India Is Outsourcing Outsourcing: UAW Listen Up

India is now outsourcing outsourcing, the New York Times reports today in World Busines:

To fight on the shifting terrain, and to beat back emerging rivals, Indian companies are hiring workers and opening offices in developing countries themselves, before their clients do.

Infosys (NASDAQ: INFY) says its outsourcing experience in India has taught it to carve up a project, apportion each slice to suitable workers, double-check quality and then export a final, reassembled product to clients. The company argues it can clone its Indian back offices in other nations and groom Chinese, Mexican or Czech employees to be more productive than local outsourcing companies could make them.

Such is the new outsourcing: A company in the United States pays an Indian vendor 7,000 miles away (Infosys) to supply it with Mexican engineers working 150 miles south of the United States border.

As an Infosys senior vice president put it, the future of outsourcing is “to take the work from any part of the world and do it in any part of the world.”

Or as Indian CEO Raman Roy said "Geography is history."

MP: This might be a lesson from Inida for U.S. unions about how business will take place in the 21st Century. For example, the UAW wants GM to lock in future work for U.S. factory workers by promising jobs, product commitments and investments in U.S. plants.

"Globalization is killing us," said Jerry Gillespie, president of a UAW local in Warren, Mich., whose members work on engineering and design of future products. "They want to build engineering centers in the rest of the world and take that work away from us. That's our fight."

That's soooooooooooo Machine Age, 20th Century thinking.