Jim Hightower: Who Needs American Workers?

[Selwynn]

Maybe you're one of the two million Americans who've recently had their jobs offshored to India, Pakistan, and elsewhere, or one of the millions more expected to have your jobs shipped abroad in the next few years.

If so, don't worry, Bucko, for a new growth industry has arisen that offers exciting job opportunities for you discarded Americans. You, too, could become an "American accent and culture trainer." It seems that while such corporations as Citibank, Dell, GE, and Microsoft are eager to abandon the U.S. and move their telephone service jobs to low-wage workers abroad, these English-speaking foreign workers are ... well, foreign, so their accents and cultural references can be jarring to U.S. customers placing orders or seeking help.

Thus, offshoring companies are hiring Americans to teach foreign replacement workers to sound and behave like Americans. Yes, this means you could end up teaching the Indian or Pakistani or Russian who was given your job how to sound like you!

http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/20251/

[aden_nak]

1. Here's what's staggering about all of that.

Despite the cost of training their employees to change their voices and understand the bare basics of the public trainwreck known as American Culture, despite the cost of flying Americans across the world to give these lessons, despite the cost of digitally altering calltakers' voices on the fly. . . it's still cheaper for these companies than it would be to hire Americans.

Of course, they're not factoring in the still-ongoing communication problems that occur between their callers and their calltakers. As an IT person that has had to work, over the phone, my own company's India-based outsourced IT support. . . the ugly fact is that I couldn't even tell what in the hell they were trying to accomplish (as a matter of linguistics, concept, and technical buffonery), so I can't imagine how fucked the average caller would have been.

[Selwynn]

2. Oh it gets worse than even that --

Here where I work (and in the interest of full disclosure, I am an outsource employee, i.e. I'm a contract test manager, just not from another country) the company we are contracted too has spent millions sending jobs to Wipro and other offshore companies. But they have YET to see a profit from that. After over three years of doing it, Wipro has YET to deliever a complete product, and the company I work for has spent MILLIONS more than it ever planned in traning and trying to get these guys off the ground, and its still not working like they hoped.

And yet, the move to offshore continues anyway... :wtf:

[aden_nak]

3. Same with my situation.

At my last job (I won't mention their name, but they make electroics and they rhime with "Bony") as well as my current one, so far it's been a money sink hole. They already weren't giving us health insurance, because we were classified as "temporary permanent contracted employees) through an alternate company (which means that some guy named Chip gets 2/3 of our salary, for which I compensated by not doing 2/3 of my work). But they STILL would have been running a loss if not for the other tax loopholes they were able to exploit.

Of course, then you have to factor in the unseen costs of trying to maintain organizational integrity and communication between the US locations and the offshore ones. With that money, they could have paid me enough to care about the quality of my work!

[dweller]

6. "temporary permanent" ??

i guess that's like the 'genuine imitation' crabmeat i saw at the grocer. . .

dp

[JHB]

4. I think that's called...

..."footing the bill for training up your own competition, Sucker!"

[Selwynn]

5. Well not only that, but it has YET to be profitable for them...

The whole point of offshoring is that its supposed to save them money - but instead it has cost them HUGE money that they have yet to make back.