India Charity Ads

Politics and religion
1

We’ve an ad running here at the moment that struck a particular chord.
It was for small girl roaming the streets in Bangalore in India and how I, for small sum, could sponsor this child to have a better life and so on.

Now I might be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that 6 years ago, Bangalore is where my job went because “we can get some equally experienced and willing to work person for 1/4 of the wage”.

Funnily enough I work currently at 1/2 of the price of our “off shore partners” fixing their crap because they’re willing to work but plain incompetent, and you still want me to pay for your waifs and strays?

The ad makes me angry because the child is in Bangalore, not some off road village in the middle of no-where. Aside from the city pulling in billions of dollars from short sighted finance execs, it’s a country willing to maintain a navy and a nuclear arsenal and the charity isn’t trying to change anything, it just wants my money. Why aren’t you pressurising the country for universal health care, an education system, an end to the caste system?

Perhaps if you paid Project managers more than £6000 a year while you ship them to the UK and the US on that salary, while charging the companies they work for hundreds of thousands of pounds a year, kids in Bangalore wouldn’t be living in the fucking gutter.

If you want de-regulated markets at its absolute worst look to India and China. We’re not worse or less productive than any other worker, we’re just not used or willing to accept being beaten into submission to keep us competetive.

2

So I’m guessing you’re upset about your name being released to the public? Defend Rights for Whites!

3

I can sense your hostility (that falls into the no shit category!) but honestly, do you think corporations /companies behave any differently in India as they do the US? You act as if it’s the India Govt asking for Charity.

They are not beating them into submission. IT professionals in India really have it made. You can not imagine how happy they are to be working in an office and not pounding rocks into gravel.

While they’ve “abolished” the caste system, it’s there. India Nationals who have it made by and large treat so many below them poorly, I am embarrassed to be with them as they treat so many with such low dignity.

They actually have universal health care there, did you know that? I was sick one time and went & saw a doctor for free, he gave me a prescription for 3 things and my total bill was 75 rupees (about 2 bucks). The same thing in the US would have cost $30-40, with co-pay.

The disparity of the have and have nots really is highlighted in Bangalore. I’ve been there, many times. The entire govt is pretty corrupt. Bangalore has seen exponential growth for 10-15 years, yet their roads are virtually the same as they were 20 years ago. It can take an hour to go 10 miles and you’re sharing the road with every thing on wheels / hooves you can imagine, including people pushing push carts.

Bangalore has ~12 million people, in a city that is not that big. Amazingly you can go 20 miles in any direction and you’re in farmland. They really pack them in.

The most interesting thing I’ve found by far about India is that no matter the awful stench, the refuse piling up on the sidewalks, people taking a shit / piss where ever they stand, I honestly don’t see the pity that these ads invoke.

As I’ve travelled there many times, I can honestly say that without a doubt people who travel to Bangalore largely are overwhelmed with the human condition they see and smell. Most don’t want to go back, ever. However, for those like me, who venture outside the cities and see the history, it is a beautiful country with a vast and wildly chaotic past (they haven’t had self-rule, ever, until the British left).

So, while I can sense your anger about how they steal our jobs, you really have no idea what is going on in India, but hey don’t worry about it because quite frankly, the people there really don’t need our help. They are quite comfortable with what they have.

4

The same reason the Red Cross spent its money on helping the victims of Katrina rather than on trying to elect people to prevent further Katrinas.

Perhaps if you paid Project managers more than £6000 a year while you ship them to the UK and the US on that salary, while charging the companies they work for hundreds of thousands of pounds a year, kids in Bangalore wouldn’t be living in the fucking gutter.

If the work wasn’t cheaper to do in India the jobs wouldn’t go there.

5

Lizard, honestly, fuck you. “you” in the free market economy have had my job, and you do it by fucking your people over, whether “you” are a company or a government or combination. Once you’ve done that, you then get an NGO to pay money to ask me for my money to put your kids through a basic level of subsistence. All the while “you’re” buying aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons.

If you want to boil it down to I’m a racist then fine, I’m more than happy to discuss that.

I’m really annoyed that I’ve had to pay my own re-skilling to see people charge money for software I wrote on the basis that they’re “cheaper” and do a “better job” than I do. On the plus side they’ve kept me employed by being so inept that they remind me of, for example, British Leyland in the 70’s or GMC in the USA now.

6

What it basically boils down to is: When you undercut what everyone else can do at the expensive of your people it’s a “fail”. When you spend that money on nukes rather than your people, it’s an “epic fail”.

7

Neither of those statements makes much sense. Indian IT firms may be able to undercut their competitors, but they’re still paying their people a lot more than they could get otherwise. And every nation in the world spends money on defense. In fact, India spends less than the US on it, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of GDP.

8

On nukes and military buildup, can you name a country in the industrial era that’s been surrounded by rivals/enemies and acted differently?

9

You act as if it’s the India Govt asking for Charity.

If only, they shouldn’t need to with the exception of the odd Katrina type catastrophe

They actually have universal health care there, did you know that?

If they have universal health care, why am I being asked to subsidise their children just to survive, in Bangalore?

So, while I can sense your anger about how they steal our jobs

And here’s the crux of the matter. “They” aren’t stealing “our” jobs. They’re undercutting them by leaving the people most in need of help destitute and by paying those who do the do the job substandard wages. They charge [western companies] 99% of what a western contrator will do to perform a substandard job. If they were any good I’d be working somewhere else.

I’ve watched “outsourcing” for the best part of 15 years, I know it’s fundamental to the US viewpoint of how the state and economy in general should run but I when it doesnt deliver results on a consistent basis then I think it’s a failed experiment. When you’ve got people driving ferraris and NGOs begging for money in the same city then I definitely think it’s failed

10

First, San Francisco satisfies that criteria near as I can tell. On a more serious point of in-country inequality, the UN-estimated Gini coefficient of the US is 40. In India, it’s 37. Obviously we have more money to start with, but they’re not being particularly mean to their poor for the case of a rapidly developing third-world country.

11

Isn’t it like 5am over in merry old England? How much have you been drinking?!

12

It takes that long to get wound up about most of the shit we probably caused to start with

13

I don’t think outsourcing is “fundamental” to the US economy, in fact I fully expect disincentives to US companies outsourcing off shore in the next few years. Bad economic times tend to bring out protectionism.

And honestly, while from an ideological ideal I am for free trade and commerce, offshore outsourcing is basically large companies taking advantage of how standards of living have been lapped by communication. Ideally a “unit of labor value” (to get all theoretically Marxist) should have the same value in Bangalore as in Austin as in London. That it doesn’t is because of conditions in India (far lower scale of living costs, lower expectations for salaries). Which ironically is now being outpaced by places like Malaysia and China.

Eventually as the economy truly globalizes, outsourcing work on the other side of the planet to get around salary standards will be seen as a curious relic. But until then, I think this is actually somewhere where the government should step in with tax incentives and the like, because other countries certainly are incentivizing their own offshore labor market.

Also, India is a superpower military, economically, and even scientifically (they sent up a moon probe this month). Ads like the ones described are purely aimed at milking money from Westerners who haven’t gotten the word yet.

14

Blaming the NGO or charity for economic questions that affect you on a personal level is ludicrous. That you would target that at, say, Bangalorian children and people trying to help them, is pathetic. So I’ll go ahead and take your “fuck you” with the same grain of salt that any normal person would.

You can have your critiques of modern capitalism and its globalization consequences. You can also have intelligent critiques of charitable organizations and how effective their areas of concentration are. But merging the two the way you are is stupid.

15

While I generally agree with your posts, Lum, I’m not really understanding this line of argument. Why is lower living costs and lower expectations for salaries (which is actually linked to expected living costs as well) not an acceptable way to be competitive?

16

Because taken to its logical extreme, given areas of the globe with economies with subsistence levels of existence, it will either drive all salaries globally down to the level of subsistence or depopulate the wealthy areas of the world of any jobs not strictly local in nature.

What needs to happen - and what will happen eventually - is the level of wealth globally reaching roughly the same plateau. At that point labor markets would compete on value and skill and not merely on which population has the lowest level of subsistence.

17

Its happening in India already. Salaries have risen 20% a year for the past 8-10 years, and instead of a 4-1 ratio, we’re paying what is about a 2-1 ratio…which really isn’t that competitive when you count the trips to India ($5K per person per week essentially). Although salaries are finally slowing down b/c of the amount of new grads coming on-line and market saturation.

Russia / China are becomming the new India - but they aren’t taking off b/c of the language barrier. The advantage India had is that English is a required language in education.

18

Eh, the use of the word “subsistence” is obvious hyperbole, but that aside, it’s not clear to me why different costs of living is an unfair form of competing on value. There are good reasons for why different areas have different costs of living. Rent tends to be more expensive in dense metropolitan areas than the boondocks, for example. Why should taxpayers or the end customer subsidize someone based in an expensive city if the job doesn’t actually need to be located there?

19

You can have your critiques of modern capitalism and its globalization consequences. You can also have intelligent critiques of charitable organizations and how effective their areas of concentration are. But merging the two the way you are is stupid.

And immediately writing off any critique of this system as racist or that it makes me somehow a BNP supporter is equally stupid.

At the end of the day what the charity does it up to it, I’d prefer we lived in a [global] society where charities to find cures for cancer or stop kids having to sift through bins in what’s supposed to be a city of economic miracle weren’t necessary.

Their ad’s just been the final wake up call that hammers home that we’ve run full circle. We’ve spent a century in “the west” improving human rights, the rights of workers, social security, welfare systems and so on, but at the end of the day as long as we keep the share prices up by shipping entire sectors of industry out to places where it’s “cheaper” because none of those rights exists we don’t really care. That we’re now running prime time ads from charities to help people in these places just seems to illustrate that we now can’t even be bothered to keep up the pretence.

20

Nothing in this section of your post has anything to do with logic.

These jobs require certification, limiting the labor pool. They’re involved in a mostly free market global labor pool, ensuring factor price equalization which results in an averaged price somewhere between the top US ones and the bottom third world country one, not a super low one. They also require certification, which reduces the available labor pool, with predictable results.

And if we accept that any given consumption basket should require about the same amount of labor units wherever it is purchased (broadly true, distorted by trade barriers), it follows that countries with free trade links should result in purchasing power moving toward parity (converging, not decreasing) between workers in various countries performing similar duties. Which is what’s already happening.