In staking out a position as an anti-outsourcer, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal isn’t simply waging war with the Connecticut Business & Industry Association.
He’s squaring off against the worldview of people like Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist and author of books such as “The World is Flat” and “The Lexus and the Olive Tree” who argue that globalization and advancing technology have made outsourcing a fact of life.
Blumenthal and the CBIA are at odds over a bill that would require Gov. M. Jodi Rell to complete a report on all state contracts that involve outsourcing — not just international outsourcing, but out-of-state outsourcing. He likes the bill, but wishes it went further.
He is concerned that Connecticut jobs are sacrificed when employers use workers from outside the state because they can do work for less. That trend is even more troublesome to him when the state government hires companies to do work, and the companies proceed to hire people from outside Connecticut to perform it.
“We cannot accept outsourcing — in the face of such unfair competition — as an inexorable or inevitable economic trend,” Blumenthal said.
If his objections to outsourcing are strictly limited to state contracts, it would be one thing. But his objections to outsourcing sound broader and more philosophic than that. That’s a concern because he represents the state, and the state’s image matters in the stiff competition to recruit new employers.
Friedman, winner of three Pulitzer Prizes for his work in international and economic reporting, sees the world differently. To him, outsourcing is a modern reality to be embraced.
For example, many forces have combined, Friedman argues, to encourage Connecticut companies like General Electric Corp. to move many of their back-office administrative and computer operations to Bangalore, India.
Why India?
Because it has a huge English-speaking population and excellent technical schools for starters. Being on the other side of the world, its people are awake when we sleep. They have superb software engineers and excellent fiber optic capacity. The list goes on and on.
GE, which is in the business of making cost-competitive products and services, has been responding to those economic incentives by moving portions of its workload to India because that strategy is efficient and cheaper.
But what about the Connecticut jobs lost by that initiative? What about those workers and their families?
In an interview with Public Television’s Terrence Smith in 2004, Friedman said: “I think we, as a society, have an obligation to public policy and tax programs and subsidies and wage insurance and health care to find a way to cushion people … so they are not steamrollered by these phenomena.”
Friedman went on to say, “What (America) must not do is put up walls that will slow us down and deprive us of what we do best, which is to come up with new ideas, bring them to market and sell them to the rest of the world.”
Blumenthal is not out of line to support legislation that requires the governor to gather information on outsourcing patterns pertaining to state contracts.
But when he implies that outsourcing itself should be reigned in, he does no favors to those in Connecticut who are seeking to recruit new employers and retain the ones we have.
