When I worked for ROLM/IBM/Siemens between 1986 and 1992, I worked on call center products, so "quite new" is not accurate.
You worked on some of the first call center products at that time. The following is a timeline of a call center pioneer, the Sykes Corporation. sykes.com
I still consider the industry to be quite new.
It seems to me that India has chosen to educate engineers to siphon jobs from the US.
That's not quite accurate in my view. India chose to develop engineers to meet the technical challenges that India faced in its struggle to develop. iit.org
Unfortunately, India for many years was more adept at training such engineers than it was at creating jobs for all of them. During the Y2K dilemma, there was an acute shortage of American programmers who understood the old COBOL language and this resulted in many such programmers coming from India to the USA to work on solutions. By and large, the American firms who hired these programmers were quite pleased with the skills and availability of Indian programmers. This was the start of the "body shop" where companies were started to acquire Indian programmers, get them their visas and place them with mostly American companies. Sometimes these programmers were paid only a small fraction of what the Body Shop earned and the workers often shared small apartments in San Jose. Usually their families stayed back in India and most of their paychecks were saved and sent back home to support their families.
Very rapidly around the turn of the century, Global Crossing and other companies laid huge amounts of undersea cable making the cost of a leased line to India drop tenfold. That made it largely unnecessary for the technical help to come to the US. It was cheaper and more desirable for them to be the night shift for US companies, allowing them to operate 24x7. This was encouraged by US policy and lauded by the Fed as encouraging the "productivity miracle".
There was no problem until the great American job engine began to run out of steam in the last couple of years. It is my belief that this great job engine halted largely as a result of the misguided fiscal and foreign policy decisions of our current President and is not principally caused by outsourcing. My view is that call center jobs are not a strategic industry that merits protection. They are typically relatively low wage jobs here in America, although they were certainly welcome in the relatively remote locations where they tended to thrive and where they often provided a temporary buffer from the longterm decline of our agrarian sector.
In terms of discussing policy, I really think it is important to distinguish between call center jobs, programming jobs and R&D center jobs. I tend to be free market-oriented and to believe that if we are to remain an advanced country we can not afford to erect a protective wall. Countries advance by earning that distinction largely through hard work and education. When I visited a Korean shipyard in 1982, I was told by the Managing Director that his generation simply assumed that it had to make many sacrifices and work 80 hr weeks if their country was to be able to develop and compete with Japan. I think that such a work ethic had already largely died in the US, a victim of its own success.
The hand of necessity is what is motivating India and China to work so hard to compete, develop, and enter the modern world. I agree with Friedman that this is a far better thing than the bitterness and hopelessness and despair that results in jealosy, hatred and cultural or religious jihad.
Joblessness is bad. We need to change policies to create more jobs, but we need not wall ourselves off to do so. We have a strong investment in openness, and that includes relatively open markets. This is the ideology that has made our country strong and that potentially can transform totalitarian regimes into modern democratic ones.
India is the largest democracy in the world. It was not that long ago that it struggled with periodic famines. It is by far the strongest ally that the US has in its region. India's economic development is in the interest of all peace-loving nations. As Baghwati noted in the PBS interview you cited, if we try to save 10 American jobs, it will cost 100 jobs as we are shut out of talented labor pools giving others a distinct cost advantage. The protection that you dream of is a chimera. In the same way that modern networks route around blockages, the modern world routes around protective walls. We can make ourselves into an island if we so choose, but not a prosperous one.
Sam |
