Indian Sweatshops

Well...my two-week long hiatus from blogging has been ended with this post I hope, if I get around to posting it.

You see, the time is well past 3:00am on a Friday night, and you can't be blamed if the question popped up in your mind, "Why break the silence in the dead of the night?" Well, I have my reasons. And quite a few of them too. First of all, I'm in a slightly foul mood - for the most vaguest of reasons you can well argue. And as the saying goes - "Don't go to bed mad. Stay up and fight", I've decided to stay up and fight out a mental battle, not against anyone in particular, not as much as to reach any logically satisfactory solution, but maybe just to let my thoughts out. Maybe I've surpressed them for some time now. Now, the reason for all this does not concern my personal life, so this mood is not emotionally-driven I add. But it does concern me in the exact same way it concerns you too, depending on what your profession and nationality is. If the answer to the first is "the IT industry" and the second is "Indian", you may fall into a similar scope, else you can be satisfied this does not concern you in anyway, close this page, and be on your way to more productive things.

Well, I'll add a disclaimer now - "This post in no way relates or refers to any specific company, or people, or person. If you feel this way, it may just be an unfortunate co-incidence, and I'm sorry about it, but not sorry enough to accept any blame."

Okay, the reason for my unrest is a well-used word, that the White man fears. The fear that there is some dark-skinned person out there who may take over his/her job tomorrow. OUTSOURCING.
Ahh..I could stop right now and be happy, but no, I'd like to be a bit more verbose and go on. Don't get me wrong, Outsourcing is very good for India and her economy. It also make us Indians proud, thinking "Aaahh...we're smarter than them, that's we are stealing their jobs." But think about it, why are we getting their jobs? Every businnes is profit-driven. What's one way to increase profits? Cut down your costs. And that's exactly where we come in, we actually "help" them in getting their costs reduced and thus boosting their businesses. There are smart people all over the world. But not all smart people are ready to work cheap. Sadly, we can't help it. That's the way our service industry has been structured. We are selling ourselves to any buyer who has the money to offer. In the end, ofcourse your company is helped too, their cash resgiters are ringing too, but what about you? Do you have the satisfaction that you need to have about the hours you've put in? Or don't you care as long as you get something in your account at the end of the month? If so, do you realise that what you just got is what someone else working in a different country in a similar job like yours made in less than a week? My friend just commented upon this a few hours back, when he said "This body-shop wages per hour work is non-sense. This attitude of taking all what the client assigns - makes us look that we are desperate for work and will do anything for $10 or more". Do we need to be like this? Unfortunately the whole Indian IT Industry is fiercely competitive, trying to bag offers (read better cash - not better work) from foreign clients, by saying "Pick us! Pick us!! We have more bench strength than Company-X, we 'supposedly' have more specialized people for your work than Company-Y, we are ready to work for 20$ lesser per hour than Company-Z!!" Ultimately we (the employees, not the employers) are just pawns used in a deal.

I have a lot more to say...but I have to stop now. However, I stress again - instead of being more of a cheap labour workforce, I hope we can soon reach a state that is well...in the simplest of words, atleast different from what it is now.