Networker: Finding more workers
A few months ago this column (GLW #402) raised the question of where information technology workers were going to come from to feed the soaring demands of the advanced capitalist world. Cuts in many areas of public education have left huge gaps in technology training, which private corporations are doing almost nothing to fill.
This question was worrying many capitalists and their governmental representatives. The problem appeared intractable.
There are many ways that a major computer company can make money. If you are Microsoft, you can use your dominant market position to bully, cheat, lie and intimidate individual consumers and other companies to pay you hugely overpriced sums for your software. Nevertheless, Microsoft still depends on its work force, its programmers and the huge range of other workers, to produce, test and sell the products it is based on.
In the software industry there is a product called "vaporware", which is software that never actually exists. Microsoft is a master of the pre-emptive vaporware announcement to undercut interest in a new, independently produced product. But that can only delay buyers of these other products for a year or two, and at the end of the day, with all his billions, Bill Gates still depends on his workers to produce the product he sells.
Internet "dotcom" companies can raise billions of dollars based on wishful thinking and some rich friends (or at least they could until March). But even here, the gamblers ("investors") expect to see the company do something at some time in the future, which requires hiring workers.
If you are an outsourcing company, you can use corrupt and underhanded activity to get governments to hand over their IT business to you. When Margaret Thatcher was Britain's prime minister, you could offer her son a job shortly before winning a huge contract from the government. You could provide round the world trips, or less visible tokens of favour. But, at the end of the day, the big outsourcing companies still need to staff (even inadequately) the systems that they take over. They still need those pesky workers.
Automation can only achieve so much, hardly keeping pace with the growing number and variety of IT systems, especially since the explosion of the Internet.
So what is the answer? Where can all these workers come from? The answer is India.
That may sound odd, but Germany, Britain and Ireland have all relaxed their immigrant worker restrictions this year to bring in Indian programmers. The United States had already adopted the same approach.
As one British IT executive explained: "If we are short of programmers we just put a bunch on the next plane from India". This is almost inconceivable given the Conservative/Labour closed door immigration in place since the early 1970s, but it's happening.
As well, much of the work is simply transferred to India. Today, 40% of the Fortune 500 companies (the world's 500 richest companies according to the US magazine Fortune) outsource their software requirements to India. Last financial year, Indian software exports were US$3.8 billion.
India is also becoming a home to call centres, where thousands of workers packed into purpose-built factories answer customers' calls. Callers to the well-known British firm Harrods may now find themselves answered from Gurgaon, a satellite town of Delhi.
So are we really living in a post-industrial era of virtual reality and cyber freedoms? Or has capitalism just shuffled the location of the working class around a bit?
BY GREG HARRIS