azcentral.com
Giant sucking sound is loss of high-tech jobs from U.S.
Jul. 10, 2003 12:00 AM
Motorola, which has been in quiet retreat from Greater Phoenix for years, is investing $90 million to build a research center in Beijing. This will be in addition to the company's 1,000-employee China headquarters.
Such developments are sending chills through American technology employees. Their fearful e-mails, from Arizona and nationwide, have overtaken every other topic I hear about from readers.
American companies are no longer just sending manufacturing jobs offshore - now the jobs are high-skilled technology positions. Forrester Research, which is hardly an alarmist outfit, estimates that a cumulative 472,000 information technology jobs will move to India alone by 2015. Call-center jobs, a staple of the regional economy here, are already on their way. A total of 3.3 million service sector jobs are expected to be part of the exodus.
The companies are playing what the Financial Times calls "brain arbitrage." That's the difference in cost between a skilled knowledge worker in India, or another developing nation, and the United States or Western Europe. The developing nations have an insurmountable advantage. The top 100 financial institutions in the world expect to save $180 billion a year by moving jobs to lower-wage countries. The loss for Western countries: 2 million jobs. . . .
=========================================================
Motorola, which has been in quiet retreat from Greater Phoenix for years, is investing $90 million to build a research center in Beijing.
Interesting.
Just today they announced the sale of their office in Harvard Illinois about 30 minutes or so from where I live. The state gave them all kinds of tax breaks to build there and it has been sitting empty.
Oh well. The sale of that building will help build the new one where it properly belongs.
China
M |
