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Globilization is a complicated picture.
I am a co-founder of a company that outsources legal support work to workers in India. Our experience is that although the Indian Institute of Technology is a pre-emminent institution, the average Indian university "pumps out" a lot of folks who are utterly lacking in "common sense." The Indian workers have done quite a good job on tasks that do not require independent thought. When we tried to use the Indian workers to do higher end tasks, they failed miserably, despite a lot of one-on-one training.
The work that the Indian workers perform is work that is not done by law firms or corporations now because they cannot do it in a cost effective manner. The Indian workers also perform tasks in processes that create new legal products and services that have not been previously offered. I do not believe that there have been any lay-offs of US workers as a result of this company. To the contrary, the new products and services offered require new types of analysts and legal assistants in the US.
Our future plans are to automate a lot of the work that is now being sent to India and keep the higher end work in the United States.
I saw the other side of the globilization spectrum during a recent trip to Shanghai. While there, I visited the research lab of a Fortune 100 company. This laboratory employed thousands of scientists and engineers in China to invent for the world. There were at least two other similarly sized research campuses in the same neighborhood, also owned by Fortune 100 companies. These facilities probably are taking US jobs. The Chinese scientists and engineers are living a solid middle class lifestyle at a lower compensation than in the US because of government subsidies of housing, transportation and food.
