Well, it never gets old--watching the reality unfold that contradicts what the blind advocates of so-called "free trade" and "liberalization" want people to believe. One of the great lies of the globalization scam is that, hey, don't worry, if we just educate people more and have them do higher-skilled jobs, not to worry, everyone will be just fine and globalization will be that warm and fuzzy trend that just makes everyone feel better. Unfortunately, the facts keep getting in the way.
Today's New York Times has yet another example:
Wall Street’s losses are fast becoming India’s gain. After outsourcing much of their back-office work to India, banks are now exporting data-intensive jobs from higher up the food chain to cities that cost less than New York, London and Hong Kong, either at their own offices or to third parties.
Bank executives call this shift "knowledge process outsourcing," "off-shoring" or "high-value outsourcing." It is affecting just about everyone, including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Credit Suisse and Citibank — to name a few.
And...
The work these bankers were doing is not necessarily going away, though. Instead, jobs are popping up in places like India and Eastern Europe, often where healthier local markets exist.
In addition to moving some lower-level banking and research positions to support bankers and analysts in New York and London, firms are shipping some of their top bankers from those cities to faster-growing developing markets to handle clients there.
Owing in part to credit weaknesses and billion-dollar charges from the subprime crisis, "people who were off-shoring high value jobs are increasing the intensity of that, and people who were not are now in the planning stage," said Andrew Power, a financial services partner at Deloitte Consulting.
And...
"There’s a huge amount of grunt work that has been done by $250,000-a-year Wharton M.B.A.’s," Mr. Kessler said. "Some of that stuff, it’s natural to outsource it."
He added, "These are middle of the office jobs, not back office, but they’re not the people on the front line."
After research, the next wave may include more sophisticated jobs like the creation of derivative products, quantitative trading models and even sales jobs from the trading floors.
Proponents of the change say Wall Street’s wary embrace of the activity may signal the beginning of a profound shift in the way investment banks are structured, with everyone but the top deal makers, client representatives and the bank management permanently relocated to cheaper locales like India, the Philippines and Eastern Europe.
In the future, executives in India like to joke, the only function for highly paid bankers in New York or London will be to greet clients and shake hands when the deals close.
Now, don't get me wrong--I have very little sympathy for Wharton MBA's and their co-horts who are the kind of folks that oil the financialization of the economy that has undermined a stable living for a whole lot of people. But, this does point up the fallacy that if people just get educated more, all will be well.
The truth is much less hopeful. Retraining is a hoax and getting more education is fine in the abstract but it is also a cruel hoax.
As long as wages are the principal--and, in some case, only--reason motivating companies to move jobs or locate production, it will be irrelevant how smart you are. I've also pointed out that those people who say Americans are the smartest workers in the world and if they just had the right skills they would beat anyone in the world, are bordering, if not crossing the line, in expressing some fairly racist opinions. Human beings anywhere in the world can learn and be equal to their counterparts.
What makes the difference here is not intelligence but how little they are willing to sell their bodies to do the bidding of global capital. That is the bottom line, no matter how much phony talking heads, politicians and economists want to cloud the air with talk of competition, efficiency and other nonsense.