Why programmers need a union
By G. Dunkel
Most of the dot-com companies are dot-gone,
but not all the jobs they created vanished with them when the
bubble burst. Some moved.
Amazon still has its headquarters in Seattle and is still
selling books and sundries over the Internet. But it has yet to
show a profitable year, although it is gradually edging into
the black. To save money, it moved its customer service
department--about 500 jobs, including some highly skilled
programming jobs--to India about 18 months ago.
In India, programming jobs pay about one-third to one-fifth
of what they do in the United States.
Amazon is not the only company that has used Indian skilled
labor to lower its costs. About 200,000 informational
technology (IT) jobs have been exported from the United States
in the past three years, according to ComputerWorld. More are
sure to follow. Any job that can be digitized--engineering,
accounting, marketing, reading x-rays as well as
programming--can be exported. A consulting firm estimates that
3.3 million technical jobs will be moved abroad over the next
15 years.
Dave Schecter, an applications program mer working in the
New York City suburbs, told Workers World, "Of course I'm
worried about my job. Any programmer should be." He pointed out
that some freelance programmers who used to make $120 to $140
an hour are now getting $40 to $50--still a good wage, but
quite a comedown.
In many ways, IT jobs are easier to export than assembly
jobs. A program written in Bombay can be running in New York
less than an hour after it's finished.
India has a large pool of qualified English-speaking
technical workers, but it is not the only destination.
Microsoft has its second-largest applications development
center in Beijing, China. Russia has a large pool of highly
qualified programmers, many of whom read English. The
Philippines and Malaysia are other low-wage programming
centers. Canada, Israel and Ireland are higher-cost countries
where programming is conducted for the U.S. and Western
Europe.
The United States is not the only country affected. The Tata
Consultancy Services (TCS), an India-based trans national, has
just won a number of contracts to do data processing for
Australian companies. Tata also outsources some of its work to
the Philippines, where skilled labor is even cheaper than
India.
The Bank of Ireland, the second-largest bank in a country
where an abundance of low-paid, highly skilled,
English-speaking technical workers helped fuel a boom of
"green" industries, has signed an outsourcing contract with
Hewlett-Packard for $600 million. Some 600 IT specialists in
Ireland will lose their jobs, since HP will use a subsidiary in
India to do the work. The Irish union representing the IT
workers has voted to strike unless satisfactory terms and
conditions are reached.
In 1985, Workers World Party founder Sam Marcy wrote about
the impact of automation and computerization on the capitalist
economy in the book "High Tech, Low Pay." He pointed out that
while the scientific-technological revolution "enormously
raises the productivity of labor, it for the first time
simultaneously lowers the general wage patterns and demolishes
the more high-skilled, high-paid workers. It enhances the
general pauperization of the population."
His message was that workers of all skill levels must
organize, organize, organize. And that they must fight for
solidarity and against racism and national chauvinism.
Globalization of capital cries out for the globalization of the
workers' struggle.
At that time, there were slightly more than a million
workers in data processing. Companies hired programmers to
write applications specific to their needs and build their own
networks. These programs displaced and down-skilled many
factory workers, but they were idiosyncratic, hand-crafted and
highly complicated.
In the early 1990s came the first stirring of the World Wide
Web. Companies began to outsource their IT work. They bought
ready-made packages of programs and hired temporary consultants
to install and configure them. As the Internet developed,
companies and large institutions like universities discovered
it was cheaper to plug into the Internet. People discovered
that they could work from home, or wherever their travels took
them--cheaply and conveniently.
With the development of the Internet and the mad rush to get
applications up and running on the Web, large corporations,
governments and other institutions turned to outsourcing, using
outside specialists trained in the new technology to build what
was needed and run it. IBM and Oracle, along with Compaq and
Sun, soon began to make big profits providing professional
services.
These big service companies, to make the highest profits,
needed to use the vast changes in speed, ease and cost of tele
com munications that have come with the explosive growth of the
Internet. It has had almost as much impact on IT as
computerization had on manufacturing in the 1980s.
IT companies can't go just anywhere for their programming
needs. They still need to find workers with education, training
and experience. They need a certain amount of infrastructure
and communication lines. But whether that's down the hall or on
another continent makes little difference to the computer.
Most programmers in the United States still think of
themselves as small proprietors whose bit of knowledge gives
them a leg up in the job market. Few are unionized. In this
respect their consciousness is like that of teachers, nurses
and pilots some 50 years ago.
But the drive for profits and the ease of communications are
making them realize that they, too, are wage workers at the
mercy of big capital. In Great Britain and Ireland, more and
more IT specialists under the lash of outsourcing are seeking
union protection.
Schecter has a suggestion. "Program mers in this country
should get off our high horses and join a union. At least we'll
get a fair shake, though it obviously won't solve all our
problems."
Reprinted from the May 29, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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