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Prudential to outsource 1000 jobs to India
By siliconindia
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Thursday, 05 June 2003, 19:30 IST
LONDON: Despite increasing discontent in the US and Britain over outsourcing to India, British insurance company Prudential plans to shift a third of its remaining 3,000 customer-service jobs to Mumbai and save an estimated 16 million pounds a year, a report said on Wednesday.
Prudential selected Mumbai over rival locations in east Europe, Asia and Ireland because of lower hiring costs but, as also because "the infrastructure and potential for savings and productivity gains made India a winner," said Prudential's finance director, Philip Broadley.
The move comes as British Communication Workers' Union issued a warning this week of strikes against BT, the telecommunications giant, over its Indian plans.
Similar moves by other companies in the US and the UK to low-cost offshore centres are now gaining international political attention, The Financial Times, London, reported on Wednesday.
US unions and politicians are also launching campaigns to protect jobs.
Unemployment in the US IT sector, now in its third year of downturn, hit 5.2 per cent last year, up from 3.7 per cent in 2000. Giga Information Group, an IT researcher, said that by 2015, a cumulative total of more than 472,000 IT jobs will be moved from the US to overseas locations, up from about 27,000 in 2000.
The "Great Tech Job Exodus", a campaign to stem the export of technology jobs to low-cost centres, was recently launched by the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers based in Seattle, the hometown of Microsoft, the world's largest software company.