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Op-Ed Columnist: Meet the Zippies
February 22, 2004
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
BANGALORE, India
We grew up with the hippies in the 1960's. Thanks to the
high-tech revolution, many of us became yuppies in the
1980's. And now, fasten your seat belt, because you may
soon lose your job to a "zippie" in the 2000's.
"The Zippies Are Here," declared the Indian weekly magazine
Outlook. Zippies are this huge cohort of Indian youth who
are the first to come of age since India shifted away from
socialism and dived headfirst into global trade, the
information revolution and turning itself into the world's
service center. Outlook calls India's zippies
"Liberalization's Children," and defines one as "a young
city or suburban resident, between 15 and 25 years of age,
with a zip in the stride. Belongs to generation Z. Can be
male or female, studying or working. Oozes attitude,
ambition and aspiration. Cool, confident and creative.
Seeks challenges, loves risks and shuns fears." Indian
zippies carry no guilt about making money or spending it.
They are, says one Indian analyst quoted by Outlook,
destination driven, not destiny driven; outward, not
inward, looking; upwardly mobile, not
stuck-in-my-station-in-life.
With 54 percent of India under the age of 25 - that's 555
million people - six out of 10 Indian households have at
least one zippie, Outlook says. And a growing slice of them
(most Indians are still poor village-dwellers) will be able
to do your white-collar job as well as you for a fraction
of the pay. Indian zippies are one reason outsourcing is
becoming the hot issue in this year's U.S. presidential
campaign.
I just arrived here in Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley,
to meet the zippies on the receiving end of U.S. jobs.
Judging from the construction going on every block here,
the multiple applicants for every new tech job, the crowded
pub scene and the families of four you see zipping around
on a single motor scooter, Bangalore is one hot town.
Taking all this in, two things strike me about this
outsourcing issue: One, economists are surely right: the
biggest factor eliminating old jobs and churning new ones
is technological change - the phone mail system that
eliminated your secretary. As for the zippies who soak up
certain U.S. or European jobs, they will become consumers,
the global pie will grow, and ultimately we will all be
better off. As long as America maintains its ability to do
cutting-edge innovation, the long run should be fine.
Saving money by outsourcing basic jobs to zippies, so we
can invest in more high-end innovation, makes sense.
But here's what I also feel: this particular short run
could be a real bear - and politically explosive. The
potential speed and scale of this outsourcing phenomenon
make its potential impact enormous and unpredictable. As we
enter a world where the price of digitizing information -
converting it into little packets of ones and zeros and
then transmitting it over high-speed data networks - falls
to near zero, it means the vaunted "death of distance" is
really here. And that means that many jobs you can now do
from your house - whether data processing, reading an
X-ray, or basic accounting or lawyering - can now also be
done from a zippie's house in India or China.
And as education levels in these overseas homes rise to
U.S. levels, the barriers to shipping white-collar jobs
abroad fall and the incentives rise. At a minimum, some
very educated Americans used to high salaries - people who
vote and know how to write op-ed pieces - will either lose
their jobs, or have to accept lower pay or become
part-timers without health insurance.
"The fundamental question we have to ask as a society is,
what do we do about it?" notes Robert Reich, the former
labor secretary and now Brandeis University professor. "For
starters, we're going to have to get serious about some of
the things we just gab about - job training, life-long
learning, wage insurance. And perhaps we need to welcome
more unionization in the personal services area - retail,
hotel, restaurant and hospital jobs which cannot be moved
overseas - in order to stabilize their wages and health
care benefits." Maybe, as a transition measure, adds Mr.
Reich, companies shouldn't be allowed to deduct the full
cost of outsourcing, creating a small tax that could be
used to help people adjust.
Either way, managing this phenomenon will require a public
policy response - something more serious than the Bush
mantra of let the market sort it out, or the demagoguery of
the Democratic candidates, who seem to want to make
outsourcing equal to treason and punishable by hanging.
Time to get real.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/22/opinion/22FRIE.html?ex=1078583005&ei=1&en=e1311fc13aaa09c9
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