A lot of friends are in town this week for spring break. It’s been great seeing old faces, I only wish the visits were a little more spread out so I had more time with amazing friends whom I’ve been far too out of touch with. Yesterday morning Laura and I were driving Andy to the airport and we got in a discussion about outsourcing. It stayed in my mind and I’ve been reading around on the internet a little bit about it. There are a lot of excellent articles out there; mainly because many web programmers are facing unemployment because their jobs are being sent to India, Pakistan, and Malaysia. Here is one interesting forum thread. Also, just now, on my own forum, I wrote the following response to Elenita’s post about accountability:

One of my pet-peeves in the globalization debate is how it is always presented as a for or against alternative. In fact, in Spanish, those of the “anti”-globalization camp are called Los Globalifobicos, in other words that they have a phobia of the world coming together.

For me, the globalization debate is the class debate continued on a much broader scale. It’s the same power struggle between the rich and the poor, between the owners and the workers, between productivity and social equality.

I think very few social activists these days would realy indentify themselves as “anti-global” or “isolationist.” Globalization is an inevitable process - the internet, traveling, television, movies, international NGO’s - all of this contributes to gloablization just as much as outsourcing and free trade agreements.

It’s how we shape the process, though, that matters and so far the rich, conservative, corporate class has shaped “the new world order,” or how power is arranged on a global scale.

I think that Elenita makes a very good point about accountability. Let’s take Naomi Klein’s example of how outsourcing changes accountability and gives the worker less riights and power. She tells us about:

Lubna Baloch, a Pakistani woman subcontracted to transcribe medical files dictated by doctors at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center. The hospital pays transcribers in the United States 18 cents a line, but Baloch was paid only one-sixth that. Even so, her US employer–a contractor’s subcontractor’s subcontractor–couldn’t manage to make payroll, and Baloch claimed she was owed hundreds of dollars in back wages.

In October, frustrated that her boss wouldn’t respond to her e-mails, Baloch contacted UCSF Medical Center and threatened to “expose all the voice files and patient records…on the Internet.” She later retracted the threat, explaining, “I feel violated, helpless…the most unluckiest person in this world.” So much for “self-confidence, dignity and optimism”–it seems that not all outsourced tech jobs are insurance against acts of desperation.

If Baloch where working directly for UCSF she could have gone straight to ther person in chage of transcriptions and demander her pay. She also could have taken UCSF to court and gotten her pay within months if not weeks. Alternatively she could have gone to the University newspaper and asked them to publish an article exposing what happened to her.

I think that’s what Elenita means when she says:

And I’m speaking as a relatively privileged human being, too; in many ways, my fears about the lack of accountability scare me only theoretically.

Those of us who are American white collar workers are more often responsible for outsourcing jobs to contractors than we are worried that we won’t get paid.

In the 90’s, my generation was just starting to understand what free trade meant. We would watch Ross Perot on TV and scratch our heads over the NAFTA debates. Our parents would watch bad local news programs telling them that it is more important than ever that their kids go to college, because all manufacturing jobs will be lost to other countries, but that “knowledge jobs” will remain in the United States. (… “because we are smarted” was left unsaid … and was wrong”) And out parents in turn would nail it into our heads: “study, study, study - going to college is the most important thing in your life.” Many of us felt like that was all our parents cared about, that they were out of touch with reality.

So we went to college, we studied Biology, Chemistry, Engineering, and Computer Programming, sure that we were the most competitive, intelliegent people in the world.

Now, a decade later, many of us cannot find jobs because there are people in India, Pakistan, and Malaysia who can do it better and cheaper. (at least this is true with programmers) And by all means - it makes sense that if they can do it better, faster, and cheaper then they should.

That is what is great about Neo-liberalism. The best people worldwide get the job.

What is terrible is that they are not protected. There is no accountability - no minumum workers’ rights or courts where workers can file their cases against their employers. So some business owner saves thousands of dollars each month by paying malaysian web designers to maintain his site which attracts well paying American customers to his shop. His shop is an instant success and he begins making hundreds of thousands of dollars every month while still paying his web-designers and programmers about 30 cents an hour. The end result is that the rich keep getting richer and everyone else gets taken advantage. The wealth and power gets concentrated in fewer hands, just like it did in the Robber Baron days in the United States after the civil war.

So what I want to know is how to make business owners accountable for their employees on a global scale. Klein’s example of Baloch brings up an interesting method: the internet. Baloch threatened to go to the internet to expose UCSF if she wasn’t paid. Of course, this is susceptible to criminals blackmailing companies who are really guilty of nothing and the internet has a long history of such types of fraud. But if the World Band, the IMF, or OXFAM (some type of well respected international institution) were to keep an online, accessible database of company budgets and global payrolls that everyone could see, including the employees themselves, that could offer a system of world wide accountability.

Which leads us to Transparency - a topic I’ll try to cover soon. If anyone has any other ideas, or disagrees with what I’ve said, please post a reply. I’d like to see more participation.

Please leave all comments, concerns, complaints, etc. in the forum. Thanks