For laid-off IBM workers, a job in India?

“It didn’t go down very well,” says Lee Conrad, a national coordinator with the Communication Workers of America who is trying to unionize IBM. “It was like people felt they were seeing not only their jobs offshored but their citizenship offshored.

“It’s definitely a huge loss in wages to the American worker,” he adds. “I think that’s why it isn’t being so readily accepted. In years past, IBM would transfer an employee to another country, but they would stay with their US wages. That’s changed.”

Mr. Conrad adds that IBM workers are upset at having to train Indians to do their jobs, only then to be laid off.

The sizzle of India’s growth has slowed some, declining to 5 percent this year. Prices for outsourcing services, a key industry in India’s new economy, could be slashed up to 20 percent by 2010, according to Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn.

Still, there remains a whiff of opportunity in the air in places like Pune, a mid-sized city in southern India that feels far from America’s economic doldrums. Construction cranes tower in the sky and spools of cable and piles of pipes line the roads as apartment buildings, office buildings, and hotels continue to be built.

In one of the new office high-rises, Mindcrest, a legal outsourcing firm, has recently hired three Americans – and has plans to hire more Westerners in the coming year. Like Heydecker in Delhi, the three women are mid-career and weren’t sent here on a temporary foreign rotation by a multinational firm back home.

“The [jobs] situation back home doesn’t make me want to go back,” says Michelle Vega, an attorney in her mid-30s who hears friends in the US describe businesses closing and mass layoffs. “I’d rather stay in Pune where people are still happy.”

It’s perhaps doubly surprising to be employed in a happy workplace when the office is a large room filled with hundreds of lawyers sitting at cubicles. The company hires mostly Indian attorneys to provide basic legal services – such as research, document reviewing, and contracts management – to large companies and law firms in the West.

Ms. Vega and her American counterparts Deirdre Byrne and Rana Rosen help the Indian attorneys understand what the Western clients want. None of them believe their work takes away American jobs, but say it instead frees young lawyers in the US from some early-career drudgery.

Over lunch, the three women laugh about stashing pine nuts, manila folders, and lint-remover rolling pins in their luggage when they come back from visits home. There are other challenges: power cuts, the bureaucracy of setting up basic services like a cellphone, and the more pervasive scenes of deep poverty on the street here.

Demanding job, nice lifestyle
But Ms. Byrne, who has worked as a high-powered Manhattan attorney and a realtor for Sotheby’s in the Hamptons, sums up the consensus: “We have a very nice life, and for a fraction of the costs at home” – even with smaller salaries.

She stresses that the work is demanding “on the scale of a New York law firm,” but comes with a “bonhomie” generally absent from Big Apple offices.

As for why more Americans are not considering work abroad, expatriates here admit it grows more complicated for those with more family ties.

Heydecker’s teenage son had to give up friends and skateboarding but has adjusted well, she says. She adds that the advantages to working abroad are often not communicated well.

“I don’t think companies like IBM are getting people in touch with those who are out here doing it, and showcasing those success stories,” says Heydecker. “It can be isolating in the beginning, but eventually, your life is pretty sweet. It all depends on how open your mind is.”

Previous

1 | 2