Live, from New Delhi: Former U.S. Media Jobs

by Tula Connell, Apr 3, 2006

For those who worry that immigrants coming to this country are taking U.S. jobs: Don’t.

If Big Business has its way, there won’t be many jobs left in this country.

Hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs already have been outsourced to other countries, with President George W. Bush’s economic and trade policies abetting the process.

Now, courtesy General Electric Co., the latest white-collar jobs likely on their way overseas could be media editing, post-production and archiving services.

According to this week’s World of Labor, two of the biggest corporate names recently launched a joint media venture: 

The news television network, NOTV (New Delhi Television) and the huge outsourcing specialist, Genpact, which is now owned by General Electric, said media groups could cut costs by at least 20 percent by outsourcing the work to India. NOTV’s chairman, Prannoy Roy, pointed out that 70 percent of all media work is digital and 70 percent of this could be done more cheaply in India. The global media and entertainment industry was estimated to be worth £770 billion ($1,350 billion) in 2005 and set to reach more than £1 trillion ($1,737 billion) by 2009.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, employment in U.S. software-producing industries fell by 128,000 jobs from 2000 to early 2004, while some 100,000 new jobs producing software for export to the United States were created in India over the same period of time.

Meanwhile:

Analysts say that 10 percent of U.S. legal work and 12 percent of accounting will be undertaken by India within five years.

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