Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2004 11:31:38 -0800 From: Norm Matloff To: Norm Matloff Subject: more on Hillary Clinton and Tata To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter The other day, I reported the following event which occurred on the Lou Dobbs show on CNN: In recent postings, I've shown that Sen. Hillary Clinton's rhetoric against offshoring is all blarney. She talks a good game, but in reality is in cahoots with the offshoring companies, notably the Indian software giant Tata Consultancy Services--one of the leaders in the importation of H-1Bs and offshoring of jobs. See these postings at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/Hillary3.txt http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/Hillary2.txt http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/Hillary.txt Well, this evening Lou Dobbs did a wonderful job of setting up Clinton, letting her go on and on about how offshoring was so evil--and then confronting her with the Tata evidence! Clinton was then forced to admit that she actually does support offshoring to a significant degree. Clinton then unwittingly compounded her problems by defending Tata's having created 10 jobs in the U.S. Yeah, 10 whole jobs! Tata imports thousands of H-1Bs, and offshores untold numbers of jobs, but hey, they created 10 new jobs in the U.S.! Then I noted that even those measly 10 jobs may well be nontechnical, e.g. sales. A number of readers then responded to me, pointing out (as I should have) that Tata may have filled those 10 jobs with H-1Bs. Well, the enclosed article sheds considerable light on that: [TCS America president Arup Gupta] said TCS is building an office in Buffalo, N.Y., to handle work from Wall Street firms. Seventy percent of the Buffalo office's work is done in India, he said. The remaining 30 percent is done in Buffalo by TCS employees, most of whom are Indian. And lest you think that those 30 percent are Indo-Americans, Gupta goes on to say that they are recruited from Indian universities, and that graduates of American universities don't want to work for Tata, due to lack of name recognition of the firm. That's totally bogus, of course, as there are tons of graduates of American universities who can't get technical work and would jump at the chance if offered. (By the way, the word "graduates" means new or recent graduates. Tata says 98% of its programmers are under age 30! I'll say more on this in an upcoming posting.) As I've mentioned, the Dobbs show has run a number of excellent pieces on H-1Bs/offshoring. Last night's show featured Dobbs debating with Marc Andreesen, who as a college student had written a Web browser which Jim Clark then used as a basis for founding the company Netscape. (He wrongly claimed credit for developing the FIRST browser.) He now runs a company which helps U.S. firms offshore their software work. Andreesen was like a politician in a debate, rattling off a series of memorized statistics while evading Dobbs' questions. (Dobbs was more combative with him than Dobbs had been with Clinton.) Dobbs' other guest on this topic last night was California State Senator Liz Figueroa of Silicon Valley. Sadly, Figueroa was not impressive. She said she wanted to fight offshoring, and has introduced a bill along those lines (SB 1453). But the bill does very little, only requiring that a firm that replaces 20 or more workers with offshore labor report that action to the state's Employment Development Department. Even worse, when Dobbs asked her about the industry's claim to lack qualified programmers, she did not challenge the claim. Norm http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1308874,00.asp Panel: Offshore Outsourcing Is Here to Stay By Stan Gibson October 6, 2003 BOSTON--The United States ought not to fear the move to offshore outsourcing, according to speakers at a panel discussion sponsored by the ITAA here. "Offshoring will not mean the demise of the U.S. economy," said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist of the consultancy Global Insight, in Waltham, Mass. "How do we deal with it? We don't stop it. That would be very costly," he added. Behravesh maintained that the ebb and flow of technology jobs is a natural consequence of free trade, the benefits of which have been demonstrated time and again. "This trend is not new." We've been going through globalization for some time," Behravesh said. "The scary thing is we thought high tech was ours. It isn't." Bruce Mehlman, assistant secretary in the office of technology policy for technology administration of the Department of Commerce, moderated the debate, raising issues such as the impact of layoffs on individuals and communities. In his remarks, he voiced the position of the Bush administration: favoring free trade. "As a trend, offshore outsourcing will continue," Mehlman said. At the same time, the administration is attempting to aid U. S. businesses through research and development tax credits, higher funding for the U. S. Patent Office and aid to technology education, said Mehlman. "America's never going to compete to see who can pay their workers the least. Instead, we need to focus on innovation and an entrepreneurial culture," Mehlman said. The discussion was one of a series in different U. S. cities geared to raise awareness of ITAA's positions on employment in the information technology industry. ITAA, located in the Washington, D.C., area, represents the interests of some 400 IT companies. Pointer For more in-depth analysis on technology labor issues, check out eWEEK'sspecial report, "Will Offshore Outsourcing Drain U.S. Tech?" Absent from the discussion were speakers who may have suffered from the trend to import foreign technology workers under the H-1B visa program or to export technology jobs through offshore outsourcing. Representing what some see as the Indian technology insurgency was Arup Gupta, president of Tata Consultancy Services America. TCS, headquartered in Mumbai, India, has some 6,000 technical consultants at client locations in North America and does $940 million in North American business annually. Gupta addressed fears of security breaches in sending vast amounts of corporate data and business procedures overseas for incorporation into technology systems. He maintained that because of its high dependence on work abroad, the Indian software and consulting industry is extremely diligent to assure the highest security levels. TCS, he said, carries out background checks on its employees. He said TCS is building an office in Buffalo, N.Y., to handle work from Wall Street firms. Seventy percent of the Buffalo office's work is done in India, he said. The remaining 30 percent is done in Buffalo by TCS employees, most of whom are Indian. He said TCS is very well-known in India and attracts the top technology candidates, but is not so well-known here and has trouble attracting star U.S. technology graduates. "We can get the best students in India, but not in the U.S.," he said. As for U.S. workers who might be displaced, he said, "Workers must continually evaluate their skills and add value." William Sweeney, vice president of EDS Global Government, said that U.S. programmers who find themselves out of work ought to look beyond their immediate situation to develop expertise in security technologies. "We're dealing with an issue that is extraordinarily emotional." Sweeney and Behravesh both stressed that maintaining technical skills is a moving target. "You need to be flexible and jump into opportunities. They will be different two to three years from now. There is no safe expertise or skill." He praised certificate programs at such institutions as George Washington University, which are geared to train workers in skills that are in demand. "Too much retraining is after you're laid off. You need to stay on top of trends." Behravesh said, despite the trend to internationalize the technology labor pool, the United States will add technology jobs in the next decade, growing from some 10 million tech workers now to perhaps 15 million in 10 years. "The economic situation now is a perfect storm. We don't know the new technologies that will come. I am not at all worried," he said.