Colorado shoots down anti-outsourcing bill aimed at India

Thursday, 12 February 2004, 20:30 IST
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WASHINGTON: The India-bashing outsourcing lobby in the US has suffered a slight setback. A Colorado senate panel has shot down a bill that sought to ban the flow of state contract jobs to India and some other countries with low-cost labour. Colorado has become only the second state, after Indiana, to reject the headlong legislative rush against outsourcing in this critical election year. About a dozen other states are still to deliberate on similar bills. “I don’t believe that protectionism makes anybody richer,” commented state senate president John Andrews as the panel voted 4-3 to shelve the bill, proposed by Democrats and opposed by Republicans. Business groups also fought the measure. The bill, introduced by Democrat Senator Deanna Hanna, was in response to IT major EDS moving jobs to India. She said she was shocked to learn that EDS, which has an IT services contract with Colorado state, was farming out tech support jobs to India. An EDS spokesman, however, clarified that of the 150 workers involved in the Colorado government project, only six do the work from India. Colorado taxpayer’s dollars shouldn’t be funding jobs in countries like India, China and Pakistan, Hanna argued. A companion bill, moved by her party colleague Terry Phillips, seeks to bar companies relocating 100 jobs or more outside the US from doing business with Colorado state for seven years. That bill is still to be taken up. But Republican lawmakers in the state see it as a futile exercise. One of them, Senator Bruce Cairns, commented: “We’re just adding another rule and another layer. Adding rules has not added any jobs.” Most of the copycat bills, now pending in the various states, are the result of intense lobbying by American labour federations, who expect few lawmakers to go against the current of populism in this election year. But the Colorado lawmakers have shown that this premise may not be valid in all cases. The Colorado rejection has coincided with the Bush administration, in line with the earlier indications provided by its chief economist Greg Mankiw, defending outsourcing in a report to the US Congress. In the report, the Bush administration has maintained that the current movement of American jobs is part of a transformation that will enrich the US economy over time, even if it causes pain and dislocation in the near term. Mankiw has taken the stand that when a good or service is produced more cheaply abroad, it makes more sense to import it than to make it locally.
Source: IANS
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