This month, IBM announced Project Match, a program to help laid off workers move overseas with their outsourced jobs … provided of course, that that they’re willing to accept local wages:
“IBM has established Project Match to help you locate potential job opportunities in growth markets where your skills are in demand. Should you accept a position in one of these countries, IBM offers financial assistance to offset moving costs, provides immigration support, such as visa assistance, and other support to help ease the transition of an international move.” [link]
I can see it now, America’s best and brightest leave their homes and everything familiar to them to move overseas and start a new life, one fraught with cultural confusion. A new generation is born in India, one plagued by confusion and self-doubt.
Novelist Juniper L. Harry depicts the lives of these American Indians with a series of stories about Boston Brahmins in Bengal. In her most famous book, the protagonist Tolstoy Thudpucker struggles to figure out where he truly belongs, whether in India or America. His classmates cruelly mock him for his name and for not having an unfamiliar cultural background. Everybody in India is different, they say. But not poor Tolstoy, he’s got no culture of his own:
“What’s your language? American English? That’s like what we speak, but with an accent, right? What do they eat in America? Pepperoni Pizza? What’s that – like Chicken Tikka Pizza but with dried out slices of dead pig on top? Sounds bland and gross! How come we can breakdance better than you? Don’t you even have a dance of your own to teach us?”
Tolstoy suffers through a series of happy marriages and confusing name changes until he attains enlightenment by transcending worldly duality and learning to dance. The Bollywood version of his tale wins plaudits from reviewers across India, none more so than the bloggers over at the IBCA blog Boston Chai Party.
With apologies to Nabokov Ninnington.
Can’t we all just get along
I don’t think these are the ones being offered the “India or bust” deals.
Just to add some more context to this – when IBM was ‘kicked out’ of India in 1977 by the Janata Party government, many Indian employees of IBM had an option to move to the US, for jobs similar to the ones they might have been doing in India, but at US wages. It only took 30 years, but IBM is now more an Indian company than it is an American one (if judged by number of employees): so the logic is the same, but the countries have switched roles. Workforce globalization? What workforce globalization? Wage convergence, what wage convergence?
Not all lay offs are due to “Outsourcing”, especially in IBM in this case – quite a few are due to the current situation of stagnant US market and in many cases,its ‘cuz of the market is contracting.
A good number of jobs (resource action) were from Sales & Distribution. And you can understand, how these affected employees from S&D, can truely go & make impact in the growing regions – if they take up the Project Match option seriously – that is.
BTW – IBM India has approx 75K employees – next only to US in terms of employee count and by some estimation, there’s not much left to outsource from US to India.
Correction to my comment(4).
Not much left to outsource from IBM US to IBM India.
wow. never knew that. do you know if many took up the option.
And 15 years later despite all the hardwork his children put in they fail to clear to gain admission to the prestigious Khandelwal Institute of Technology, Bundelkhand, and instead have to settle for the lowly IITs and even worse go abroad to study at some “Junior University”. Oh what have times come to!!
Not really. They were offered 1-year to 1.5 year conditional appointments at the end of which they had to re-apply. But then you see those days, a green card was a lot easier if one came to the US with a job. Even then not many accepted the offer. My uncle decided to shop around the various IBMs the worked over, and finally chose IBM-Germany and thereon to IBM-Australia. Gulf Oil offered far better terms when they moved out of India in 1963. All Indian employees (my late dad included) were offered a posting in Canada or the Southern USA. My mom being the living expert (since her dad still worked in the UN those days) advised my father against it!
Like Anand Giridhardas ? Unlike Jhumpa Lahiri kinds of yesteryears, I doubt whether the global generation is fraught with such angst.
What a slap in the nuts that offer would be. It is insulting things like this that speaks great volumes about how disconnected CEO’s are from normal people.
Why do we let kids go off to college, just so they can become redundant employees? Just let kids go straight from high school and into a program that teaches them one program and BAM! Your on the same level as some guy who spent years in college working on a CS degree.
May the lords of Cobol, err Kobol, protect us!
Very likely most of the people using this opportunity will be Indians. Hard to believe that Americans would be willing to relocate to India, more so when they can just get unemployment benefits here instead.
Maybe in another 10 years, India will be that lucrative a destination! Not yet.
great post 🙂