Outsourcing encompasses more workplace tasks
CHENNAI, India — Task by task, function by function, the American office is being hollowed out and reconstituted in places like this, a makeshift facility on the sixth floor of an ancient shopping mall in India.
OfficeTiger Ltd., one of the most prominent and aggressive of a new breed of outsourcing companies, has hired 2,000 Indians, most of them young and all of them relentlessly gung-ho.
They work as typists, researchers, librarians, claims processors, proofreaders, accountants and graphic designers. Their clients are U.S. brokerage firms, investment banks, law firms and even copy shops.
The Indians take on jobs both big — 100-page investment reports requiring weeks of work — and small. Iayaraja Marimuthu, for instance, is designing a program for the upcoming wedding of Ann and John, a Texas couple proclaiming their joy in being “together for life.” It will take him less than an hour.
Outsourcing, which started with U.S. companies laying off software programmers and call center workers and hiring cheaper employees overseas, is now stretching to encompass almost any kind of work that is done on a computer and is orderly and repetitive in structure. That’s a vast category that stretches from copy editing to financial analysis to tax preparation.
Just as voice mail reduced the need for receptionists and word processors transformed the traditional role of secretaries, outsourcing is beginning to reshape the office, eliminating some jobs and redefining others. Its proponents say it will lift the burden of menial chores from millions of office workers, giving them more time to spend on challenging and creative enterprises.
“We’re allowing employees to delve deeper, to learn more, to push the boundaries of what had been standard work,” says OfficeTiger’s American co-founder, Joe Sigelman.
That’s one side of the argument. But for other employees, outsourcing means the permanent threat of dismissal in favor of someone who can do the same job for a tenth the salary.
It also means revamping the methods of entering certain professions, including law and finance. There’s a time-honored tradition in those fields of making new associates do the drudgery. It teaches them the subject and winnows the number of aspirants to the truly dedicated. That won’t happen if the drudgery is shipped elsewhere.
Some economists say outsourcing is already so pervasive that it helps explain why the U.S. economy is doing such a lousy job of creating jobs. Analysts expected a net increase of 200,000 positions in July, but payroll growth totaled a mere 32,000.
In an unguarded moment, Sigelman recently said he was doing his best to keep corporate hiring down in the United States. “We hope to be leading the move of white-collar jobs from the U.S.,” he told the Economic Times, an Indian paper, in December.
While many Indian companies, as well as American multinationals, are setting themselves up as outsourcers, OfficeTiger is particularly striking because it’s come so far so quickly on so little.
Founded four years ago by two New Yorkers in their early thirties who had no expertise in the Internet, bureaucracy in India or even starting a business, the company will have revenue of $40 million this year. Eight of the best-known financial firms in New York and London have signed on as clients.