The US-based IBM, the world's largest IT company, plans to increase its payroll in India this year by more than 14,000 workers, even as it cuts 13,000 jobs in Europe and the United States, The New York Times reported on Friday, quoting an internal company document.
Marcus Courtney, president of the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers or WashTech, told the daily: "IBM is really pushing this offshore outsourcing to relentlessly cut costs and to export skilled jobs abroad."
"The winners are the richest corporations in the world, and American workers lose."
IBM to cut up to 13,000 jobs to slash cost
The daily said that WashTech, based in Washington State, gave it the IBM document on Indian employment.
IBM declined to comment on the document or the numbers in it, other than to say that there are many documents, charts and projections generated within the company, it said.
But, Robert W Moffat, an IBM senior vice president, in an interview to the paper explained that the buildup in India was attributable to surging demand for technology services in the thriving Indian economy and the opportunity to tap the many skilled Indian software engineers to work on projects around the world.
Moffat said IBM was making the shift from a classic multinational corporation with separate businesses in many different countries to a truly worldwide company whose work can be divided and parceled out to the most efficient locations, the paper reported.
Cost is part of the calculation, Moffat noted, but typically not the most important consideration. "It's mostly about skills."
Moffat said that IBM was hiring people around the world in new businesses that the company has marked for growth, even as it trims elsewhere.
This emerging globalisation of operations, Moffat noted, does lead to a global labour market in certain fields.
"You are no longer competing just with the guy down the street, but also with people around the world," he said.
Such competition, however, the paper said, can become particularly harsh for workers in the West when they are competing against well-educated workers in low-wage countries like India. An experienced software programmer in the United States earning $75,000 a year can often be replaced by an Indian programmer who earns $15,000 or so, it added.
