India wants global trade rules to counter the backlash in the US as Microsoft Corp, Citigroup Inc and other companies move computer programming, call center and other back-office jobs to India and other nations.
Indian Commerce Minister Arun Jaitley said he raised recent restrictions by states such as New Jersey to the contracting of Indian companies in a meeting yesterday with US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick. Those limitations, he said, need to be addressed in the WTO agreement being negotiated now.
"We need to get over this present aberration of states putting curbs on electronic commerce," Jaitley said at a speech to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
"Why should US industry be forced to take less efficient services?" Jaitley's words underscore the concern in New Delhi over rising resentment in the US about American jobs moving overseas as companies seek to cut costs. The anger has grown as the number of Americans collecting unemployment rises to a two-decade high.
Forrester Research of Massachusetts predicts an acceleration of outsourcing will result in 3.3 million American jobs moving offshore by 2015, 70 percent of them to India, which is counting on cheap computer and related services to spur exports and curb unemployment in its US$477 billion economy.
Yet growth in those services is coming up against complaints from state lawmakers and unions in the US.
"At a time of one of America's worst economic recessions in 20 years, we see our largest companies making a conscious effort to move jobs overseas,'' said Marcus Courtney, president of the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, part of the AFL-CIO.
"That's not in the interest of the US economy or US workers," Courtney said.
Legislatures in New Jersey, Maryland and Connecticut are all considering measures to outlaw government contracting of services from abroad, according to the union.
"There's three now, but there's going to be 40 by next year," Courtney said.
Microsoft Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co, Texas Instruments Inc, Citigroup Inc, and General Electric Co have all either opened offices in India or contracted for services from Indian companies such as Spectramind Ltd, a unit of Wipro Ltd, India's largest software maker by market value.
In financial services alone, 2 million US and European financial service jobs will move out of developed countries in the next five years to low-cost centers such as India, Russia, China and the Philippines, translating into savings of US$356 billion for companies, said Deloitte Research, an arm of the Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu accounting firm.
India is the premier location for these services, because of its well-educated, English-speaking labor force, the report said.
India has 450,000 software engineers, and provide "quality work at 50 to 60 percent of the cost," according to a Microsoft Corp presentation published on a union Web site.
Two US House of Representatives committees yesterday condemned China’s attempt to orchestrate a crash involving Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim’s (蕭美琴) car when she visited the Czech Republic last year as vice president-elect. Czech local media in March last year reported that a Chinese diplomat had run a red light while following Hsiao’s car from the airport, and Czech intelligence last week told local media that Chinese diplomats and agents had also planned to stage a demonstrative car collision. Hsiao on Saturday shared a Reuters news report on the incident through her account on social media platform X and wrote: “I
STILL ON THE TABLE: The government is not precluding advanced nuclear power generation if it is proven safer and the nuclear waste issue is solved, the premier said Taiwan is willing to be in step with the world by considering new methods of nuclear energy generation and to discuss alternative approaches to provide more stable power generation and help support industries, Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) said yesterday. The government would continue to develop diverse and green energy solutions, which include considering advances in nuclear energy generation, he added. Cho’s remarks echoed President William Lai’s (賴清德) comments in an interview last month, saying the government is not precluding “advanced and newer nuclear power generation” if it is proven to be safer and the issue of nuclear waste is resolved. Lai’s comment had
‘BUILDING PARTNERSHIPS’: The US military’s aim is to continue to make any potential Chinese invasion more difficult than it already is, US General Ronald Clark said The likelihood of China invading Taiwan without contest is “very, very small” because the Taiwan Strait is under constant surveillance by multiple countries, a US general has said. General Ronald Clark, commanding officer of US Army Pacific (USARPAC), the US Army’s largest service component command, made the remarks during a dialogue hosted on Friday by Washington-based think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Asked by the event host what the Chinese military has learned from its US counterpart over the years, Clark said that the first lesson is that the skill and will of US service members are “unmatched.” The second
STANDING TOGETHER: Amid China’s increasingly aggressive activities, nations must join forces in detecting and dealing with incursions, a Taiwanese official said Two senior Philippine officials and one former official yesterday attended the Taiwan International Ocean Forum in Taipei, the first high-level visit since the Philippines in April lifted a ban on such travel to Taiwan. The Ocean Affairs Council hosted the two-day event at the National Taiwan University Hospital International Convention Center. Philippine Navy spokesman Rear Admiral Roy Vincent Trinidad, Coast Guard spokesman Grand Commodore Jay Tarriela and former Philippine Presidential Communications Office assistant secretary Michel del Rosario participated in the forum. More than 100 officials, experts and entrepreneurs from 15 nations participated in the forum, which included discussions on countering China’s hybrid warfare
RSS