Two emails in my spam-cluttered inbox this morning raised some interesting problems that I find hard to break down.
First Robert X Cringley’s weekly piece for PBS. He’s talking in the main about US jobs leaving those shores and heading to places like India or other developing countries, where costs are lower. This is illustrated by the “Brain Drain” from the UK after the second world war.
It comes down to short term corporate greed versus longterm weakening of your local position. But it raises some very difficult questions. If I employ an Indian programmer rather than a British one because they’re cheaper is that such a bad thing? It saves me money, but gives work to someone from a country that’s desperately poor. A couple of years ago I met an Indian programmer at a party who’d been “imported” into Britain to help build and launch a website. Highly educated, undoubtedly good at what he was able to do. His wife had come over with him, yet at the back of my mind was the fact that he was probably being paid less than someone over here would have been. And if there weren’t such infrastructure issues with this company, I expect there wouldn’t have been any need for him to come over and he could have saved the company even more money – no flat to upkeep.
I want to learn more about the state of industry in the UK, because as we close down factories (Panasonic in Wales this week), does Britain have much manufacturing capacity left? Can we continue to compete with Third World nations’ cheap labour? At first it seemed as though manufacturing jobs were morphing into call centre jobs. But now even they are outsourced to India.
While mulling this over I got an email from Oxfam’s Make Trade Fair campaign. They’ve launched an iniative to highlight the vast subsidies paid over to some of the richest men in the country via the Common Agricultural Policy. Protectionism at its worst?
Farming is certainly a tough business, but a vital one. But there’s a fine line between subsidising and blatant protectionsim. It really is worth having a look at the report Oxfam have produced.
Maybe I should get one of these T-Shirts.