact. One such type of cost reduction scheme is a
concept designated as "commercial activities," or "A-76"
competitions. The designation A-76 refers to the Office of Management
and Budget [OMB] circular that establishes the rules and procedures for
creating a cost study that weighs whether or not to keep government workers
or to replace them with "more efficient" workers in the private
sector. The idea is to force an efficiency restructuring of the public
sector employees to continue performing the same functions, but to do so at
a greater cost savings.
The first error in this procedure is the fact that the cost of the work
performed by the government team involved in determining the existent
structure, hiring an outside consulting firm, as well as the extensive time
lost interviewing members of the workforce and management, and conducting
"town hall meetings" to prepare the workers for the possible loss
of their jobs, is not factored into the equation. A recently conducted
A-76 Study performed at a northeast facility cost $3 million, and was not
included due to OMB rules. Additionally, the government's restructured
work force lost the competition in the Information Technology area, which is
comprised of computer support and IT information management services.
Employees concluded that the only way the private sector competitor beat the
government employees by a margin of $30 million was to farm the work out to
India.
As "T-Day" rapidly approaches, the infamous April 15th tax day of
reckoning on the part of the beleaguered American workforce with their
central rulers inside the Beltway, even this 100 percent totally traditional
American ritual is finding its way to India. In an article carried on
Rense.com by Chidanand Rajghatta writing for the Times of India a year ago
on April 17, 2003, Rajghatta offers, "Millions of Americans sweated it
out on Tuesday, struggling to meet the deadline - April 15 - for filing
their annual tax returns as accountants and post offices stayed open late to
accommodate the laggards. Many will be hoping the Indians have lived
up to their reputation for sound number-crunching."
In his article, "US Tax Returns To India Causing A Stir,"
Rajghatta continues: "In keeping with the great outsourcing trend that
has swept across American businesses, thousands of US tax returns are now
being processed in India, a development that has led to quite a stir in the
accounting community. Numbers are hard to pin down, but according to
Kishore Mirchandani, president of Outsource Partners International, the firm
that claims to have triggered the development, more than 10,000 returns went
to India for scrutiny this year. The accounting firm Ernst and Young
alone is believed to have forwarded 7500 American tax returns to its
subsidiary in India after transferring a tax partner familiar with US tax
laws there. Scores of other smaller accounting firms have also sent returns
numbering in the hundreds to India after a pilot study last year showed
encouraging results."
The article quotes Mirchandani, "'The business is still in its infancy,
but we are looking at over 100,000 returns going to India this coming year,'
says Mirchandani, whose firm has a 300-person operation in Bangalore and is
looking to expand because of the growing demand. Several additional
American firms are also lining up to send returns to India, after pilot
projects showed significant reductions in costs and turnaround times.
'More and more firms are jumping on the bandwagon after seeing the results.
They seem very satisfied with the quality, not to speak of the speed and
cost factor,' says Bill Carlino, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Accounting
Today, which has tracked the trend over the past year."
In a March 14th article in the "Job Market" section of the Sunday
New York Times, entitled "Corporate America Sending More Legal Work to
Bombay" by Ellen Rosen, Rosen begins her piece, "When Laurene
Horiszny, the general counsel of Borg Warner, needed to research an
employment law question in several states, she left her firm's lawyers
alone. She did not contact the outside firms she retains either.
Instead, Ms. Horiszny turned to Mindcrest, a fledgling consulting firm with
Indian-trained lawyers in Bombay ready to do the work."
Rosen goes on, relating that, "The research, Ms. Horiszny said, was
'much less expensive than going to our outside firms.' And she was
satisfied enough with the results to engage Mindcrest for a second project,
an initial legal review of the purchase order terms used by Borg Warner, an
automotive parts manufacturer."
The article continues, "While computer programmers, radiologists and
tax preparers have watched some of their business move off shore, lawyers,
bound by intricate ethical rules and licensed by states, have been largely
protected from foreign competition. But as companies from Borg Warner
to General Electric start to experiment with using foreign lawyers for
discrete legal projects, that is starting to change."
A trend is now easily discernible - no job in America is safe! The
debate between anarcho-capitalist economists and traditional conservative
economist leaning more to a regulated, protectionist economy will shortly
start heating up. A job drain as a result of the latest corporate
employment fad and buzz program, namely "outsourcing," will indeed
cut costs for corporations. But how will this affect our society?
Can the American people weather this stampede towards a new global economy?
Clearly, global economics will indeed diminish national sovereignties.
Does that mean that perhaps our entire government can be outsourced to
India? Perhaps we can export our tax code there as well, and import
their Constitution since we no longer have one.
-###- © Copyright
THEODORE E. LANG 3/14/04 All rights reserved. Ted Lang is a political
analyst and a freelance writer.
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