The jobs Britain
stole from the Asian subcontinent 200 years ago are now being
returned.....
The Guardian:
The flight to India
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1067344,00.html
If you live
in a rich nation in the English-speaking world, and most of your
work involves a computer or a telephone, don't expect to have
a job in five years' time. Almost every large company which relies
upon remote transactions is starting to dump its workers and hire
a cheaper labour force overseas. All those concerned about economic
justice and the distribution of wealth at home should despair.
All those concerned about global justice and the distribution
of wealth around the world should rejoice. As we are, by and large,
the same people, we have a problem.
Britain's
industrialisation was secured by destroying the manufacturing
capacity of India. In 1699, the British government banned the
import of woollen cloth from Ireland, and in 1700 the import of
cotton cloth (or calico) from India. Both products were forbidden
because they were superior to our own. As the industrial revolution
was built on the textiles industry, we could not have achieved
our global economic dominance if we had let them in. Throughout
the late 18th and 19th centuries, India was forced to supply raw
materials to Britain's manufacturers, but forbidden to produce
competing finished products. We are rich because the Indians are
poor.
Now the jobs
we stole 200 years ago are returning to India. Last week the Guardian
revealed that the National Rail Enquiries service is likely to
move to Bangalore, in south-west India. Two days later, the HSBC
bank announced that it was cutting 4,000 customer service jobs
in Britain and shifting them to Asia. BT, British Airways, Lloyds
TSB, Prudential, Standard Chartered, Norwich Union, Bupa, Reuters,
Abbey National and Powergen have already begun to move their call
centres to India. The British workers at the end of the line are
approaching the end of the line.
There is a
profound historical irony here. Indian workers can outcompete
British workers today because Britain smashed their ability to
compete in the past. Having destroyed India's own industries,
the East India Company and the colonial authorities obliged its
people to speak our language, adopt our working practices and
surrender their labour to multinational corporations. Workers
in call centres in Germany and Holland are less vulnerable than
ours, as Germany and Holland were less successful colonists, with
the result that fewer people in the poor world now speak their
languages.
The impact
on British workers will be devastating. Service jobs of the kind
now being exported were supposed to make up for the loss of employment
in the manufacturing industries which disappeared overseas in
the 1980s and 1990s. The government handed out grants for cybersweatshops
in places whose industrial workforce had been crushed by the closure
of mines, shipyards and steelworks. But the companies running
the call centres appear to have been testing their systems at
government expense before exporting them somewhere cheaper.
It is not
hard to see why most of them have chosen India. The wages of workers
in the service and technology industries there are roughly one
tenth of those of workers in the same sectors over here. Standards
of education are high, and almost all educated Indians speak English.
While British workers will take call-centre jobs only when they
have no choice, Indian workers see them as glamorous. One technical
support company in Bangalore recently advertised 800 jobs. It
received 87,000 applications. British call centres moving to India
can choose the most charming, patient, biddable, intelligent workers
the labour market has to offer.
There is nothing
new about multinational corporations forcing workers in distant
parts of the world to undercut each other. What is new is the
extent to which the labour forces of the poor nations are also
beginning to threaten the security of our middle classes. In August,
the Evening Standard came across some leaked consultancy documents
suggesting that at least 30,000 executive positions in Britain's
finance and insurance industries are likely to be transferred
to India over the next five years. In the same month, the American
consultants Forrester Research predicted that the US will lose
3.3 million white-collar jobs between now and 2015. Most of them
will go to India.
Just over
half of these are menial "back office" jobs, such as
taking calls and typing up data. The rest belong to managers,
accountants, underwriters, computer programmers, IT consultants,
biotechnicians, architects, designers and corporate lawyers. For
the first time in history, the professional classes of Britain
and America find themselves in direct competition with the professional
classes of another nation. Over the next few years, we can expect
to encounter a lot less enthusiasm for free trade and globalisation
in the parties and the newspapers which represent them. Free trade
is fine, as long as it affects someone else's job.
So a historical
restitution appears to be taking place, as hundreds of thousands
of jobs, many of them good ones, flee to the economy we ruined.
Low as the wages for these positions are by comparison to our
own, they are generally much higher than those offered by domestic
employers. A new middle class is developing in cities previously
dominated by caste. Its spending will stimulate the economy, which
in turn may lead to higher wages and improved conditions of employment.
The corporations, of course, will then flee to a cheaper country,
but not before they have left some of their money behind. According
to the consultants Nasscom and McKinsey, India - which is always
short of foreign exchange - will be earning some $17bn a year
from outsourced jobs by 2008.
On the other
hand, the most vulnerable communities in Britain are losing the
jobs which were supposed to have rescued them. Almost two-thirds
of call-centre workers are women, so the disadvantaged sex will
slip still further behind. As jobs become less secure, multinational
corporations will be able to demand ever harsher conditions of
employment in an industry which is already one of the most exploitative
in Britain. At the same time, extending the practices of their
colonial predecessors, they will oblige their Indian workers to
mimic not only our working methods, but also our accents, our
tastes and our enthusiasms, in order to persuade customers in
Britain that they are talking to someone down the road. The most
marketable skill in India today is the ability to abandon your
identity and slip into someone else's.
So is the
flight to India a good thing or a bad thing? The only reasonable
answer is both. The benefits do not cancel out the harm. They
exist, and have to exist, side by side. This is the reality of
the world order Britain established, and which is sustained by
the heirs to the East India Company, the multinational corporations.
The corporations operate only in their own interests. Sometimes
these interests will coincide with those of a disadvantaged group,
but only by disadvantaging another.
For centuries,
we have permitted ourselves to ignore the extent to which our
welfare is dependent on the denial of other people's. We begin
to understand the implications of the system we have created only
when it turns against ourselves.
Join this
India movement at:
http://www.indiacause.com/IC_JML.htm