Conscience prick!

In early 2001, in Canada, I was walking to my desk on a dull and cold Monday morning and the floor was unusually quiet. People generally were focussed with their work and did not interact too much except on a professional level, but today was unusually quiet - even the odd chirp in the corner was missing and the faces too were gloomy - kind of mirrored the cold weather outside.

I went to my cubicle and turned on the workstation and gave my customary Hi to Fady! He was unusually sober and just said "Did you hear about it".

I replied "About what".

Fady said " Renne and Fadia have been laid off".

I was shocked - Renne used to work in the cubicle next to mine. I asked - "When did this happen".

Fady said "They came to know it in the morning and Renne would come in the afternoon sometime to collect his stuff"

I was dumbstruck - did not know what to say to Fady - my head shook in disbelief. As I turned to my computer screen, I started wondering. What would I tell Renne when he came over. Don't worry buddy, you'll get a better job. And from where? The job scene was grim, recruitments had been frozen for quite a while. Recession, cost-cutting, huge losses and job-cuts were all that you heard of these days.

Met Moiz at the coffee place and he said I guess with you guys (Indians) around, they would need us (client employees) less - Moiz told it playfully but that was the harsh truth.

With the client offshoring to reduce costs, the employees at the client site who were redundant were being moved... The companies were also suffering severe losses due to the recession and that had resulted in large scale lay-offs, but then offshoring too played its bit in the job reduction by moving some jobs to India...

People may say that Offshoring is taking the back-end work and thus helping the industries to focus on exciting, innovative R&D work rather than dull maintenance work. But this is not entirely true - I have seen that atleast in the Telecom industry, some of the companies are outsourcing even key development activities offshore cause the talent in India is phenomenal and at lower costs, it is too compelling a case for clients around the world to ignore...

In our Strategic Management class, we had learnt that if you do not have a competitive advantage, then differentiation will come down to pricing and that is what was happening. We are able to provide the same services at a lower cost and therefore we were preferred over their own existing employees...

Coming back to Renne - he came in the afternoon and gave me a smile and I said a wry "Hi!". As he was talking with the others who dropped by his desk, he broke down and said "I don't know what I'll do - the job market is frozen - I guess I will just have to keep trying. Maybe I will go to a different country, a continent maybe, maybe I'll..." He lost his voice and anyway I could not hear more... I shut down my computer and quietly left for the day

As I was walking back to the apartment I thought "Did I just rob Renne of his job? Was outsourcing all about job stealing? Was our economy growing at the expense of people losing their jobs at the other end of the world" Manmohan Singh seems to disagree saying that job loss is a short term side affect and in the long term the US economy will see benefits out of outsourcing...

I guess all I can say to Renne is "Welcome to the cruel world of Capitalism!"