Outsourcing boom creates worker shortage

http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/?sid=70318b4a07ebba31

India's outsourcing boom has created a chronic shortage of skilled workers, threatening to send future jobs to competitors like China and the Philippines.

ABC reports call centers and outsourcing firms are growing fast, but their HR departments say because of the shortage, many young Indians they interview are unemployable mainly because of their poor English.
snip...

The problem with the skilled worker shortage in the second-most populous nation in the world is not quantity but quality, the report said. Many of the 3.6 million graduates churned out every year by Indian universities are considered mediocre, the report said.
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I am so freakin tired of hearing how wonderful Outsourcing our jobs to so far ahead intellectually and technologically advanced Indian workers are...

I hope the corporations PAY and PAY and PAY... and wait till they screw with the Indian worker cause I have NO DOUBTS they will sabotage their American Boss in a minute... with no ramifications...

Happy Holidays Corporations!!! Cheap Labor is OVER!!!

IT'S STILL FREAKING CHEAP!!

NOPE!!!

Thats the problem!!! and they are finding out they are not as technologically capable as we are...

at project-planning time). If it takes 2 offshore programmers 50% longer to get it right, it's still "cheaper" at some discounted salary level.....

cheap matters in the short run

Which one do you think US management and shareholders cares about?

when i was fairly new in the computer industry (over a quarter century ago! gah!) we used to get the cream of the crop from IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) here in Silicon Valley. The reputation of Indians as super engineers came about IMHO because we were comparing the top 5% of the Indian class to the overall American class. Now that a lot of work is getting outsourced to India we're starting to realize that when comparing all Indian engineers to all non-Indian engineers on the average they're pretty much the same (surprise, surprise). Mr. Retrograde, who works with engineering teams in both Indian and China, says the big problem with them is lack of experience: he sees them making the same mistakes he and his contemporaries made themselves a coupla years out of school, but they have very few local people to warn them about pitfalls.

me to fix the crap that came back from India at 2 - 3 times the price, often spending more than if they'd just developed it here. Biggest issue however is since they've shipped all the junior programmer jobs out of the country, we are running out of senior programmers. Just try to get an entry level programming job here. Add to this that nobody seems to be able to write code anymore because they only know how to use some M$, point & click IDE, and we're pretty screwed.

every one of their tech help people I have spoken to by phone/e chat are from India.

Msongs
www.msongs.com/political-shirts.htm

It's the primary reason my wife and I cancelled our Earthlink DSL accounts and moved to a competitor. Unfortunately that competitor is also moving it's call centers overseas.

No matter how wonderful the workers in India, etc are, they are still in India and not here. And English, or whatever it is we speak, is not their first language.

I had a telephone solicitor from Earthlink (obviously in India) keep calling and could not convince him that I simply was not interested in their service. I finally had to tell him to go away and please not call back. Why switch services, when the local node for our cable service is four blocks away? And there are human beings there?

to get rid of local providers.

our "local" provider is MediaCom, which apparently operates in odd, rural places all over the US. I think they are based out of the South somewhere, since the operators which whom I have spoken have all had that accent (unlikely to find someone in Bangalore who sounds like that). They are more expensive than some services, but then one of their installers lives across the street from me...so really "local."

they'll find another way to screw the American worker, yet they enjoy the security of living under the protection of the strongest military. I ran into a guy with a Ph.D in genetics the other day, he's working in a sales/recruiting type job at a local home improvement store. He gave me a dumb look when I asked him what kids should be studying if the good jobs are being outsourced. America continues to be dumbed-down. I'm getting tired of it.

and the corporations are going to have to CHANGE or go bankrupt...

problem is India is a democracy, and one with left wing parties to boot.

They gained in the last election:

Apart from statistical indicators, recent political and social developments argue that growing income inequality and poverty are inspiring a backlash against India's government. This was very clear in the aftermath of India's 2004 general election. Despite the strongest rate of economic growth in 16 years, the incumbent National Democratic Alliance was trounced in the polls.

More significantly, India's far left political parties, led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), reversed their long-term political decline, becoming the third-largest block in the legislature. Such is the strength of India's far left parties that the current coalition government, led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, depends on their fading support to remain in office.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/GL20Df01.html

Any chance this fact is related to the planned shift in outsourcing to even more impoverished (and more pliable to capital) countries


As Marx said, "Workers of the World, Unite!"

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/GL23Cb01.html

While Santa Claus lives it up with Rudolph at the North Pole, his elves have relocated to southern China's towns and villages.

Some 70% of the world's Christmas ornaments and other paraphernalia now originate in officially atheist mainland China. Tinsel, Santas, mistletoe and artificial trees of every shape and hue are churned out at a relentless pace by thousands of factory workers in Guangdong, Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces.

According to the China General Administration of customs, Guangdong on its own exported more than US$620 million worth of Christmas products in 2004. For the country as a whole, the figure was over $1 billion.

Even the White House now celebrates a "Made in China" Christmas. In 2003, seven of the trees adorning the US president's residence were manufactured in China. In fact more than two-thirds of the world's artificial Christmas trees are made in the single city of Shenzhen.

to "believe" in Santy Claus!!

was founded. As long as the original owner had it, it was a pretty good place to work, as far as factory jobs go. The owner's theory was that you should give the workers a fair deal (good wages and benefits), and they'll give you a good day's work. He liked to brag that he had the best workforce in the country, people from the farms and surrounding small towns, people who had grown up with a strong work ethic.

However, after he died, his children were not interested in running the company, so they sold to a group of investors. These investors soon decided that the Minnesota manufacturing facility was "too expensive" and that they should shut it down and move production to the Texas-Mexico border. According to an acquaintance who was a manager left over from the era of the original owner, the new owners' unspoken reason for the move was the hope that they could hire illegal immigrants for less than minimum wage and pay lower wages and no benefits to everyone, because of lower living costs and worse conditions for labor in Texas.

So that's what they did. The problem, according to our acquaintance, was that hiring illegal immigrants wasn't as economical as they thought, because the workers kept disappearing as the INS caught them. Also, the workers in Texas responded to the low wages and no benefits by quitting at a moment's notice and not giving a damn about quality.

Yet reopening the Minnesota plant would have been a violation of the prevailing religion of Outsourcing, and so that company is still manufacturing its products in a variety of overseas locations.

Outsourcing is a powerful group delusion, and most business executives these days come out of business school programs that teach them to crunch numbers, count beans, and treat workers as necessary evils. It never occurs to them that 1) Workers respond well to good treatment, and 2) They will have no customers if they keep outsourcing all their jobs.

Offshoring cos. should be called what they are -- traitors to America. And since the republinazi party supports offshoring, they're the traitor party.

53rd state so that we can tax the corporations and the workers and help them pay off our debt.

Has anyone conducted a study of what our individual debt would be from our multi-multi trillion dollar debt if the corporations were required to pay tax on all outsourced work and if the workers out there had to pay U.S. tax for the work done for U.S. customers?

The corporations are cheating us so that they can have and extra dollar in their pocked today.

Anyone who thinks that the corporations are American is jesting - they belong to their own country of profit - and profit now.

I am usually against boycotting because I always felt that formal talk around boycotts hurt the little people who were employed by these corporations - but I now believe we should individually stop buying any product or service that is outsourced.

There is a huge debt caused by the Repulican Party that must be paid off.

And that includes outsourced work to beloved Ireland or the Cayman Islands or Nicaraguaor wherever.

kicking all those outsourcing US corporations permanently!!!

Go for it!!!

Or more money for fairtrade/ethical/sustainable goods.

there are some companies out there trying this already: check these out

American apparel

No Sweat - union supported clothing and cool 'Rosie the Riveter' pic as well ;)

Hawaiian Hempwear Smokin'!

I'm interested because I've heard that clothing was really cheap in the States.
So would you be willing to pay the price?

they made clothes in larger sizes. The hempwear at least appears to go up to a 2x. Where did people get the idea that socially conscious women only come in S, M, and L? :shrug:

to the first two sites you listed.

I've also been trying to convince REI that large women need activewear just like everybody else. Might as well talk to a rappelling wall.

I'll keep looking though. Someone will figure it out eventually. :-)

Talke a look at Deva Lifewear for unisex clothing that is great and very durable.

http://www.devalifewear.com/mm5/

a couple pieces of clothing from DevaWear.

And their clearance prices aren't bad...

I do try to buy US products as much as possible. The sickest thing to me, was after 9/11, all of those flag waving vehicles--most of the flags were made in China. I refuse to display an American flag that is not made in this country. To me, it is obscene.

better. I like wearing mostly cotton clothes. I have two cotton skirts, I bought at an all cotton shop in Eureka CA over eighteen years ago and I still have them.

that show how a company can make a superior quality product, paying living wages to domestic workers, and be priced competitively. Of course, the top executives don't get to steal salaries 600 times higher than the workers, so we don't see very many doing it.

Some of my friends were "off shored" - but were given "little projects" and an "early retirement" package -- but with a "non-compete" and a "confidentiality" string.

Well, the "non-compete" expired (they must be limited in time and scope), and these guys are now overloaded with work - that has been "re-off shored" back from India.

Admitted - these are low overhead projects completed out of family rooms and basement rec rooms.

A lot of it is "networking" (as in they "knew" the guys in India - heck, they trained them when they were in the US).

... rate for Indian programmers/DBAs and the work takes 4 times as long -- if it succeeds at all. There is no one to check up on the offshore people, and it takes an incredible amount of work to create work packages for them. IT ain't like call centers or even radiology. IT is more like gardening -- hard to do by remote control. Heck, it's hard to make software behave with local staffing of highly educated native English speakers. Software is hard and detailed.

Managers who are trying to push their work to India should reach down toward the floor and feel around. Might be nothing but air down there. :-) In any case, if I were a manager, I would hate to be stuck with a bunch of overseas Indian programmers. If they are so smart, let them immigrate. That would be fine by me, but I'll bet India and the corporations wouldn't get the joke.

Now about those Republicans allowing H1-B and L-1 visa abuse...

It doesn't matter if they are American, Indian, Chinese, or Russian. I've worked with Indians who are brilliant, but the majority are average, and quite a few are dumber than a box of rocks. No different from their American counterparts. What happened in the 90s, with the tech boom, is that a lot of young people decided to get Comp Sci or MIS degrees because the money was good. Unfortunately, if you don't have the aptitude for software development, no amount of greed is going to compensate for your lack of skills. I suspect that what's going on in India right now is no different from what happened here ten to twenty years ago. You've got a lot of young Indians who see big bucks in high tech and are wasting a lot of their own time, as well as their employers time, trying to keep their head above water in a job that requires a certain mindset that cannot be taught. It's no different from any other skilled job.

The only advantage that China and India have are huge populations to draw from. There are a lot more of them than there are of us. What pisses me off about outsourcing debates are the racist and nationalist overtones that cloud the issue. Outsourcing should be good for India and China, as long as developers are treated on as equals to Americans or Europeans. This means fair wages, decent working conditions, and equal benefits. If its nothing more than chasing ever cheaper slave labor, ala Walmart, than it sucks both for the American worker as well as the Indian and Chinese worker.

I could never really figure out how the average Indian IT was superior US ITers.

unbelievably imsulting and patently false LIE -- that all this outsourcing is necessary because our workers aren't qualified. He got this from a CEO, and shared that little bit with Caroline Kennedy (who's edited a book of poems -- woohooo, yawn :sarcasm: ) whom he fawned pathetically over. (Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan enough of CK, but the fawning was disgusting, and the book didn't seem that great, frankly. But when you're really famous, you can get most anything published.)

Bill Gates is fucking famous for repeating this lie and then the bastard lays his own workers off and sends their work off to India. A lot of the bigshots do this. Congress needs to get laws written against this. Or else

for violations with the EU...

He is going to be lots poorer...

in the countries where they obtain their beloved cheap labor.
Or put up against the wall.
Either is fine with me.

Fully agree! Then we can see how really "American" these execs are, and how appreciative of the life we give them here is!

First step is to criminalize hiring illegals here so that in order for them to get cheap labor, they HAVE to outsource it. Then it comes down to measuring how much of their company hires here and how much they hire overseas, and have some formula tied to that and having an equivalent percentage of their management structure living over there, and if a majority is working overseas, the CEO HAS to live away from here.

How can COMMUNISTS provide workers to private corporations??!

And I thought communism was a failed system in which the people lived like drones and never looked up from their work and got paid just enough to eat a meal once a day and spent their lives never even having a moment to look up at the sun and enjoy the sunshine?

So how come China is so forward-moving all of a sudden??

The Chinese and other Asian countries do not have the same views and laws on intellectual property rights and copyrights as we do. So, if, or when, at some future date, they suddenly decide to nationalize all those factories built by the MegaCorps, they will thumb their noses at those companies and their countries of origin. And keep all that now "free" technology provided by the sucker MegaCorps. Don't bet the Chinese aren't thinking about this...they have a great tradition of taking a very long view of planning.

Those who do not study history...

any more than does Venezuela's nationalization of the oil industry.

I was taught all my life that communism was the absolute worst evil we could ever encounter. But right here, right before my eyes, in my own country, I've now found a worse evil.

Communism and nationalization of resources don't seem so scary now. Seriously.

Communism only took hold in places that already had long totalitarian/monarchist traditions. Nationalization of resources, I think, is in the best long term interests of every country. Private industry alone should not reap the benefits of exploiting natural resources, since those resources ultimately belong to the all citizens of the country.

(you may call me a communitarian, since the community is the source of all existance, not the individual)

going to react to us???

Guess the evangelicals don't give a shit about that when they vote republican.

Do we really want the engineering expertise needed for our secret weapon systems here to go away because there's little demand for their talents here any more unless they work in defense. Then we have places like China building up their expertise at our expense and knowing our defense systems as a result. I wonder how the wingnut voters will feel about that when faced with those facts! Sooner or later we're ALL going to pay for outsourcing engineering talent to other countries, one way or the other!

is what saved our asses in WWII. I remember when they started outsourcing our manufacturing jobs, and we were told that we were going to be the service industry. I thought at the time, "yeah, McDonalds and Wal-Mart." Lo and behold, now our service industry jobs are going overseas. Apparently, our great so-called American companies cannot stand to see an American with a decent job or a pension. It's always for the stockholder, nothing for the worker or the community. Let's face it, there not American!!!!!

All of them.. the corporations, the HR departments, the workers. Fuck them all. Destroy our Country to make your fat cat investors rich.. then go to hell and rot.

sensitive personal and financial data to Indian corporations for years and they've been caught disseminating and otherwise misusing it time and time again.

They deleted a sales file that was created without doing any checking to see if that name was used farther down the line. Any idea what that does when you do vendor managed inventory? Yeah.. ugly.

It was hell
They come in with cheap rates and then slowly up up UP the hours it takes them to do something. An actual American who worked here would have never deleted that file because they have a committment to the company and watch out for mistakes, offshore could care less.

I have other stories, including them using an old program copy which wiped out changes I did prior.

Lets say a Indian radiologist reads an xray and sends the report
but its wrong...

but here is the question???

can the patient sue him ??? He's in India!!!

the repercussions is the patient and Hospital here in the states...

and does HE REALLY care??? if this was his license on the line ??? but it isn't...

I think this was all propoganda to bring prices of IT workers down in US but the saddest part and the corporations will pay for this ... Is that US students exited college programs for other occupations and NOW there will be a shortage...

They learned it from the British! :sarcasm:

There isn't a single occupation or profession that couldn't be done cheaper by somebody in the "third world".