Into Thin Air

After his job on Agilent's Windows NT support team ended up in Singapore, William V. Grebenik decided to set up a company that would help smaller companies move offshore. He thought he could help clients with the cultural issues that often create problems, but he blew through his severance before the company could get any traction. "I'm living on one-fourth of what I was making," says Grebenik, who now runs a part-time technical training company. "I've got to make the rent in five days. I'm going to be borrowing it off somebody."

It took courage for people like Grebenik and Pounds to share their stories, because many others whom Fast Company contacted refused, terrified that speaking out would further harm their chances of finding work. "People are really frightened about potential blacklisting," says Natasha Humphries, a former senior software engineer for Palm who was laid off last August. Humphries says she was sent to Bangalore to train some contractors, only to find out later that they were her group's replacements. (Palm disputes Humphries's account, saying her work was split between two local managers.) One man we contacted who had spoken to a local paper about being offshored was told he'd be fired from his new position if he was quoted elsewhere. His wife spoke to us instead.

Many U.S. companies are also doing their best to stay out of the spotlight on this issue--even as they rely increasingly on overseas workers. Rather than loudly proclaiming the benefits--or, alternatively, opting not to shift those jobs overseas--many are simply continuing their offshoring as quietly as possible. "Nobody wants to be the poster child for this," says Vashistha of neoIT, who says publicity-shy clients asked him to take their names down from his Web site. Even McKinsey, which extols offshoring's benefits publicly, didn't respond to a reporter's request to learn more about its own offshoring efforts.

For many multinationals, in fact, offshoring can be a public-relations nightmare at both ends of the pipeline. They fear being associated with the loss of U.S. jobs, of course--but they also worry about offending huge markets if they pull back from employing workers in places such as India, China, and Indonesia. Dell, for example, has tried hard to downplay its decision to bring back some of its call-center operations to the United States from India after criticism about the service quality. According to Barry French, a Dell spokesman, it was "a lot of flurry over something reasonably insignificant. The climate is pretty intense, so what was a small action got blown out of proportion. We remain absolutely committed to India." And at Lehman Brothers, questions about a recent decision to bring back its help desk, which had been outsourced to Indian tech company Wipro Ltd. in January 2003, brought the following clipped response from a spokeswoman: "We're not getting into the details of it. We don't want to be quoted on this. It was a management decision."

The irony is that offshoring is not an American-only concern. In manufacturing, the jobs have trampolined from country to country. In a world where people are treated as any other factor of production, scapegoating one country is pointless. Already, jobs that just five years ago went to Ireland are now done in India; as wages rise there, new, cheaper sources of well-trained workers are springing up in such places as the Philippines and, of course, China. "People in India, of course they're happy, they're getting more money," says Andres Urv, whose job as a quality assurance engineer was offshored in 2003. "But when companies pull out and say, 'Thank you so much but we found someone cheaper,' will they be feeling like we do?"

Where will it all end? Some people believe that population trends make the whole debate a waste of time. Even if the worst-case scenario for offshoring comes true, they say, the departure of boomers from the workforce will create a demographic earthquake so severe that filling, not finding, jobs will pose the biggest challenge.

But other observers see a bleaker prospect ahead. "As centers of skilled high-tech professionals build up in other parts of the world, the U.S. . . . may no longer dominate the next wave of innovations," a fall 2003 Berkeley study on outsourcing reads. Or perhaps it doesn't matter. "Anyone who is looking at this current debate isn't looking down the road far enough," says Tim Chou, president of Oracle Outsourcing. "The future is HAL [the superintelligent computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey]--a computer sitting in a dark room spitting out money. It won't involve any people, because [computers] are way more repetitive, reliable, and much lower cost than any human."

Perhaps Pounds, formerly of Agilent, sums it up best: "We've had throwaway clothes, throwaway cars, and now we have throwaway people." Is that what globalization was supposed to be all about?

Sidebar: Going, Going, GONE?