U.S. firms consider their workforce to be disposable?
Friday, 09 April 2010, 23:12 IST   |    11 Comments
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U.S. firms consider their workforce to be disposable?
Bangalore: Gone are the days when a company would train a factory worker to become a computer programmer or offer lifelong employment. Now it's all about quarterly revenue and profits now. Vivek Wadhwa, who is Senior Research Associate for the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, believes that American corporations consider their workforce to be disposable - like ball-point pens and cigarette lighters. Unlike the Indian companies, in U.S, unless one has the alphabet soup of technologies on his/her resume, he/she can't get anything more than an auto-response to his/her job application. Eventhough by mistake he gets hired, it's up to him/her to get booted out with the first dip in sales. In the U.S. it is witnessed that large corporations offer some employee training programs, but managers often discourage their workers from participating in them. The say that why will any company invest in workers when there is no clear payback. Above all, training requires time off, and costs the department money. Many of experts often tout India's engineering-graduation rates as India's advantage but if we go by some of the published reports, it is noticed that only half of the outputs of India's engineering colleges are employable upon graduation. Yet in 2007, India's five largest IT services companies added 120,000 engineering jobs. IBM and Accenture added 14,000 engineers each in India in the same year. That's only seven of the hundreds of companies that hired engineers that year. Where did these engineers come from, and how is it that India's R&D industry is booming? In the last few years, researchers at Harvard and Duke University found that India is achieving similar feats in workforce development by learning from the best practices of the western companies that have outsourced their computer systems and call centers there. Wadhwa in his article written for TechCrunch mentioned that the Indian experience highlights what can be achieved by investing in upgrading the skills of the workforce. If workforce training can take the output of an education system as weak as India's and turns its graduates into world-class engineers and scientists; imagine what could be done with a worker base that has received amongst the best education in the world, as is the case in the U.S.

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