Help Protect British Jobs

[Spiros]

There is still too much focus on the money-saving side of this and not enough on the service side. In my experience as both a customer and someone who experience from the corporate side of things the staff in India are better than those they replace in the UK. They are better qualified and more loyal but cost less to hire. Try telling all the people who rang 118 118 and got given the number of Pizza Hut regardless of whose number they wanted that they would have got a worst service from someone in Bombay. If it's done properly (and a lot of companies are doing it properly, despite what the press would have you believe) then customers don't notice the accent, they just get what they want and go away happy.

 

[Guinness Boy]

DRF - any tarrif would not be putting the UK at a competetive disadvantage. It would be putting it back on alevel playing field with the rest of Europe. Senators in the US are already asking for a tarrif as they are heamorging service sector jobs. In Europe the reason we out source and Germany and France don't is that Indians don't speak German or French.

I spent 3 months in Chennai training Indians on my company's product and what happened? The good ones immedaitely left with their new skills for a higher paid job. The staff turnover amoung the Indian middle class is currently extrmely high with the English speaking world all outsourcing.

We used another company over there without the formal training and the quality we got back was so awful we had to completely re-write it so there is a false economy aspect.

But don't think this is just a simple profit making thing. Once one company has outsourced others have to do it just to stay in business. Eventually the bubble will burst but for now expect this to keep on happening. I agree with Looney in one sense (ouch that sentence hurt) - the extra money in the economy from doing this needs to be reinvested in a new jobs and markets in the UK.

Oh and Lammy - don't know if you were being ironic but English is India's first language in that it is the link language between lots of different local dialect (Tamil in Chennai, Kanada in Bangalore, Hindi in the North for example). The reason for this is a simple legacy of British colonialism coupled with multi-ethnicity. Put simply your muslim doesn't want his kid educated in Hindi, nor your Hindu his kid educated in Urdu but they both accept teaching in English.