[ppi] [ppiindia] Thomas L. Friedman: Indian jobs, U.S. angst

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      Thomas L. Friedman: Indian jobs, U.S. angst
         Thomas L. Friedman NYT  Monday, February 23, 2004




BANGALORE, India My contemporaries grew up with the hippies in the 1960s.
Thanks to the high-tech revolution, many became yuppies in the 1980s. And
now they should fasten their seat belts, because they may soon lose their
jobs to "zippies" in the 2000s.
.
"The Zippies Are Here," declared the Indian weekly magazine Outlook. Zippies
are this huge cohort of Indian youth who are the first to come of age since
India shifted away from socialism and dived headfirst into global trade, the
information revolution and turning itself into the world's service center.
.
Outlook calls India's zippies "Liberalization's Children," and defines one
as "a young city or suburban resident, between 15 and 25 years of age, with
a zip in the stride."
.
"Belongs to Generation Z," it continues. "Can be male or female, studying or
working. Oozes attitude, ambition and aspiration. Cool, confident and
creative. Seeks challenges, loves risks and shuns fears." Indian zippies
carry no guilt about making money or spending it.
.
They are, says one Indian analyst quoted by Outlook, destination driven, not
destiny driven; outward-looking, not inward-looking; upwardly mobile, not
stuck-in-my-station-in-life.
.
With 54 percent of India under the age of 25 - that's 555 million people -
six of 10 Indian households have at least one zippie, Outlook says.
.
And a growing slice of them (though most Indians are still poor
village-dwellers) will be able to do your white-collar job as well as you
for a fraction of the pay. Indian zippies are one reason outsourcing is
becoming the hot issue in this year's U.S. presidential campaign.
.
I just arrived here in Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley, to meet the
zippies on the receiving end of the outsourced white-collar jobs. Judging
from the construction going on on every block here, the multiple applicants
for every new tech job, the crowded pub scene and the families of four you
see zipping around on single motor scooters, Bangalore is one hot town.
.
Taking all this in, two things strike me about this outsourcing issue.
.
One, economists are surely right: The biggest factor eliminating old jobs
and churning new ones is technological change - the phone-mail system that
eliminated your secretary.
.
As for the zippies who soak up certain U.S. or European jobs, they will
become consumers, the global pie will grow, and ultimately we will all be
better off.
.
As long as the affluent West maintains its ability to do cutting-edge
innovation, the long run should be fine. Saving money by outsourcing basic
jobs to zippies, so we can invest in more high-end innovation, makes sense.
.
But here's what I also feel: This particular short run could be a real
bear - and politically explosive. The potential speed and scale of this
outsourcing phenomenon make its potential impact enormous and unpredictable.
.
As we enter a world where the price of digitizing information - converting
it into little packets of ones and zeros and then transmitting it over
high-speed data networks - falls to near zero, it means the vaunted "death
of distance" is really here. And that means that many jobs one can now do
from home - whether data processing, reading an X-ray, or basic accounting
or lawyering - can now also be done from a zippie's home in India or China.
.
And as education levels in these overseas homes rise to U.S. levels, the
barriers to shipping white-collar American jobs abroad fall and the
incentives rise. At a minimum, some very educated Americans used to high
salaries - people who vote and know how to write op-ed pieces - will either
lose their jobs, or have to accept lower pay or become part-timers without
health insurance.
.
"The fundamental question we have to ask as a society is, What do we do
about it?" notes Robert Reich, the former labor secretary and now a Brandeis
University professor. "For starters we're going to have to get serious about
some of the things we just gab about - job training, life-long learning,
wage insurance. And perhaps we need to welcome more unionization in the
personal services area - retail, hotel, restaurant and hospital jobs which
cannot be moved overseas - in order to stabilize their wages and health care
benefits."
.
Maybe, as a transition measure, adds Reich, companies shouldn't be allowed
to deduct the full cost of outsourcing, creating a small tax that could be
used to help people adjust.
.
Either way, managing this phenomenon will require a public policy response -
something more serious than the Bush mantra of "let the market sort it out"
or the demagoguery of the Democratic candidates, who seem to want to make
outsourcing equal to treason and punishable by hanging. Time to get real.


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