Britain Industrialized by Destroying India's manufacturing capacity

[Guest guest]

"Britain's industrialisation was secured by destroying the

manufacturing capacity of India."

 

INDIA RICHEST COUNTRY -What is the truth?

 

The flight to India

The Guardian

George Monbiot

December 21, 2004

 

If you live in a rich nation in the English-speaking world, and most

of your work involves a computer or a telephone, don't expect to have

a job in five years' time. Almost every large company which relies

upon remote transactions is starting to dump its workers and hire a

cheaper labour force overseas. All those concerned about economic

justice and the distribution of wealth at home should despair. All

those concerned about global justice and the distribution of wealth

around the world should rejoice. As we are, by and large, the same

people, we have a problem.

 

Britain's industrialisation was secured by destroying the

manufacturing capacity of India. In 1699, the British government

banned the import of woollen cloth from Ireland, and in 1700 the

import of cotton cloth (or calico) from India. Both products were

forbidden because they were superior to our own. As the industrial

revolution was built on the textiles industry, we could not have

achieved our global economic dominance if we had let them in.

Throughout the late 18th and 19th centuries, India was forced to

supply raw materials to Britain's manufacturers, but forbidden to

produce competing finished products. We are rich because the Indians

are poor.

 

Now the jobs we stole 200 years ago are returning to India. Last week

the Guardian revealed that the National Rail Enquiries service is

likely to move to Bangalore, in south-west India. Two days later, the

HSBC bank announced that it was cutting 4,000 customer service jobs

in

Britain and shifting them to Asia. BT, British Airways, Lloyds TSB,

Prudential, Standard Chartered, Norwich Union, Bupa, Reuters, Abbey

National and Powergen have already begun to move their call centres

to

India. The British workers at the end of the line are approaching the

end of the line.

 

There is a profound historical irony here. Indian workers can

outcompete British workers today because Britain smashed their

ability

to compete in the past. Having destroyed India's own industries, the

East India Company and the colonial authorities obliged its people to

speak our language, adopt our working practices and surrender their

labour to multinational corporations. Workers in call centres in

Germany and Holland are less vulnerable than ours, as Germany and

Holland were less successful colonists, with the result that fewer

people in the poor world now speak their languages.

 

The impact on British workers will be devastating. Service jobs of

the

kind now being exported were supposed to make up for the loss of

employment in the manufacturing industries which disappeared overseas

in the 1980s and 1990s. The government handed out grants for

cybersweatshops in places whose industrial workforce had been crushed

by the closure of mines, shipyards and steelworks. But the companies

running the call centres appear to have been testing their systems at

government expense before exporting them somewhere cheaper.

 

It is not hard to see why most of them have chosen India. The wages

of

workers in the service and technology industries there are roughly

one

tenth of those of workers in the same sectors over here. Standards of

education are high, and almost all educated Indians speak English.

While British workers will take call-centre jobs only when they have

no choice, Indian workers see them as glamorous. One technical

support

company in Bangalore recently advertised 800 jobs. It received 87,000

applications. British call centres moving to India can choose the

most

charming, patient, biddable, intelligent workers the labour market

has

to offer.

 

There is nothing new about multinational corporations forcing workers

in distant parts of the world to undercut each other. What is new is

the extent to which the labour forces of the poor nations are also

beginning to threaten the security of our middle classes. In August,

the Evening Standard came across some leaked consultancy documents

suggesting that at least 30,000 executive positions in Britain's

finance and insurance industries are likely to be transferred to

India

over the next five years. In the same month, the American consultants

Forrester Research predicted that the US will lose 3.3 million

white-collar jobs between now and 2015. Most of them will go to

India.

 

Just over half of these are menial "back office" jobs, such as taking

calls and typing up data. The rest belong to managers, accountants,

underwriters, computer programmers, IT consultants, biotechnicians,

architects, designers and corporate lawyers. For the first time in

history, the professional classes of Britain and America find

themselves in direct competition with the professional classes of

another nation. Over the next few years, we can expect to encounter a

lot less enthusiasm for free trade and globalisation in the parties

and the newspapers which represent them. Free trade is fine, as long

as it affects someone else's job.

 

So a historical restitution appears to be taking place, as hundreds

of

thousands of jobs, many of them good ones, flee to the economy we

ruined. Low as the wages for these positions are by comparison to our

own, they are generally much higher than those offered by domestic

employers. A new middle class is developing in cities previously

dominated by caste. Its spending will stimulate the economy, which in

turn may lead to higher wages and improved conditions of employment.

The corporations, of course, will then flee to a cheaper country, but

not before they have left some of their money behind. According to

the

consultants Nasscom and McKinsey, India - which is always short of

foreign exchange - will be earning some $17bn a year from outsourced

jobs by 2008.

 

On the other hand, the most vulnerable communities in Britain are

losing the jobs which were supposed to have rescued them. Almost

two-thirds of call-centre workers are women, so the disadvantaged sex

will slip still further behind. As jobs become less secure,

multinational corporations will be able to demand ever harsher

conditions of employment in an industry which is already one of the

most exploitative in Britain. At the same time, extending the

practices of their colonial predecessors, they will oblige their

Indian workers to mimic not only our working methods, but also our

accents, our tastes and our enthusiasms, in order to persuade

customers in Britain that they are talking to someone down the road.

The most marketable skill in India today is the ability to abandon

your identity and slip into someone else's.

 

So is the flight to India a good thing or a bad thing? The only

reasonable answer is both. The benefits do not cancel out the harm.

They exist, and have to exist, side by side. This is the reality of

the world order Britain established, and which is sustained by the

heirs to the East India Company, the multinational corporations. The

corporations operate only in their own interests. Sometimes these

interests will coincide with those of a disadvantaged group, but only

by disadvantaging another.

 

For centuries, we have permitted ourselves to ignore the extent to

which our welfare is dependent on the denial of other people's. We

begin to understand the implications of the system we have created

only when it turns against ourselves.