The best part about the recent Dow Chemical Co. deal with Tata Consultancy of India is that it moves jobs here to this country Dow-Tata Deal for 1,250 Jobs in Midland Reverses Worldwide Trend
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One of the best things about the recent Dow Chemical Co. deal with Tata Consultancy of India is that it moves jobs here to this country instead of exporting them.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says recent telecommunications advances, especially the Internet, could theoretically put more than 30 million U.S. jobs at risk of being exported overseas.
A new office center is being built in Midland, Michigan, that reverses that trend. Tata plans to have up to 1,250 employees here --in the very fields that are most at risk.
We've all gotten a call, or made a call, and found that the service rep is not located in the U.S. but in India or some other remote location. That means a job is lost here, the domestic economy is further eroded.
Some folks we know make a point of finding out where the call is coming from -- and hanging up if it is not from this country. Drastic step, yes. But obviously sending a message to corporations that we, the domestic consumers, demand support for the U.S. job base.
Tata, a leading IT services, business solutions and outsourcing firm, also is expanding in Milford, Ohio, near Cincinnati.
Tata recently announced that it had scaled up its North America Domestic Delivery Center, TCS Seven Hills Park, to 300 associates. Seven Hills Park provides a wide range of IT solutions, consulting, business process outsourcing and engineering services for TCS customers across industries including Banking and Financial Services, Life Science and Healthcare, as well as Manufacturing and Retail.
TCS Seven Hills Park is also the location of TCS new North American Training Center. Over the last several months, more than 225 associates have joined the company from top universities throughout the country and completed a six weeks training program at the center as part of the TCS Initial Learning Program (ILP).
The TCS ILP is unique in the industry - training includes a mixture of business professionalism, quality, and technical courses with a focused rigor on integration into TCS. Many of these newly trained associates are now developing custom IT solutions for the government and healthcare sectors.
Services theoretically can be done anywhere in the world through the Internet, four U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) analysts say in an article appearing in the agency's Monthly Labor Review.
There are about 160 occupations that can be performed in other countries -- involving an estimated 30.3 million workers.
Those at-risk workers make up about one-fifth of total U.S. employment and cover a wide array of job functions, pay rates and educational levels.
"To our nation's peril, the free trade orthodoxy continues to ignore a fundamental economic fact: It matters where things are made," said Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO at a recent conference.
"Over the past decade, the U.S. industrial base has suffered an unprecedented decline. The loss of more than 5 million manufacturing jobs and the closure of over 50,000 manufacturing facilities have undermined our nation's technical capacity to innovate and to make things, while at the same time decimating our middle class."
In Trumka's view, flawed trade and tax policies and a financial system focused on short-term profits drove good jobs offshore, led to record trade deficits, and left the economy in ruins.
The manufacturing share of the nation's gross domestic profit (GDP) has fallen to 12 percent (from 15.9 percent in 1995) and the financial sector has grown to 22 percent. "This growth model of asset bubbles, low wages, credit pyramids, toxic assets and unregulated, out-of-control global capital has been a recipe for disaster," says Trumka, adding:
"There is a reason every other developed and advanced developing nation has a manufacturing strategy. Most governments see manufacturing as key to long-term growth, and they target investment in industries and technology. In contrast, the U.S. government abandoned strategy to market forces and left workers and communities hanging without a safety net."
More than half of the vulnerable jobs in the BLS study are professional and related occupations, including computer and mathematical science occupations and architecture and engineering jobs, and many office and administrative support occupations also are considered endangered.
Since 2000, corporations have shipped more than 525,000 white-collar overseas, according to the AFL-CIO Department for Professional Employees (DPE). Some estimates say up to 14 million middle-class jobs could be exported out of our nation in the next 10 years. Accountants, software engineers, X-ray technicians, all are losing their jobs as corporations look for low-wage workers in countries such as India and China.
Meanwhile, the jobs being created in the United States often are low-wage jobs that don't offer health coverage or ensure retirement security. Nearly one-quarter of the nation's workers have jobs that pay below than the $8.85 hourly wage the U.S. government says it takes to keep a family of four out of poverty. Sixty percent of such workers are women, and many are minorities.
Among the occupations most susceptible to being sent overseas, the BLS analysts say, are information-based and don't need "face-to-face" contact. These include especially office and administrative support jobs, with relatively low education or training requirements, including telephone operators, payroll and timekeeping clerks, and word processors and typists.
Another 11 of the highest ranked jobs are professional and related occupations, which generally possess higher educational requirements. They include pharmacists, computer programmers, biochemists and biophysicists, architectural and civil drafters, financial analysts, paralegals and legal assistants.
Among the occupations least likely to be shipped overseas are financial managers, food scientists and technologists, front-line retail sales managers, and training and development specialists.
The Tata trend of expanding in the U.S. is one of the few healthy trends in this global shift of employment. Policy leaders in this country need to figure out how to replicate the Midland-Great Lakes Bay and Cincinnati experience with Tata nationwide.
The future of our nation and well-being of its people demand it. ###
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