Quote:
Originally posted by cuaphi
Okay, just a couple of things here. I agree that the overall globalization of commerce is not inherently a bad thing. However, the numbers presented here are way off. An Indian in a call center makes the equivilant of $10,000 a year. That provides a stable middle to upper middle class income in India. Second, a help desk job in the middle of the boom used to pay pretty well. Now I see (and have been called about) jobs at the IBM call center in Boulder where they're offering $10-11/hour. The market has been driven down by two things. One, the market was so inflated that they had to come back down and two, competition with Indian labor means that a job requiring a decent skill level has become quite low paying.
My boyfriend's company just sold the application he supports to a company based in India looking to break into the North American market. They're keeping the tech support crew and a couple of others while they set up a Broomfield office... for now. The software engineers and project managers are being offered sad little lay off packages. It's about 10 people in total which isn't a lot but the job market is unlikely to reabsorb these people any time soon.
On the one hand I can see how Americans have a sense of entitlement when it comes to well paying jobs and that the artificial pay inflation in IT in the late 90's was unsustainable. On the other hand I get angry when I see people constantly losing their jobs when they're well educated, hard working and have invested too much time and money to start over. People have tried to argue that this is the same as the evolution of the agriculture or manufacturing industries but it seems to me that those shifts took place over a larger period of time.
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Why did they go into those fields? Perhaps they can try and invest to get an even higher education with more opportunities in something that won't go away quickly.
-Rudey