Wipro's Azim Premji - 'The man who wants to take your jobs'

[mailings02 at ttlexceeded.com (Bob George)]

Josh Pollak wrote:

>[...]
> However, its important to make sure that we truly are redistributing the 
> excess wealth of this country to those who need it; and rather than 
> being at the expense of the average worker, the excess wealth should 
> come from the overly rich and large corporations.

Ow. Sorry, but "redistributing" is in the eye of the beholder. I 
more-or-less agree with much of what you're saying, but I don't think 
the government's job is to do that.

> One way I see this working is for the government to send foreign minimum 
> wage standards. For example, if American corporation Foo wants to out 
> source programming to Bar, they should be required to pay Barian 
> programmers xx% of the average American programmers salary, where xx 
> would be reasonably large. This would have the dual effect of 
> discouraging outsourcing while simultaneously benefitting the recipient 
> nations of outsourcing.

Let's just keep it simple and tax what's done overseas in accordance 
with how those countries penalize our attempts to enter their markets. 
We can't really dictate what's done in other countries, only our own. 
(Well, recent wars not counting.) Trade should be equitable.

> Just an idea, I'm not an economist or an international trade specialist, 
> so I don't know how this would affect trade laws, or how much outsourced 
> programmers get paid already.

I drive a Japanese car. I know there were American workers who were 
impacted by the shift of the automotive industry to Japan (and now 
Korea, etc.). I also know that the two American cars I bought because 
they WERE american (Dodge and Ford) pretty well fell apart within 5 years.

The only way we can hope to change these trends is to learn from the 
lessons of the past. Customers do deserve quality, regardless of where 
the product is made. That extends into service (i.e. call centers) and 
the rest.

I don't claim to have answers either. One argument against Open Source 
(often expressed on the ISP Wireless list) is that Open Source is 
unfairly putting American programmers out of work. I don't think that's 
true myself, but I can't say that for every job "eliminated", one's been 
created.

I'm not as troubled by the fact that jobs (use the buggy-whip analogy) 
go away, nor that some jobs I've done in the past are less lucrative 
these days (former Novell CNI). I am troubled at the shenanigans the 
politicians play to undercut the American workers to benefit corporate 
interests.

- Bob