by JYOTI SARASVATI
When Romney criticized outsourcing in his election campaign, he broke with Republican tradition.[i] Outsourcing had been one of the few topics in which both parties appeared to genuinely disagree on, the one issue in which the underlying class dynamics of the pro-business Republicans and labor-backed Democrats were laid bare. By taking the lead in condemning outsourcing, Romney has been able to shift the contours of the debate, from the issue of class interests within the US, to the notion of a zero-sum affair between nations. Obama has quietly acquiesced to this new framework.
But how valid is this shift? Can the outsourcing of an American call-centre or software job to Bangalore in India, or a US manufacturing job to China, really be understood in the simple terms of a net loss for the US and a net gain for India or China? Is there a better framework for understanding the process?
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But there is another side to this story.
It can be argued that whatever the wider economic and societal benefits emerging from the industry, they accrue only to a thin layer of Indian society: the upper-middle class who comprise the owners, managers and workers of the industry. The vast majority of the Indian population remain untouched by the industry’s rapid development and global success, unable to enter it due to a lack of access to the education such jobs require. It is this view that has prompted professors Jayati Ghosh and C.P. Chandrasekhar to label the industry as an ‘exaggerated development opportunity’.
More controversially, it is possible to go one critical step further and make the case that the costs of the industry outstrip its benefits, and that the majority of the Indian population are not so much untouched by the industry as disadvantaged by it.
The Counterpunch for more