The back-room revolution
The next round of the globalisation of jobs might see China, Malaysia and the Philippines competing with India, which Singapore's Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, calls the world's 'information technology and back-room office'. Many westerners resent a trend that may not have been widely known until a British tabloid headline, 'Lloyds off to India', told them that the bank had closed a call centre and transferred 1,000 jobs.
'This is a callous move,' said an official of Unifi, the banking union, accusing Lloyds of showing 'no respect for staff, customers or local communities' and of being 'purely in the business of generating profit without a conscience'. The union's warning of industrial action and a campaign involving customers and members of parliament could place more than a dozen British Indian parliamentarians in a tricky situation.
Another union, Amicus, calls Norwich Union's decision to employ 2,500 people in India to support its general insurance business 'deplorable' and 'despicable'. It, too, has threatened protests.
A confrontation involving jobs and foreign countries could extend beyond trade unionism into the kind of ugly race politics that has reared its head in some European countries. No wonder HSBC, which earlier announced the removal to India of 4,000 jobs by the end of 2006, now sounds cautious. 'We are only conducting a feasibility study,' a spokeswoman assured staff. 'No final decision has been taken.' Lloyds, too, has promised to handle job losses in its Newcastle upon Tyne office 'with care and sensitivity'.
Banks, airlines, insurance companies and health insurers already operate call centres in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad. General Electric, Microsoft and McKinsey, the world's biggest consultants, have laboratories in India. Mumbai's film industry provides the music for many Hollywood movies. Information provider Reuters is cutting costs by setting up centres in Bangalore and Hyderabad. Similar plans will save each of the world's 100 top financial institutions US$1.4 billion by 2008. The US financial sector hopes to transfer 500,000 jobs overseas in five years.
Recently, however, Dell Computer announced that some of its India-based customer-service jobs would be repatriated to the US. That would have delighted trade unionists, as well as the London woman whom I asked for the number of directory inquiries. Throwing up her hands in horror, she exclaimed: 'You'll find yourself talking to someone in Bombay or Bangalore. It'll cost the earth, they won't know a thing, and you won't understand a word they say!' Of course, there are problems. In spite of TV and email, people living thousands of miles away and without local knowledge cannot always answer inquiries authoritatively. Britain is full of jokes about operators in India who master Scottish or Midlands accents, but falter over small physical details.