Xavier Delaunay crossed the English Channel to join INI in London as the
financial sector was convalescing, recovering after the disaster that had hit
the UK banking industry, which had threatened the sector with systemic
collapse. As a specialist in systems security he had been hired by INI as part of the
in-house team set-up to supervise the work of their IT service providers. It was a
well-paid job. Luckily for Xavier banking security came at a high cost, which
precluded any idea of sub-contracting work to Mumbai, or any other offshore
service company.
The global labour market in specialized professions, the so -called knowledge
economy, which had in the past been reserved for the West, was undergoing a
rapid transformation due to the growing availability of higher education in
countries such as India, driven by the development of digital processing and high
speed Internet technology. The pressure of low cost offshore subcontracting was
weighing heavily on wages paid to IT specialists in London and just about every
other service centre in developed countries.
Ten years earlier Xavier would have been well paid because of the relative rarity
of his skills, but since then salaries had stagnated, in spite of an ever growing
demand for qualified IT specialists. The knock-on effect of the crisis and the
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availability of low cost alternatives, seriously affected the pay of engineers,
accountants, medical analysts and countless other white-collar workers.
A point of no return had been reached. The dominant place occupied by Western
economies and their workforce was now in danger. The transformation brought
about by communications and technology had now reached into every nook and
cranny of the planet’s economy, opening the market to those who, in the past,
could have never dreamed of competing in markets that had always been the
reserve of Westerners.
What had commenced as outsourcing low skills at low prices was turning into a
backlash as the number of university graduates doubled, offering a supply of
highly qualified workers for added value jobs. The barriers that separated the West
from the rest have fallen as the number of university students in China and India
overtook those of the US and Europe in the fields of IT, technology, engineering,
science and mathematics.
The golden days were gone when expatriates in Hong Kong dominated banking
and business in a wide range of positions. Within the space of a decade, technical,
managerial and professional roles were occupied by locals and the number of
expatriates dwindled. At the same time the cost pressure in manufacturing and
service sectors, once driven by Western companies, rebounded, hitting labour costs
in the US and Europe, forcing their economies to adapt to the global market
demand as competition from emerging economies grew.
Globalisation had commenced in Hong Kong, when its entrepreneurs began
outsourcing low-skilled, low-value tasks in nearby Mainland China. In 1979,
Shenzhen was established as a Special Economic Zone by the Chinese government
for reasons of its proximity to Hong Kong, at that time a booming British colony.
Since those early days outsourcing was transformed into a global business
demanding high-skills for complex products, as demonstrated by the assembly of
Apple products at Foxconn in Shenzhen, the world’s largest maker of electronic
components, with its one and a half million employees.
The growth of transnational corporations, that owed their loyalty to none but their
shareholders, functioning wherever conditions were most favourable in the global
market place, left workers exposed to global change, where even those with solid
educational backgrounds struggled to maintain a middle-class lifestyle,
precipitating large swathes of the West’s salaried workers into precarity and
exclusion.
Western nations found themselves confronted with growing social instability and
perhaps strife as unemployment, inequality and institutional poverty became fixed
parts of society as governments failed to come to terms with change.
As competitive pressures increased and global options grew for businesses,
educational excellence became essential for those who could afford it. Middleclass
families were forced to invest in competitive advantage for their offspring: sending
them to the best schools, colleges, and universities. Those relegated to lesser
known universities, for economic reasons, would be faced with a narrower choice
of job opportunities, and certain would end up as part of an ever-growing highly
qualified, but low paid workforce.
Delauny like many others of his class voted with his feet, selling his skills to the
highest bidder, as politicians struggled to adapt, their ideas fixed in the past,
proposing out of date solutions to new and complex problems, unable to come to
terms with the progress of global capitalism.
Xavier was one of those fortunate enough to have chosen a sector of increasing
importance as Chinese and Russians, led an underground economic war, hacking
into the West’s government, business and banking IT systems. The battle for
economic power took another turn in what promised to be a fight to the death,
where the winner took all.