I have just finished reading a most amazing book -- The Beautiful and the Damned. A Portrait of the New India, by Siddhartha Deb.
The book has many facets and provides a really informative view of several aspects of life in India -- from the plight of farmers, through the monotony and precariousness of workers' lives, to a glimpse of the lifestyles of the Indian super-rich. What I found fascinating, however, is the picture it paints of outsourcing -- of what moving jobs from America and Europe to India has done to the country and its people.
Follow me below the fold for some thoughts and observations.
I have never liked outsourcing. It has decimated the American middle class by taking away its livelihoods for no better reason than to pad corporate bottom lines and to allow corporations to avoid our regulatory regime in the form of labor and environmental laws (more on this later). It has resulted in what is perhaps the first economic experiment of this kind in human history -- an economy without much of an industrial core. How such an economy is supposed to survive long-term is a question that is tacitly being avoided in the media or in serious political discussions. We talk about "jobs" but do not say much about the quality of jobs available to American job-seekers. The service and retail industries occupy a central role in this, but who can raise a family on a job at McDonald's or Wal Mart? Outsourcing has also produced a vicious economic cycle, where because people lose their jobs, the amount of disposable income available to vast swaths of the American middle class has sharply declined, thus producing a decline in demand ... and a decline in demand produces a decline in supply -- with more workers being fired or working part-time instead of full time, leading to further decline in disposable income, and thus to further decline in demand etc...
But...
It being in my nature to always look for a silver lining, I had thought naively that at least somewhere else on the planet someone could raise a family on our outsourced jobs. That even as we suffer in the Purgatory of waiting for the next technological innovation that will power up the American economy and create "the jobs of the future," at least, in the sum total of things, somewhere someone else is secure and happy. That at least the sum total of happiness and security in the world is preserved even as they are to be found elsewhere...
Siddhartha Deb provided for a VERY rude awakening.
The portrait of India that emerges from his book is one of hardship and sorrow, of lives destroyed and humanity diminished.
Deb looks first at some of the people who are supposed to be doing better because of the outsourced jobs -- the owner of a chain of colleges that supposedly provide young Indians with the skills for their "new economy" and then an engineer, who at least in theory, should be among the main beneficiaries of this new economy -- the emergent middle class, if you will.
But lo and behold, there is very little happiness or security to be found there. To the contrary, they compare themselves to the richest people in the West, and find themselves full of insecurities about their present status in India. What seems to have been transplanted best from the West is the eternal thirst for more possessions, the abhorrent consumerism we all know so well. So the college owner buys a Bentley Continental and has it repainted to match the color of his favorite shirt... And the engineer invests a vast amount of money into a half-finished house in the middle of nowhere finding it necessary to import cabinets from Italy ...
Writes Deb,
In contemporary India the new rich [...] are people in a hurry, expressing fevered modes of consumption, flaunting gargantuan appetites meant to astonish and dazzle the rest of us. They acquire things that are better, bigger and more exclusive [...] People are the amount of money they make, but even in the world of the Indian rich, that is no longer enough. (p.43)
I used to read much on the so-called "green revolution" in India and on how the World Bank and a vast array of NGOs focused on making India self-sufficient in food. But decades later, globalization and outsourcing have come to the Indian countryside too. Deb examines the effect of the dismantling of the government-funded program for providing seeds and loans to small farmers. New economic thinking (and rampant corruption) have allowed to a truly massive displacement of peasants from their land. They no longer have the resources to cope and, as Deb demonstrates, the free market is a capricious and an unmerciful god. Speculators dupe villagers into growing specific products (the focus in the relevant chapter is on "red sorghum") promising good prices for the harvest. But then at harvest time, these same speculators begin a cutthroat race to the bottom trying to undercut each other's prices and, in the process, devastating the lives of thousands upon thousands of peasants. The truly squalid conditions in which these poor people live are mind-numbing...
But quite apart from having to rely on a "free" market to make their living, peasants' lives are also blighted by pollution that goes unreported and uncleaned. This next part reads almost like a science fiction novel:
The stench hit me when I climbed to the top. My nose and eyes started to burn. There was a lake of sorts below us, bubbling and brown, its surface indented with rocks, and although we were well away from the lake, the fumes coming from it were so strong that it was like standing over a vat of sulphuric acid. Vijay pointed to the horizon on the other side of the lake, where the factories releasing the effluents were located. (p.130)
But perhaps the most poignant part of the book is the chapter dealing with life at a factory. This is what I wanted to read most from the entire book. For here perhaps, in industrial production, one could find some semblance of security or, indeed, the seeds of trade-unionism beginning to take root. No such luck. The life of a factory worker consists of a long 12- or 14 - hour shift and then fitful sleep... with cooking and washing clothes squeezed in-between... Workers actually live on the grounds of the factory (?!?!) in what is the crudest, most awful reproduction of some unholy mix of slavery and serfdom. Not only that, but a majority of them pay recruiters to find such jobs for them and their indebtedness to the recruiters never allows them to break above water.
But what is most revealing about the whole arrangement is that employers in one part of the country only hire migrants -- local people could be troublesome, could try to form a union. Migrants are away from their support networks, they owe money, their jobs are of paramount importance to them... and so they put up with everything... long hours, unhealthy and dangerous work for which many of them have not been properly trained, the misery and squalor of cubicles where they sleep, cook, and get drunk on cheap liquor and beer... Theirs is not a life, it is a vegetative state -- from strenuous effort and extreme exhaustion to a few hours alone and hungry and drunk...
And these people often lose their jobs, so they move from place to place - totally anonymous in the vastness of that country - profoundly alone:
For what happened to workers who fell through the hole, I didn't have a person I talked to, only a vision. [...] He was young, maybe in his late teens, dressed in a black T-shirt and trousers. His feet were bare, and he moved on those bare feet down the middle of the road, unheeding of any of us. His eyes were bloodshot, staring into the void. He was most likely a Nepali and he was almost certainly drunk. But there was something about him that suggested a terrible violation, as if he had been raped and set loose on the street. Everyone stared, no one moved, either because they were stunned by his appearance or because they were used to such figures. He went past us, drifting towards the new highway... (p.206)
This is what corporations have done, though the word "done" is somehow not strong enough here. This is where our good jobs have gone. To be bad jobs elsewhere -- not a source of security or happiness, at all, but a machine for consuming lives... for destroying the environment... And even for the select few, providing nothing more than a bad replica of an American gated community. And this, in the end, is why corporate employers have done this. To avoid labor laws that prohibit them from hiring children or limit the hours in a working day. To avoid minimum wage laws, that allow them to virtually imprison people in factories abroad and mistreat them like no human being should ever be mistreated. To treat the environment as an unlimited source of all raw materials they need and, later, as a huge garbage dump whose cleanup is never their problem. This is what they have wrought. I shudder to think that this, perhaps, is Western civilization's greatest legacy to the world...
Sat Sep 22, 2012 at 2:40 PM PT: Update I: Wow! Community Spotlight... I am really glad. Outsourcing is a topic we do not discuss enough. Thank you all. Read on!