India's outsourcing industry takes toll on workforce

[Thor_MN]

Source: CNN.com

But, 26-year-old Vaibhav Vats will tell you, it was doing him no good. His weight had grown to 265 pounds and he was missing out on social life as he worked long overnight hours at a call center. Eventually, he quit.

Call centers and other outsourced businesses such as software writing, medical transcription and back-office work employ more than 1.6 million young men and women in India, mostly in their 20s and 30s, who make much more than their contemporaries in most other professions.

They are, however, facing sleep disorders, heart disease, depression and family discord, according to doctors and several industry surveys.

Loneliness can also take a toll.

"There is no social life," said Vats, who worked at night and either slept or watched television during the day. "You are not meeting new people."




Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/12/25/india.outsourcing.ap/index.html

---

Boo F'ing Hoo. If you don't like the jobs that you have taken from the US, close the call centers. There's lots of people here who will work those jobs at the wages they were making before they were shipped over there.

[CountAllVotes]

1. Welcome to the Great American Workforce

You like the money but ... :nopity:

:dem: :kick:

[OhioChick]

2. ........

:nopity:

Welcome to the "Global Economy."

[The Backlash Cometh]

3. Did you get those symptoms? sleep disorders, heart disease, depression and family discord,

Isn't that the American experience?

[orleans]

5. yes, that is the "american experience" but apparently it is NO LONGER

"uniquely american"

[The Backlash Cometh]

7. Life does seem to have a way of finding a balance.

You want American jobs? You also get to experience its dysfunctional byproducts.

[mcscajun]

4. Yup. Those are all the problems that *used* to be faced by US IT workers...

until unemployment or UNderemployment became our biggest problem.

Big difference: We got paid more.

I no longer live on TUMS, but then I'm only getting 1/3 of my old salary.

[Skittles]

6. yes

actually, my main reason for Tums these days is having to deal with the India folk who took your job :(

[OhioChick]

9. After 7 Pay Cuts....

I've moved up from Tums to Pepcid.

[DainBramaged]

22. Hear Hear

:hi: :hi: :hug:

[Vinca]

8. Worse yet for poor Vaibhav, as soon as they find a cheaper place

to outsource his job, he'll be tossed out the door as if he was an American worker.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

39. its a race to the bottom. soon as another country finds a cheaper way to do this

the corporations will move

[Ohio Joe]

10. oh boo f'ing hoo yourself

It can't be the fault of the CEOs making the decisions to outsource, noooo, it has to be the fault of the poor bastard that took the job.

[Thor_MN]

14. Sorry if you misunderstood, I'm not in favor of any aspect of outsourcing.

Or insourcing for that matter. I've seen way too many good paying jobs evaporate because of greedy corporations. If Ravi or whatever his name is doesn't like the job, he needs to ask for more money so that the corporations realize the full costs of having sleep deprived people with heavy accents represent their company. One bad customer experience costs a company more business than 10 good experiences. The total cost of outsourcing isn't immediately felt.

I blame both CEOs and the people willing to take jobs at less than market rate. If he is not happy with his job, he is not making enough money, and I don't feel a bit sorry for him.

[Ohio Joe]

15. ummm

1 - You directly blame Vats. "Boo F'ing Hoo. If you don't like the jobs that you have taken from the US, close the call centers"

2 - From the very first paragraph of the article: "Eventually, he quit."

3 - Regarding Vats being "willing to take jobs at less than market rate" this from the second paragraph: "who make much more than their contemporaries in most other professions".

You seem to have a big issue with the people of India because CEOs here in America are outsourcing there. I'm hoping you did not really read the article you posted and only put up your comments in anger. They come across to me as very ugly. I would hope you really think about this issue and stop blaming those that have not done anything wrong.

I'm not very big on outsourcing either but quite frankly you still seem to be blaming the wrong person for the cause of it. I think this comment from you says a lot: "If Ravi or whatever his name is doesn't like the job, he needs to ask for more money so that the corporations realize the full costs of having sleep deprived people with heavy accents represent their company.". The man has a name, it's Vats, and neither you nor I have any idea what his accent is like. You appear to have judged him though and deem him worthy only of ridicule.

[Enrique]

11. how much does Mr. Vats weigh now?

[treestar]

12. So you would never take a job here if a foreign company were

the investor who established the company? Because that job is "stolen" from that country's national.

This is just immature. There has to be a better way of dealing with this question than this.

If he doesn't like the job, it's my estimate that neither would most Americans. He's bellyaching about the job itself - most Americans would do that too if it were still located here.

[Thor_MN]

13. He's not happy with the job because the Earth rotates.

In order to work a call center job servicing United States callers, you have to work overnight. What would be a 9-5 job here is somthing like 8PM to 4AM job there. If one has never worked night shifts, they can not appreciate how isolating it is. Everyone else you know is 11 time zones away from you, but living next door. You body is telling you it's time to wake up while you are desparately trying to will yourself to sleep so you can get some sleep before having to go to work.

The entire problem, beyond the greedy corporations, is that the job is in the wrong place. To be real time in the US, the job should be in the US. There are plenty of good reasons for night shifts (Hospitals, Nursing homes, where I worked night shifts, others). Outsourcing call centers is not one of them.

I know many people, who liked their jobs, who watched them go to India and elsewhere. The problem isn't the job, it's the time zone.

[Nobody]

56. I worked at a 24 hour call center

All the 8 to 4 Monday through Friday shifts went to the people at corporate headquarters. Because we were "acquired" we got all the weekends, all the 10AM to 8PM (my shift, by the way), all the evenings, overnights, holidays AND we had mandatory overtime to the tune of every day work an extra hour, staying late or coming in early to suit them and it was always the least convenient for you no matter the shift, plus you had to pull 8 hours or more on a day you normally would have off, they chose the day. By the way, that was only us, not the corporate 8-4 crew. They got all the holidays off, too.

Their goal was to burn people out so they could hire new grads from the tech schools. I know because the manager actually said this in a meeting. His response to our collective jaw drop was "If you don't like it, you can quit." Begin mass exodus. Company is also a staunch anti-union company. They'd fire you if you so much as said the word union in any context.

Not the fault of the time zones, bad work environments are everywhere, and bad management and corporate greedy pigs will seek to divide us when we should be uniting.

[OhioChick]

17. Your Tune and Attitude Will Change Once

They Start Outsourcing Legal Work. (I Believe you said that you were a lawyer)

Oh........They already are.....Imagine that!

U.S. losing legal work to overseas firms

Posted Tuesday, December 12, 2006

If the jobs at General Motors or DaimlerChrysler's plant in Delaware suddenly moved to China, people wouldn't be shocked. Manufacturing jobs have been moving offshore for years.

But what if major corporations decided it was cheaper working with lawyers in India?

The practice already has begun. And the Wilmington-based DuPont Co. is recognized as a pioneer in the growing trend.

The legal offshoring industry is estimated to be about $60 million to $80 million today -- tiny in comparison with the estimated $225 billion U.S. legal industry -- but it has the potential to grow up to $4.7 billion by 2011-12 in India alone, according to a report by Crisil Research and Information Services.

The cost of working with lawyers in India averages $50 to $70 an hour, compared with an American lawyer with the equivalent experience who would get paid $200 or more. An Indian lawyer working as a temp would cost $20 or less, where as one in this country would cost up to $70 an hour.
http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061212/BUSINESS/612120341/1003

Legal research growing globally

U.S. firms using services of outsourcing companies
Posted Thursday, December 21, 2006

Ruby Prasad’s legal research and briefs regularly find their way into courts across the United States despite the fact her workstation is located 8,000 miles away in India.

Prasad is among the 200 lawyers working for Chicago-based Mindcrest Inc., which has an outsourcing facility in Mumbai.

Mindcrest and other legal outsourcing firms are experiencing explosive growth. Mindcrest is 10 times the size it was two years ago.

According to George Hefferan, vice president and general counsel, Mindcrest plans to add 200 more employees by the end of 2007.

Atlas Legal Research, another legal outsourcing company with offices in Bangalore, India, and Fort Worth, Texas, also grew tenfold in the last two years. The company employed three attorneys in India in 2004. Today, it has 30.

http://www.dailyherald.com/business/story.asp?id=262418


U.S. firms outsource legal services to India
August 21, 2007

NEW YORK: Bruce Masterson, the chief operating officer of Socrates Media, asked his outside counsel to customize a residential lease for all 50 U.S. states in 2003. About $400,000 was the firm's estimate. He rejected that cost and hired QuisLex, a firm in Hyderabad, India, that did the work for $45,000.

"It was good quality," said Masterson, whose company, which is based in Chicago, publishes legal forms on the Internet. "We've been working together ever since."

Clients are pushing law firms like Jones Day and Kirkland & Ellis to send basic legal tasks to India, where lawyers tag documents and investigate takeover targets for as little as $20 an hour. The firms are part of a trend that will move about 50,000 U.S. legal jobs overseas by 2015, according to Forrester Research in Boston.

"The objective is to have only the most valuable people in London or New York, and the others in India, China or Columbus, Ohio," said Robert Profusek, co-head of the mergers and acquisitions practice at Jones Day in New York.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/21/business/law.php

I hope you don't end up "bellyaching" about "your" job in the not so distant future.

I hope for a response, instead of your usual hit-and-run posts on outsourcing threads.

[treestar]

40. I'm self employed

Lawyers are licensed here not only by country, but by state. So they'd have to come to the U.S. to go to law school and take the bar exam, at the very least. But probably what they are needed for is Indian and Chinese law.

I don't see anyone else having a job as a threat to my chance to make a living. No one really needs to. If I had a job and it was sent to India (why they would need a Delaware lawyer in India I have no idea, but let's say they do) I either go there or get another job here. The job you hold now is not the only job in existence for you. Or you can start your own company.

We have to get away from the mentality that Big Business owns us and can starve us if they choose to locate elsewhere. Making that presumption sets the frame that they are in charge.

And you've completely overlooked my point that some investors will come here from abroad. So you'd refuse to take such a job, because you would be "stealing" it from the Indians or Mexicans or Swedes or whoever? Everyone who works for Honda should just stop going to work, right, rather than "steal" those jobs from Japanese people?

[LanternWaste]

16. How did they take the jobs from the U.S.?

"If you don't like the jobs that you have taken from the US, close the..."

How did they take the jobs from the U.S.? I was under the impression that those particular jobs given to them by C.E.O.'s wanting to reduce the bottom line...

In other words, 'we gave them the jobs' rather than 'they took the jobs from us'.


Anyways, I'm of the opinion that bad working conditions affect us all at the end of the day... regardless of whether those bad working conditions are on 'our' side of the imaginary red and blue line of a map, or the 'other' side.

[Name removed]

18. Deleted sub-thread

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Lone_Star_Dem]

19. Becoming stressed out and emotionally bankrupt is all part of the job package

Never fear, all you need to do is look to the US for guidance as to how we dealt with these problems when these were our jobs.

We learned how to deal with the old "burn out" problem years ago. We have doctors here who are more then willing to peddle--I mean prescribe our cure all modern pharmaceuticals. Give us a call, we'll gladly write you a script for whatever it is that ails you. When you need help dealing with the side effects of the cure, don't worry, we have another pill to treat those too.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

20. boo fucking hoo to you. its your country and your ceo and your politicians that make these decisions

why blame another person who is just trying to make his/her living.

with this level of stupidity, no wonder american politicians and ceo's get away with whatever they want to do.

:eyes:

[DainBramaged]

21. If that's the case, why do you live here????

[La Lioness Priyanka]

23. my mother married someone here and move years ago. i think this is in many ways a great country

that doesnt excuse the stupid xenophobia of this thread.

[ChromeFoundry]

25. you seem quick to blame an American

trying to keep his/her job. Somehow, you find, the American is at fault when he/she loses their job to an offshore agenda. I see this thread as U.S. citizens sick and tired of seeing their and their ancestors hard work and loyalty to a nation, constantly being stomped upon by capitalists and corrupt politicians. I do not see too many people blame foreigners for taking the jobs they are offered.

The fault rests with the corporations and politicians selling out the American dream, and you are always on the side of condoning those "right-wing" actions for the benefit of another nation's people.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

26. i didnt blame americans, i pointed out that the decisions are coming from this country

not from india. indians cannot 'take' these jobs away forcibly.

i think you are reading what you want to read. i specifically said 'CEO's and Politicians"

[ChromeFoundry]

29. I didn't blame Indians for accepting a job

I blamed this government. How is that reading what I want to read?

I will be doing my part this next election by NOT voting for any candidate that wants to:
- increase the H1B visa cap
- give tax breaks to companies move jobs to foreign lands to gain quick profits
- put the oil and pharmaceutical agenda over the well being of citizens
- supports NAFTA/CAFTA

So i guess that means Hillary will not be receiving my vote.

[OhioChick]

30. Info For You:

(Courtesy of Antigop)

Hillary Clinton Pushes For More H1B Visas and OutSourcing
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhLBSLLIhUs

Lou Dobbs: Hillary Clinton's Hypocrisy (Part 1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLNOSGM2jK4

Lou Dobbs: Hillary Clinton's Hypocrisy (Part 2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgdrh2Bc95M

[IndianaJones]

31. woo hoo. Lou Dobbs...concerned racist. nt.

[OhioChick]

32. Your Job Hasn't Been Outsourced Yet? n/t

[IndianaJones]

33. I'm fighting the orientals for my very survival. nt.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

34. if mine were, i would blame the corporate fat cats and not some lower middle class person in india

or wherever my job went.

[ChromeFoundry]

35. Lou Dobbs is a patriot, not a racist.

His aims are to retain U.S. jobs.

He does not put blame on Mexicans, Indians and the Chinese for the jobs they are offered. His goal is to keep alive the American dream for all U.S. citizens, not just the elite CEOs and politicians.

That is not something you can say HRC aims to protect!

[IndianaJones]

36. Lou Dobbs is a racist. I'm sure he is a patriot to those that think like him. nt.

[ChromeFoundry]

37. Show me...

If you believe him to be a racist, prove your point. I'm not going to sit here defending his commentaries to someone that can offer nothing more than juvenile name calling as a basis for an argument.

[IndianaJones]

38. is it his anti-brown people agenda that is so attractive to other patriots? nt.

[ChromeFoundry]

41. Apply, Lather, Rinse...

Repeat response found on Post #61

[IndianaJones]

42. so thats a yes...are you a "patriot"? nt.

[ChromeFoundry]

43. Apply, Lather, Rinse...

Again.. see Post #61

I never got your response.

[IndianaJones]

45. I think we're on the same page...you just use the codeword "patriot". nt.

[ChromeFoundry]

46. Codeword? Patriot is not a codeword...

This is the page I am on.

Source: http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/patriot
patriot (noun): one who loves his or her country and supports its authority and interests.


If you are asking if I support the interests of the United States and its citizens, then, YES, by all means I am a patriot.

[IndianaJones]

47. yep...same page. Dobbs is a racist or "patriot". nt.

[superduperfarleft]

48. :snarf: a "patriot?"

Hardly. And even if he isn't actually a racist, he certainly hangs out with some interesting people.

http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=589

So yes, technically he himself may not be a racist, but if you were to ask me if a particular white guy in the middle of a Klan meeting was a bigot, I'd be inclined to say "yes."

[IndianaJones]

28. whose ancestors? nt.

[AngryOldDem]

44. Have you answered the question yet?

Do you, or do you not, have a problem with defense contracts and other sensitive information being compromised by outsourcing?

Leave the "xenophobic" and "racist" shit alone for a minute and answer it.

And if you think outsourcing is as simple as "dumb schmucks" vs. "cunning CEOS" vs. you have a lot to learn.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

50. that was not the question. the OP was about a guy in india who was suffering

because of his job.

[IndianaJones]

24. whats with the whiny orientals?

next they'll be crying about food or something. if these people had any judeo-christian morality, they would refuse these jobs and die in protest.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

27. seconded. nt

[krabigirl]

49. Welcome to the American nightmare..

[boricua79]

51. ahhh...capitalism...

Shafting the workers in the West...and exploiting the workers in the East. One suffers unemployment...the other suffers exploitation.

And the rich man wins.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

52. thank you. nt

[ChromeFoundry]

53. Perfectly put! n/t

[The Croquist]

54. Don't worry about out sourcing to India

It's about to hit the fan in Southern Asia. When the Pakistanis decide that Musharraf killed Bhutto it will be time to start a war. When Musharraf nukes India and India returns the favor all those call centers will be moving to Ireland.

Erin go braugh

[La Lioness Priyanka]

57. umm yeah.

:eyes:

[Nobody]

55. Divide and conquer, that's how the exploiters win

Speaking as one who was forced out of the IT industry thanks to the corporat fat cats who fired entire departments to ship the jobs overseas, it's not the workers' fault they took jobs that were offered them.

I'm not surprised that the outsourced jobs lead to extra stress, obesity, lack of a social life and the lack of a support network, and all that. The idea when we had those jobs was to burn out the tech support people as quickly as possible. That was admitted to by my boss when I worked a phone tech job after I had missed two weeks of work from a stress-induced migraine. I won't work phone jobs again, I literally can't, but some love those jobs.

Blame the corporate pigs bursting their stomacjs at the trough of greed, not the people who need to feed their families and therefore will take any reasonbly good job that comes along.

India will lose their jobs to cheaper companies when the people of India become too prosperous. The corporate pigs outsourced only the work, not the management nor the infrastructure. Rising tides aren't supposed to lift all boats, only the yachts, it's supposed to wash over and swamp the humble fishing boats. So sayeth the corporate pigs.

[Nobody]

58. Isn't irony fun?

Here are the ads that showed up at the top of the page when I clicked this topic.

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Three for four showing us ways we can export jobs and drive locals into poverty. What is it about prosperity for all that corporations and conservatives can't stand? My guess is that these selfish pigs want it all for themselves and don't want to see actual consumers consuming.

Thought experiment to give to the next conservative you see: What if you owned everything in the world worth owning, including all of the money, and I do mean ALL of it?