I just read the most useless article at Salon

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/11/05/outsourcing_report/index.html

I have nothing against Katharine Mieszkowski, but this professor she interviewed about outsourcing white collar jobs was particularly useless.

We have done a kind of forward-looking paper. The chances of being wrong are pretty high in this kind of a situation. If you were to look at where the whole situation stands today, I wouldn't say that a lot of jobs have gone already. The entire India business-process outsourcing sector employs around 250,000 in jobs like accounting and legal research. I'm separating the software aspect from this business-process sector.

And the 250,000 jobs that have been created in India, I wouldn't say that they were jobs that existed in the U.S. It's not as if it was a one-to-one transfer of jobs.

But, as I said, we are looking forward, and there is no question that we are probably in the early stages of business-services outsourcing.

So, which is it? Is there no question, or is it probably? This guy sounds almost like a politician. It gets worse:

I was there last July, and every day there were major U.S. firms saying so-and-so firm plans to open a payroll-and-accounting office in such-and-such an Indian city, which would be employing around 3,000 people or 4,000 people. Big numbers are being bandied about.

We didn't want to make too much of that. But the reason why it was included in the opening introduction of our report is that this was going on at the same time that layoffs were going on in the U.S.

That's the significance. So, in that sense, there's no question that part of the jobless growth is because of that. But would it have made a big difference? I'm not so sure. The U.S. is a huge economy, after all.

Don't want to make too much of it? Not a big difference? What then, was the point of the paper, that everything is OK and there's nothing to worry about? It gets even worse that that:

...ultimately the job market has to adjust. Or, the wages will adjust downward significantly, so that it becomes competitive again not to outsource the jobs and to have them done here.

Or, the best-case scenario is, there's continuing innovation. There's creation of new sectors in a dynamic economy. New firms are established. Higher-paying, value-added jobs are created. So, basically, a repeat of what happened when the manufacturing outsourcing gathered steam. That's the best possible outlook that one can look forward to.

So let me get this straight. Your advice to the guy who spent four years and a shitload of money getting a computer science degree is to (1) work at Wal*Mart or (2) go back to school? And study what, exactly? Another field that's on the brink of being outsourced? Just how much student loan debt do you think people can handle? Is tuition free at Berkeley or something? Get real!

Put the title of piece in the subject line
and edit that copyrighted material to four
paragraphs. Thanks, rfu, moderator

I used to be in the medical technology field.

It got real nasty, pay stagnated, so I studied programming and changed careers.

I made decent money for a year and a half, then the bottom fell out. I have been more-or-less unemployed for two years this week.

In that time, I studied other disciplines within computer science, after having been told that they were the real "hot" fields. Same thing -- everything has been outsourced to India.

I have recently come to the conclusion that I will not be able to continue as a programmer. In a few years, if you're not from India, you simply won't be writing code. Simple as that.

By the way, I have no animus against people who live in, or come from, India. My anger is toward the corporate and legislative peabrains who have put us in this position.

Now, at age 45, I find myself as broke as I was at 20, without any prospect for a decent job in the next several years, the probability of going back to school and into more debt, with extensive training in three useless fields, with medical problems and no health insurance, living in a country where the the only help I can get is a lecture on Personal Responsibility™ and yet another xerox copy of A Letter To Garcia.

That's not The American Dream. That's an hallucination.

--bkl

Not in what you quoted.

But, what can I say? When unions were striking during the Depression to keep their wages at historical utopian highs, they made the same arguments and wouldn't hear of wages dropping as a counter to unemployment.