Tuesday, September 25, 2007

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.

3 Comments:

At 9/25/2007 12:38 PM, Blogger Abhay Chebbi said...

This was expected of the Indian companies. As Mr. Raman Roy said, its not late before Indian companies will outsource work to other developing countries. Its already happening!!

 
At 9/26/2007 8:53 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

The entire first floor of my place of employment is Indian outsourcing. I pass by it everyday to the stairway up to the third floor. The entire room is speaking Indian language, and no one is speaking English, unless the Indian employees are assisting an English speaking customer. Then also the dialect and pronounciation is very difficult to understand. Everyone is speaking and working and a buzz is in the air.

 
At 9/27/2007 8:43 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

If you turn the equation around and ask what are the consequences for the workers, you might be interested in the debate between the "flatlanders", and the "creative class" believers. Check out: http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=pto-4360.html&fromMod=emailed

 

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