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To: RealMuLan who wrote (15051)	11/7/2004 11:18:23 PM
From: RealMuLan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116555

UK Plc under pressure to move jobs offshore Mon 8 November, 2004 03:33 By Ross Finley LONDON (Reuters) - British business is facing increasing pressure to move jobs abroad to cut costs and there is no sign that this global trend is set to reverse, an industry survey shows. India and China top the list of destinations where British businesses are already doing plenty of offshoring as well as for those companies who were considering it, with Poland and the Czech Republic following. "The pressures on companies to offshore ... are intense, and rising," said Ian McCafferty, chief economist at the Confederation of British Industry, ahead of the employers group's annual conference in the central English city of Birmingham. More than half of the 150 companies the CBI surveyed said pressure to move business overseas -- as a growing number of American companies are now doing -- has increased over the past two years and a bit more than a fifth said very greatly so. But the report said that while Britain has clearly lost jobs from offshoring -- leading to a loss of about four percent of a given company's UK workforce -- the economy has able to replace those jobs elsewhere and add even more. At 4.7 percent, the international measure of UK unemployment is at its lowest in 20 years and is less than half than the jobless rate in France and Germany. New jobs created in Britain as an offspin from offshoring tend to be skewed toward skilled and graduate-degree workers, said CBI director-general Digby Jones, who added that within 10 years there will probably be no work left in Britain for unskilled workers. "The challenge is to create more jobs than we lose -- which we are doing -- and to ensure people have the skills to take advantage of them," Jones said. The UK financial services industry has been at the forefront of recent transfers of jobs to low-cost countries. Aviva, Britain's biggest insurer, plans to shift up to 7,000 posts to India by the end of 2007 to cut costs. Others moving UK jobs abroad include rival insurer Royal & Sun and banks Lloyds TSB and HSBC. Operations transferred overseas include call centres, data entry and information technology support. But not all of the UK's big financial companies have been lured by offshoring. HBOS Alliance & Leicester and Royal Bank of Scotland have said they do not intend to move jobs abroad. RBS has said service standards may not be maintained once work is outsourced, while HBOS has said the challenge is to make customers like its existing call centres rather than move them to India. The average UK call centre worker earns 13,000 pounds a year compared with between 3,000 and 4,000 pounds in India, according to finance trade union Amicus. But while the CBI's McCafferty said common perception has it that a large proportion of outsourcing is aimed at call centre work, the CBI survey found only about 15 percent of companies were offshoring it. Many more companies cited manufacturing of industrial goods and research and development and design as the kind of work they are already conducting offshore or wanting to. The survey was conducted between October 7 and October 29 based on responses from 150 companies employing three quarters of a million people in Britain and 2.2 million globally. reuters.co.uk