If you live in a rich, English-speaking nation and your work involves a computer or a telephone, don’t expect to have a job in five years’ time. Almost every large British company that relies on remote transactions is starting to dump its workers and hire cheaper workers overseas — mainly in India.
Britain’s industrialisation, based on textiles, was secured by destroying Indian manufacturing capacity. In 1700 it banned the import of superior cotton cloth from India.
Throughout the late 18th and 19th centuries the sub-continent was forced to supply raw materials to Britain’s manufacturers, but it was forbidden to produce competing finished products. Britain is rich because India is poor.
Now the jobs stolen 200 years ago are being returned. Britain’s National Rail Enquiries service is likely to move to Bangalore, in south-west India, while HSBC bank announced it was cutting 4 000 customer service jobs in Britain and shifting them to Asia. BT, British Airways, Lloyds TSB, Prudential, Standard Chartered, Norwich Union, Bupa, Reuters, Abbey National and Powergen are already moving their call centres to India.
There is profound historical irony here. Indian workers can out-compete British workers today because Britain smashed their ability to compete in the past. Having destroyed India’s own industries, the East India Company and colonial authorities obliged its people to speak English, adopt British working practices and surrender their labour to multinational corporations.
Workers in call centres in Germany and Holland are less vulnerable because their countries were less successful colonists, and fewer people in the poor world speak their languages.
The impact on British workers will be devastating. Service jobs were supposed to make up for the loss of manufacturing employment that disappeared abroad in the 1980s and 1990s.
The British government handed out grants for cyber-sweatshops in places where the industrial workforce had been crushed. The companies running the call centres appear to have tested their systems at the government’s expense before exporting them.
It is not hard to see why most have chosen India. The wages of workers in the service and technology industries there are roughly one-tenth of those in Britain. Educational standards are high and almost all educated Indians speak English.
While British workers will take call-centre jobs only when they have no choice, Indian workers see them as glamorous. One technical support company in Bangalore recently advertised 800 jobs. It received 87 000 applications. British call centres moving to India can hire the most charming, patient, compliant, intelligent workers available.
There is nothing new about multinational corporations forcing workers to undercut each other. What is new is the extent to which the workers of poor nations also threaten the security of the British middle classes.
At least 30 000 executive positions in Britain’s finance and insurance industries are likely to be transferred to India over the next five years.
United States consultants Forrester Research predict the US will lose 3,3-million white-collar jobs between now and 2015, most of them to India. Half are menial jobs such as taking calls and typing data.
The rest are for managers, accountants,underwriters, computer programmers, IT consultants, biotechnicians, architects, designers and corporate lawyers.
For the first time British and American professional classes face direct competition from another nation. Over the next few years we can expect a lot less enthusiasm for globalisation in political parties and the newspapers that represent them. Free trade is fine — if it affects someone else’s job.
Historical restitution is taking place as hundreds of thousands of jobs flee to an economy Britain ruined. In India a new middle class is developing in cities previously dominated by caste.
Its spending will stimulate the economy, which may lead to higher wages and better job conditions. The corporations, of course, will then flee to a cheaper country, but they will leave money behind.
Consultants Nasscom-McKinsey, India, will earn $17-billion a year from outsourced jobs by 2008. But the most vulnerable British communities are losing jobs meant to rescue them.
Two-thirds of call-centre workers are women. As jobs become less secure, multinationals will demand ever harsher conditions of employment in an already exploitative industry.
At the same time they will oblige Indian workers to mimic British working methods, accents and tastes — to persuade customers in Britain that they are talking to someone down the road. India’s most marketable skill today is the ability to abandon cultural identity.
The benefits of outsourcing jobs to India do not cancel the harm caused. This is the world order established by Britain and sustained by the heirs to the East India Company, the multinational corporations, who operate only in their own interests.
Sometimes these coincide with those of a disadvantaged group — but only by disadvantaging another.
For centuries the British have ignored the extent to which their welfare depends on denying other people’s. They will begin to understand the system they created only when it turns against them. — Â