Low skilled employees could find they are out of a job within a decade as an increasing number of UK firms shift work abroad, says CBI boss Digby Jones.
Mr Jones said the trend was for unskilled and semi-skilled jobs to be exported to countries like China, and be replaced at home by graduate posts.
BBC : UK firms to look abroad
Digby is surely missing something here. Outsourcing low cost, low skilled jobs offshore isn’t anywhere near as financially attractive as outsourcing high cost, medium - high skilled jobs. The UK lost shipbuilding to South Korea and there isn’t any obvious reason why we won’t lose IT development to educated low-cost labour in, say, India.
Moving services like call centres offshore has had a few false starts but - notwithstanding language and cultural glitches - it’s happening successfully. And if the jobs to be exported don’t need much in the way of language expertise and cultural familiarity then the prospect becomes even more attractive. I’ve worked on three IT projects managed offshore; two in India and one in Croatia.
Roy Hattersley once mentioned a conversation with someone at the US Embassy who said something to the effect that the UK couldn’t have an economy based on everyone holding doors open for each other. The notion that a knowledge economy will be our saving as globalisation progresses must be wrong, surely. More than anything else, knowledge is exportable.
