IT'S NOT THE JOBS, IT'S THE TAX REVENUES

Jobs take trip abroad: Growing trend toward IT outsourcing is a boon for India (SCOTT LEITH, 5/4/03, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

A generation ago, an ambitious native of India like Vivek Kaluskar might have left his country for good.

Now, the 25-year-old is planning to go back to his home city of Bangalore when he leaves Georgia Tech with a degree in computer science.

He'll return to become part of a huge and growing tech sector in Bangalore, where local companies mingle with outposts of American giants like Microsoft.

He'll earn less money -- maybe $1,000 a month -- but he'll live on less, too.

"With the software boom, the standard of living is better," he said. "More and more people are able to afford larger cars. Before, people didn't own cars."

Bangalore, a city of 5.5 million, has become one of the world's hot spots for the kind of white-collar jobs that were long a strength of the U.S. economy.

Now, many are moving overseas.

Coca-Cola, for example, already outsources about 15 percent of its information technology work and plans to do even more to cut costs. Few of those jobs have gone abroad so far, but in the future, about 70 percent of Coke's outsourced work will end up overseas, chiefly in India.

This increasing mobility of many jobs -- in IT, but also in areas like accounting and engineering, and in less-skilled fields like call centers -- has grown into a mainstream trend. There's concern that tech jobs could make a shift akin to what happened when manufacturing jobs migrated to Mexico, China and Southeast Asia. As with those factory jobs, the job market for American tech workers, already depressed by the dot-com bust and the stagnant economy, could get tighter.

"The Internet has made this world a lot smaller," said Paul Eurek, co-CEO of Xpanxion, an Alpharetta company that specializes in moving tech work offshore for clients that include Coke. "It is the way it's going to go."

This is the phenomenon that Ali mentioned yesterday. Our company sends a bunch of what would be called IT work to India, but it it's really glorified data entry and they struggle even with that. But it's a trend to worry about, especially as our schools decline. These are the people who we're counting on immigrating here and paying for our Social Security. If they aren't coming, we better privatize even faster. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 4, 2003 8:41 AM