Clamour against US giants shifting more jobs to India

NEW YORK: Gloom and doom about jobs vanishing to India gripped the United States this week as three blue-blooded American corporate giants – JP Morgan Chase, Intel, and Microsoft - revealed plans to move thousands of jobs to the Indian subcontinent.

“India scored another victory in its battle to win jobs from the United States,” observed The New York Post while reporting the back-to-back announcements by the three firms. “While such jobs aren’t the most highly skilled in the investment banking food chain, they do represent a step up from the low-skilled jobs traditionally associated with outsourcing.”

JP Morgan plans to hire 4,500 workers in India and move nearly a third of its investment banking back office and support staff there by 2007. Intel plans to pour $1 billion into India in the coming years, including $800 million to expand its research and development operation and hire new employees.

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said his firm would nearly double its workforce by hiring 3,000 people in India and invest $1.7 billion in the next four years. He has even lobbied openly for expanding the H1-B guest worker visa programme saying there aren’t enough American college students majoring in computer science.

“Workers in virtually every economic sector now face competitors who live just a mouse-click away in Ireland, Finland, India, China, Australia, and dozens of other nations,” warned Norman Augustine, former chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin, in an opinion piece for The Washington Post.

“US companies each morning receive software that was written in India overnight in time to be tested in the United States and returned to India for further refinement that same evening,” Augustine said, pointing out that not only call-centre jobs but high-end jobs were up for sale to developing countries.

A survey by Forrester Research on the growing outsourcing trend predicts that by 2015, 3.4 million US-based positions and $136 billion in wages will be relocated overseas. According to analysts, outsourcing of work to countries like India and China is a fait accompli in customer service, direct marketing, clinical research, and infotech.

With outsourcing accelerating there is growing political support for Congressman Adam Smith’s recently introduced Trade Adjustment Assistance Improvement Act reform bill, which will extend more financial and health insurance benefits to displaced American workers whose jobs have been exported overseas.

Indian American Sona Shah, who filed a lawsuit against software firm ADP Wilco after she was displaced by an H1-B foreign worker, told DNA that hard-nosed commercialism had spawned a boom in international business outsourcing.

“I have a degree in physics from New York University and mechanical engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology, but I still got replaced by a foreign worker,” she said. “It really doesn’t matter how skilled or qualified American workers are... US firms just want to dump them and get the job done at half the price by foreign workers.”