Pressure at home

Published : Dec 03, 2010 00:00 IST

At a call centre in Chennai. Call centres in India are one of the most visible forms of job outsourcing. With the new information technology, secure communication lines and the lower wages of Ireland, India and China, white-collar jobs have begun to disappear from the suburban enclaves in the U.S. where they had grown.-ALU JOHN

At a call centre in Chennai. Call centres in India are one of the most visible forms of job outsourcing. With the new information technology, secure communication lines and the lower wages of Ireland, India and China, white-collar jobs have begun to disappear from the suburban enclaves in the U.S. where they had grown.-ALU JOHN

Obama's India trip comes under attack as the media and talk show commentators in the U.S. play on white-collar anger over job losses.

THE airwaves cackle with the sound of Talk Radio. On the liberal side of the dial, Ed Schulz complains that President Barack Obama has done a bad deal with India. He brings out his scales. Obama says that the trade deals conducted with India will create 54,000 jobs. That is good and well. But the United States has lost five million jobs, Schulz moans, which means that the scales are unbalanced. Schulz does not say that five million U.S. jobs were shipped to India. That would be preposterous. But his measurement implies it.

On the conservative side of the radio and television dial, the vitriol is hard to take. Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity have let loose all the guns. Beck, who has a problem with facts, lamented that Obama and his entourage would spend $2 billion for 10 days in India to go see the festival of lights. His co-host, who does not seem to know the population of India, pointed out, I mean, you could bring almost all of India to Washington for less than $2 billion. They were not interested in either the outsourcing question or the other trade deals. Obama was their target. They have no other.

Discussion in the U.S. of Obama's trip has been underwhelming. Part of it has to do with bad timing. The midterm elections happened a few days before he left. It appeared as if he was fleeing the scene of the carnage. The newly emboldened Republicans went hastily to Washington to claim their prize. They want to repeal the health insurance law and to make a mess of whatever remains of Obama's agenda. The most boisterous are the Tea Party candidates. Sarah Palin released a video that claimed the victory for herself, even as many of her most visible candidates lost the election. All this detained the press. Delhi is too far away.

As well, out of his long hibernation came George W. Bush. His memoir, Decision Points, was released as the Obamas left India for Indonesia. Written in the typical style of presidential memoirs, Bush's book nonetheless has some compelling sections. Notably, he admits that he authorised torture (waterboarding of a number of prisoners) and has no remorse for it (he claims that medical experts assured the CIA that it did no lasting harm, which is not the best measure of torture). He also says that he had a sickening feeling every time he thought about the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. No one was more shocked and angry than I was when we didn't find the weapons. But he does not apologise for the war. The reasons for going into Iraq might have been spurious, but not the war itself. Bush's reappearance smothered the press reports on Obama's soft power demonstrations in India.

India did come up during the elections. Both Republicans and Democrats pummelled each other on the issue of outsourcing. It is an expected ploy for the Republicans, who are keen to turn every issue into one of xenophobia or jingoism. Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner led the charge a few years ago with an anti-immigration Bill; at the same time, his family business, Kimberly Clark, moved its operations to Mexico and China. This is the clearest example of the shallow political discourse on globalisation: fear-mongering alongside profiteering.

The Democrats, who are often less willing to feast off the politics of fear and panic, followed the Republican playbook. Senator Barbara Boxer of California and her defeated challenger Carly Fiorina (former head of Hewlett-Packard) feuded over outsourcing. Of Carly Fiorina, Barbara Boxer said, My opponent never cared much for American jobs. She laid off 30,000 workers and shipped their jobs to China, to India, to Malaysia, all over the world, and while she was doing it she enriched herself (Carly Fiorina's net worth is $2.2 billion). Carly Fiorina countered that Barbara Boxer has taken tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from companies that have outsourced jobs that have outsourced for years.

The word India now refers in many quarters to outsourcing. On the Ed Schulz show they joked that if you call customer service, you get a guy called Ralph on the phone. What he means is Rajiv, the commentators laughed. NBC has a new sitcom called Outsourced, which follows the travails of Todd Demsey, who prefers to relocate to India rather than get fired. He has to train his call centre Indian colleagues in the ways of America. On NBC, the show follows The Office, which is an American adaptation of the successful British comedy. The Office is an anxiety-ridden show, where the pathetic characters glide between comedic shenanigans and the horror of being laid off. Outsourced picks up the thread right after The Office ends, and it takes us to the outer limits of disquiet for the white-collar American worker.

Geography of production

The U.S. economy shed considerable parts of its manufacturing sector starting in the 1970s. Fewer U.S. workers now manufacture things than they did a generation ago. Those jobs went to Mexico, China, Malaysia and to other places where transnational firms hired subcontractors to make and process products. This was the new geography of production. That shedding of jobs created anger, notably in the 1980s when anti-Japan feeling led to attacks on anyone who looked Japanese. (The most notable example was the violent beating to death of Vincent Chin in 1982 by two auto workers in Detroit, Michigan. Vincent, a Chinese American man, was beaten by them because they associated him with Japan, which was exporting cars to the U.S.) The working class and the unions, however, had insufficient power to tackle the disarticulation of industrial production. It came like a force of nature and left them stranded.

During this current period, over the past five years, it is no longer the industrial working class that has seen its jobs disappear in large numbers. The new unemployed are white-collar managerial workers who inhabited the office parks, answering phones, managing inventory and straightening up databases. With the new information technology, secure communication lines and the lower wages of Ireland, India and China, these white-collar jobs have begun to disappear from the suburban enclaves where they had grown.

It is the departure of these jobs during the last recession that fuelled the rise of the Tea Party and the anti-Obama movement. These are educated workers who did not expect to lose their jobs. Their sense of entitlement is fierce. Unlike the industrial working class, they know how to use the system and are kindling for the incendiary rhetoric of Sarah Palin, Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck. Tea Party patriots held anti-outsourcing rallies across the country before the election. One Tea Party member wrote, Outsourcing is a pit that America needs to climb out of. At the bottom of the pit is India. One Tea Party wag said that Obama should have gone to Bangalore and outsourced the U.S. presidency. The rhetoric is not pleasant.

The numbers tossed around are of concern. Sourcing Line notes that 1.3 million jobs have been outsourced to India. Add to that some 150,000 H1B workers who have come from India to the U.S. These are the numbers thrown back against the 54,000 jobs that Obama projects will come out of the Indian trade deals (as one Tea Party activist put it, this is a jobs deficit). No doubt that frustration over these numbers will grow, and anti-India agitation will intensify. There is little that the words of Ron Somers of the U.S.-India Business Council can do to mollify what has snowballed into anger.

Thom Hartmann, a progressive radio show host, reported that Obama had cut billions of dollars of deals with India. He noted that Obama said that these deals would create jobs in the U.S. This amused him. Hartmann pointed out that very little was made in America. One premium product is weaponry, so no wonder that a large part of the trade deals cut are for India to buy U.S. weapons. This is not far from the facts. The U.S. had just finished a $60.5-billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia. The deals with India will not amount to as much, but whatever will be finally inked by the year's end will simply add to this mammoth total. The arms industry, which is spread across the congressional districts of the U.S., will hum. Their work will not be outsourced; it defines what remains of manufacturing in the U.S.

Unremarkably, the U.S. media took little interest in Obama's promise to India that his government would support India's bid for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. For over 30 years, the U.S. government has tried its very best to undermine the U.N. The Heritage Foundation ran a campaign in the early 1980s to dull the lustre of the organisation and for the U.S. government to stop its annual membership fees to the U.N. The Reagan administration followed the Heritage line and sent Alan Keyes to 760 United Nations Plaza in New York City (Keyes famously called the U.N. a wobbly house of cards). George W. Bush sent John Bolton to the U.N. as his ambassador. Bolton had once said, There's no such thing as the United Nations. If the U.N. Secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference. The disregard shown to the U.N. Security Council in the lead-up to the Iraq war is commonplace.

Obama even said that India's two-year temporary stint coming up was a probationary period; to wit, India will have to vote with the U.S. to prove that it is a responsible power. Iran must surely be worried. In 1993, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright announced that the U.S. would welcome an expansion of the Security Council, giving seats to Germany and Japan. Not much movement on that front since then. It is unlikely that the U.S. will move with any more energy for India. Hence, the near silence on this pledge in the U.S. media, and from the politicians.

Obama went on to Indonesia and then to South Korea and Japan. Obama's charm, his soft power, remained on full display. In Indonesia he reminisced about his youth and ate bakso (meatball soup) off a street cart. Meanwhile, behind the scenes all the generals and the CEOs conducted their deals. When these fell short, Obama's magnetic effect was brought into play shaking hands and lobbying for his countrymen.

He was outsourced for 10 days, to be greeted at the airport, when he got home, by the detritus of the elections and the anger at outsourcing.

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