Corporate Responsibility in the Global Economy: Skills Transfers for Better/Worse Life?
When Canadian Sociology Professor Marshall McLuhan predicted in the 1960s that media (television) would create ‘the global village’, none of us could have imagined to what extent the Internet would have revolutionized the way we would work and live just a few decades later.
With the Internet today, you can search and find just about everything in just a few clicks: personal information about your boss, colleagues or neighbors, the latest book of your favorite author, a second-hand car, an exotic 10-day vacation at the other side of the world, a new job, a new flat, a one-night sexual partner, or even your love mate for life. That’s for the benefits!
Any drawback? Sure there are, and not from the lesser ones. Some have already experienced the dark side of globalization by getting their job stolen by incredibly cheaper, more docile third-world workers. Why do we need to pay a programmer $40 an hour in Europe or in North America, while programmers in India do well on $3 an hour? For a very interesting article related to the topic, please read The New Face of the Silicon Age - How India became the capital of the computing revolution. The article also gives the list of the top 5 US employers in India: General Electric (17,800 employees), Hewlett-Packard (11,000 employees), IBM (6,000 employees), American Express (4,000 employees), and Dell (3,800 employees).
| My Job Went to India | Debugging Indian Computer Programmers: Dude, Did I Steal Your Job? |
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| Buy at Amazon UK | Buy at Amazon UK |
| Buy at Amazon US | Buy at Amazon US |
So, is the outsourcing threat real?
You might answer yes when thinking at the personal, individual level. We all have an acquaintance of ours who has been on the dole since his company decided to export his technical skills to China. Or at least, we have heard about a man who heard about a man who… A popular trend today is indeed to communicate about such frightening but exciting stories, be they urban myths or sheer reality. You can even find web pages displaying jobs at offshoring risk. Eye-catching communication at it’s finest!
But what about the global level? Globalization is a complex and sensitive topic, leading to extremist pro and con positions. You will find plenty of contradictory articles on the Internet and as many contradictory theories by brilliant economists and researchers. What side are you on?
In the business community, companies have started to understand the importance to communicate clear, positive corporate messages related to globalization. If skills outsourcing remains a dangerous topic to be banished from corporate communication in most cases, one angle to talk about it positively is to make it part of a social initiative. For a few years, this has been a trend that developed under the label ‘Corporate Responsibility in the Global Economy’. Corporations leverage their sponsorship or participation in education initiatives to claim their commitment to social causes in the global economy. This is particularly true for software editors, whose technology and related skills can be easily exported. The most recent example is the one of SolidWorks - an engineering/CAD software company – that decided to donate software, training, and engineering expertise to help rebuild Rwanda’s infrastructure. Pro-globalization will call those companies well-meaning. Anti-globalization activists will see economical dangers and political manipulation.
To end up with and for your reference, here is link toward a very activist web site – Gone with the World - from which I took the following food for laugh/thought:
Mr. X: I bet you Americans don’t even know where India is.
Mr. Y: I most certainly do; it is right between me and a paycheck.