Outsourcing: At Last Someone Has the Nerve to Talk About China
As anyone connected with international business knows, there is a hue and cry in the US about IT jobs being outsourced to India. President Obama has doubled the visa fees for IT specialists coming to the US to work (for companies with less than 50% US citizen/permanent resident employees) and there is the H-1B and L-1 Visa Reform Act of 2009 in the works for denying H1-B visas to such companies altogether.
But the point is, far more significant than the 40,000 or so jobs filled by Indian IT specialists in the US are the millions of manufacturing jobs lost to China (5.38 million between 2000 and 2009). The US administration and media have been strangely quiet about this. My surmise is that it is because China is one of the US’s prominent lenders — (China held $844 billion in US T-bonds as of June 2010).
Finally this weird silence is springing cautious leaks. In this article in the Economic Times (the large business newspaper of the Times of India), a senior official at one of the top US tech firms is quoted saying, “We are already struggling to rival cheaper offshore locations in manufacturing…” And as one would expect, he requested anonymity.
But at least it is a beginning, and one hopes that more voices will soon be heard pointing a finger at the Phantom of the US Job Market.
