India Wake Up
A letter from a US Citizen IT Professional to John Kerry, probable Democratic candidate to Challenge President Bush in upcoming US Presidential Elections
I am an IT worker -- a software engineer and a database administrator. Several months ago, I resigned an IT job with my Fortune 500 employer. I was too disgusted to continue working for a company that is so shamelessly unconcerned about our society and its American employees. My former employer has been firing American call center representatives, software engineers and accountants and moving their work to India. My ex-employer is also using low-wage non-immigrant Indian visa workers in the US (in place of Americans). This is the result of "outsourcing" contracts signed with several Indian firms. Thereafter, layoffs and foreign replacement workers have been common at my workplace.
After watching this trend for 2 years, I gave up on a career in information technology with my former employer. Like many other American workers, I was completely demoralized by my employer's actions and the national trend to fire Americans and move jobs offshore. Non-American (Indian) workers here in the US on H-1B or L-1 visas received "knowledge transfers" from my fellow American Information Technology ("IT") workers. Then the Indians went back to India to do the work and the Americans were given the "pink slip." I watched it all happen. It was done legally, according to the laws enacted by Congress. Team by team, American IT workers were let go and with each wave of lay-offs, the severance checks grew smaller. For those of us who remained, pay raises became unheard of. Most of us who have gone through this experience have finally realized that we are competing with a third world wage scale while our employers continue to charge "American prices". It isn't fair and it isn't just but it is legal.
My experience is not unique; it's being repeated in major corporations all over the United States. Almost every day there are new announcements of layoffs here in the U.S., usually linked to movement of work offshore. There are now, by some estimates, nearly a half million unemployed IT workers in the U.S. And the job eliminations continue to spread to new companies and to other "back-office" jobs such as accounting. We read about it. We see it announced on television. We hear our neighbors, friends and colleagues talking about it. There is now way that an informed person could avoid coming into contact with this information. People are angry and demoralized. We are losing the Information Age jobs that were supposed to take the place of all the manufacturing and industrial jobs that have been moving offshore for more than 10 years.
Now, it is clear to me and many other Americans that a majority of our elected political leaders are either indifferent to or ignorant of the loss of US Information Age jobs and the depressed wages that foreign non-immigrant visa workers have brought. (Who among our elected representatives voiced concern at the recent news that IBM will soon move nearly 5,000 IT jobs to Indian and China and cease software development operations in the U.S.?) The President and Republican-majority Congress are pushing ahead with new "free trade" agreements which will further increase the outflow of American Information Technology jobs -- and all "white collar" jobs while permitting more non-immigrant foreign workers unfettered employment in the US. There are very few people in Congress looking at the "big picture" and taking note of the fact that American workers, society and eventually, the economy suffers because of the short term, myopic decisions of corporations only intent upon reducing labor costs to pump up quarterly performance reports. Corporations are cutting their labor costs but they are also cutting back the American standard of living and consumers' disposable income.
The December figure of 8.2% growth in GDP has had no discernible impact on the middle class jobs market. This is a "jobless recovery" for people seeking middle-class employment. In my profession, the employment market in the U.S. for software engineers and Information Technology workers is miserable and only appears to be getting worse. Outsourcing, H-1B and L-1 visa workers and the free movement of labor provisions of the latest free trade agreements have become a knife in the back of the American IT work force, American society and communities around the nation. The well-paying Information Age jobs are disappearing and so is the tax base, the disposable income, and the revenue that these jobs represent. We don't tax the non-immigrant visa workers who are taking American IT jobs and we can't tax the new foreign employees of companies that have "offshored" U.S. jobs. The real winners in the new "global free trade" agreements are rich investors, rich corporate executives, and low-wage foreign nationals and nations (India, China, the Philippines). (India is the premier example of this phenomenon where low wages and a growing IT work force has lured many corporations to build "technology centers" and hire Indians instead of Americans.) The zealous proponents of "free trade" and "Worker Replacement Visas" (WRVs = H-1b and L-1) have essentially launched a "war" on the American middle-class -- a realization which is spreading more widely with each day.
This has disastrous consequences for communities across America. The middle class job base was hit hard by the loss of industrial and manufacturing jobs; now the Information Age jobs are going overseas too. (It is far more than simply call centers; next generation R&D jobs and sophisticated high-level engineering is now moving offshore.) In fact, India has a deliberate national policy to attract these jobs -- to take these jobs out of the American employment market here in the US. (They employ lobbyists here in the U.S. and have a "friendship" committee to which even Rep. Gephardt belongs.) Many of us believe this signals a real decline in the general prosperity of Americans -- decline in our previously high national standard of living. There is no new employment sector on the horizon offering wages and benefits comparable to what is being lost on a daily basis in the IT sector. (Don't be misled: Nanotechnology and biotechnology along with other scientific and technical job areas are also poised to move offshore; there is nothing to prevent these losses on top of Information Technology.)
We in the middle classes see a widening slum of service sector/minimum wage and part-time employment where over-qualified applicants displaced from better jobs compete to be under-employed rather than unemployed. "American companies" are creating a middle class in India at the cost of shrinking the middle class in the U.S. We see national, state and local making cuts in essential human services because there "isn't enough money". Well, there might be enough money if the U.S. was not hemorrhaging jobs -- blue-collar and white-collar!!
In this campaign season, it appears that many political candidates seem intent on maintaining a complete silence on the H-1B and L-1 non-immigrant work visa programs and American white collar/"back-office" job losses. It is hard not to see this eerie silence as a self-serving conspiracy to avoid alarming the American people and an avoidance of real popular opinion.
I am hopeful that Sen. Kerry is different. I am looking for explicit statements from Sen. Kerry recognizing the severity of outsourcing and worker replacement in the US and offering more specific corrective measures than simply making foreign call-center workers acknowledge they are not in the U.S. or providing subsidies to corporations to employ Americans. I hope this letter will arouse your interest to examine the widening job losses, which have moved beyond manufacturing and directly affect the white-collar and Information Age jobs. The years of free trade failure and IT industry support of Republicans should encourage John Kerry to see that this is an issue that deserves attention in this election. There must be a real alternative to the unrestricted capitalism, which pits American workers against low-wage workers of the Developing World. Americans want credible leaders with vision and courage to drive an alternative to cutthroat capitalism. There are many IT workers and white-collar workers looking for a champion -- someone who can see beyond campaign contributions from an IBM or a Microsoft… We're looking for an unmistakable sign that John Kerry is on the side of American middle-class workers and not content to take the word of the outsourcing industry lobbyists.
I realize that this letter focuses primarily on the loss of jobs in the IT sector. This is my profession and the area with which I am most familiar. Yet, the job losses in call centers and Information Technology are only the beginning of an even more widespread effort to move ALL "back-office" type jobs to low-wage nations. For example, accounting jobs are now moving offshore to India. Architectural and engineering firms are moving work to Asia. Indian teachers are being imported with H-1b visas to fill teaching positions in Houston, Texas. (This alarms my wife who is a public school teacher and an NEA member.) There is really no limit to the job losses we are seeing in the U.S. If we want to remain a middle-class country, we must re-evaluate the benefits of "free trade" and acknowledge the hard truth that it is driving down our wages and eliminating middle-class job opportunities. It's clear to me that more funding for education and research into new technologies will not help our situation because any new "high tech" jobs can be moved offshore just as the best IT jobs are leaving and for the same reason: lower labor costs. "Global competitiveness" sounds good in corporate boardrooms but the American middle-class is taking it on the chin.