[IMC-Editorial] [India Thinkers Net] The jobs they stole are coming back.

[India Thinkers Net at Zinester.com]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1067344,00.html
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The flight to India 

The jobs Britain stole from the Asian subcontinent 200 years 
ago are now being returned 

George Monbiot 
Tuesday October 21, 2003
The Guardian 

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. 

www.monbiot.com 
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Fwd by : Ram Narayan


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