President Bush of the US of A has sealed his fate with the 2nd gulf war(I really don’t want to say which way). Now as a crunching finale to their poll campaigns US legislators have been pushing bans on outsourcing. This when they are still extending agricultural subsidies to their own farmers, which implies that they are killing the local agricultural market in third world countries.
Outsourcing of US white-collar jobs has got everybody in the US shouting. Wired magazine even did a feature on this in it’s Feb issue.
From our(Indian) perspective
We have spent years upon years importing goods and services from the US. For crying out loud they almost exclusively controlled who had and who did not have computers about a generation ago. All medical services and drugs were bought from the west. The shifting of manufacturing services to other destinations was when the US was hit first. Cheap labour in South Asia and other 3rd world countries, who in the eyes of the American’s are ‘poor’ countries, have been categorically proving financially more viable alternatives to domestic production. The disparity that the Americans are proud of is the sole reason for their goods and services being imported. What we see here is world economics trying to correct a lop-sided balance. The corrective lop-side, as I would like to call it, was first seen when manufacturing of motor cars and other mass produced items became dirt cheap in Japan and other countries. In this second wave it is intellectual property which is moving out of the US. Don’t get me wrong each country is doing it’s best to gain the maximum from these winds of change.
- America is trying to hold on to it’s position and jobs by banning outsourcing
- China is continuing devaluing it’s currency to keep outsourcing profitable.
- Indian politicians are trying to extract feel-good points for the outsourcing jobs it has got over the past 2 decades. and of course the RBI is checking the rising rupee
- Even companies are thinking up new methodologies to circumvent existing laws to cut costs.
But I feel that legislations to ban outsourcing will not be well taken by the US economy. Although analysts may claim that it will be better in the long term. who are they kidding. Did the drive to buy American goods only work in the 70′s and 80′s? manufacturing has by and large shifted outside the US. US Companies like Trilogy, Sapient and Tavant have gone further and founded their branches on Indian shore. So even if a job is given to an American firm and third party sub-contracting is banned. The company itself will be using workers in India. This is one of the more direct ways of circumventing the proposed legislations. I’m sure there are subtler ways which are virtually untraceable.
So wake up I say. the outsourcing wave may do for us what the micro-devices manufacturing did for the south east Asian countries. 
