Uninentended consequences......and outsourcing

It appears IBM has a novel approach to both outsourcing and lay-offs in these troubled times. Big Blue's "Project Match" offers laid-off employees in the US (5,000 of them last month) a chance to apply for jobs with IBM in a sizable list of other countries, including India, Nigeria and Russia. Those taking up the offer, who are deemed to be good workers, will be assisted with travel expenses and obtaining visas.

The only catch is, you'd have to be willing to work for local pay and conditions in the country where you're located. This may appeal to some young folk looking for a ticket to an exotic location, but for most people it wouldn't really be an option. Of course none of this is new. IBM, like many other companies, has for several years been actively building its capability to outsource it's own functions, and those of its clients, to places with cheap labour.

I've been wondering how many tens of thousands of redundancies (lay-offs) recently announced in the EU and North America would probably have happened anyway - crash or no crash. The rush to outsource to China and / or India hasn't stopped as far as I know.

Tighter, tougher times may even have seen some outsourcing moves extended and / or brought forward.The US lost over 600,000 jobs in January '09 alone. Just over a third of those lost were in manufacturing. Just how many of those were surplus to requirements and how many were destined to be outsourced anyway, we have no easy way to tell. I haven't seen press releases anoucing the opening of factories in China or India, yet thousands have been opened by the world's largest manufacturers. Also consider, job losses in the target outsourcing countries will also tend to mask such shifts at their other end. For example, ANZ is recruiting like crazy in India right now, even as they seek ways to shed workers in Australia and New Zealand. With the crash they no longer have to make excuses.

CUSTOMER ASSISTANT:

ANZ OPERATIONS AND TECHNOLOGIES PVT. LTD, ( Karnataka-Bangalore)
GRADUATES CUSTOMER ASSISTANT: looking for candidates with 1-2 years of experience handling only credit card queries. Experience: 1 to 2

From: jobviewer.com - 5 days 21 hours ago Email More Research Salary

Excellent Opening with ANZ for Non Techical Graduates

ANZ Operations And Technologies Pvt Ltd (Bangalore, India)
We have Walk-in Event starting from 16th of Feb to 21st of Feb 2009 We have multiple positions open with us in Financial Process. If you are interested to work with world class organisation, please walk in to our office on the given date above with your updated profile. Candidates who don t meet .

Another local example of outsourcing that was likely going to happen regardless: Telecom NZ is outsourcing a further 250 jobs to the Philippines over the next 18 months. I'm betting that move on the cards before the crash. When that programme is complete, Telecom says there will 1,600 contact centre jobs in NZ and 700 overseas. That should help keep NZ wages down, as the threat of your job heading off-shore will be ever present.

Time to do some research on that one.

Of course all these lost jobs everywhere place ever more loans at risk and add billions more to the burden of bad debt that seems to grow ever larger every day. Many Kiwi families rely on having two incomes and losing just one of them can still leave a family in dire straits, chewing up the credit cards in the hope things come right before they hit the limit and fall over.

One might be forgiven for seeing the bail-outs now underway around the world as having the unintended side effect of making people unemployed and instead becoming massive subsidy programs for troubled companies to enable offshore outsourcing. All to "save the economy".

There's the idea. Raw and undeveloped and needing some research. I can see the opportunity there for people who want to mask outsourcing as necessary cutbacks in tough times...and a company in trouble will today be able to do things (more and bigger) like outsourcing to survive that were unthinkable a year ago.

Now let's see what's happening. I'm sure this will go into the mix with everything else.