Saturday, May 28, 2005

Report: outsourcing worries Indian union leaders too

U.S. techies aren't the only ones anxious about outsourcing. Union leaders in India also worry about the trend of farming out tasks to other companies, according to a report Friday on the Web site of the Union Network International Graphical organization.

At a union-organized seminar in Pune, India earlier this month, outsourcing was identified as one of the five major problems facing printing and newspaper employees in the country, according to the report. "[T]his was resulting in loss of employment of the existing workers in a company (and the) employer was paying a fraction for the outsourced work," the report said.

Perhaps surprisingly, the report indicated Indian union leaders feel empathy for European and American workers stung by offshore outsourcing. "As union members, we must understand that for every job that we get in India, a job is lost in the outsourcing country," the report said. "And the beneficiary is always the employer because in India he has to pay only a fraction of the wages that he pays in his own country."

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