Winter 2006 Alumnae Quarterly Web Extra
Global Outsourcing
More thoughts from Mount Holyoke alumnae on the impact of global outsourcing…
- Lynne Barbee ’69, lead organizer for the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), is currently organizing workers in Michigan. With manufacturing jobs moving overseas, she is seeing closed factories there; “very large, empty buildings.”
- As for the manufacturing might of China, when the Chinese people are able to buy more as well as build more, “there will be an actual global market,” says Nancie Fimbel ’68, associate dean of San Jose State’s College of Business.
- Right now, most developing nations are not ready to compete with the United States at the highest levels, especially in finance and financial products, says Fariha Kamal ’01, pension analyst, Fidelity; but “they will be catching up eventually.”
- There is a question that applies to every nation in the global economy: “Who’s really earning the big bucks?” asks Sonali Gulati ’96. When companies save on labor costs, she asks, “what is happening to the saved money? Does it go into the pockets of the CEOs?”
- There is a “huge chunk of money being saved by multinational corporations,” says Sonali Gulati ’96, when they pay a worker in India $250 per month to work at a call center. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s what a new MBA–graduate working in India would expect to make. “All they have to do is speak English,” says Gulati, documentary filmmaker.
- The trend in night-shift call-center jobs for predominantly younger workers in India is serving to estrange families from each other, as they work on opposite ends of the clock, if not the planet. “There is a cultural shift happening in the parent-child relationship,” says Sonali Gulati ’96.
