¿Blame India for that jobless recovery ?

The Sidney Morning Herald has an interesting story about the shifting of jobs to China and India. You can replace the references to Australia with any other country and you drag the same conclusion. The article is here Blame India for that jobless recovery and is noticeable the profilesof the people working in India, not going overseas to make the same work.

"American Express has its fraud analytics department based in India - 60 PhDs sit in a room watching credit card use patterns in America, looking for fraud. JP Morgan has a team of research analysts in Mumbai; another investment bank has a team of PhDs in Moscow doing global quantitative analysis; McKinsey has a research centre of 130 MBAs just outside Delhi.

General Electric is hiring 2000 people a month in India; HSBC now does all its mortgage processing there; Ford employs 1000 design engineers in India. Neptune Orient Lines has centralised its global accounts receivable, accounts payable and general ledger operations in Shanghai; Motorola has its R&D centre in Russia, where it employs rocket scientists to design mobile phones."

"Employment in the US services sector has remained unchanged over the past 21 months as the economy has recovered; usually the services industry headcount has grown 5 per cent by this stage of the cycle. The employment growth is happening in India instead."

"The bottom line is that the American corporate system with its focus on headcount, also used by most Australian firms, is directly leading to the so-called "jobless recovery". On the other hand, executives and directors have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders to lower costs where possible, and there is a snowballing effect taking place as companies find their competitors are getting big cost savings by shifting the call centres to India."

"But protests or not, Australian firms will be forced to catch up: drudge work, whether making shirts or data processing, is moving to cheap-labour countries.

Australia will become a nation of salespeople, waiters and - one sincerely hopes - journalists."