A February 26, 2004 report in ‘The Christian Science Monitor’ makes the case for outsourcing succinctly: “India may still be the world’s outsourcing king. The great global magnet that’s attracting American and European service-industry work such as computer programming, insurance-claims processing and call-center staffing. But a growing host of countries aims to knock India off its throne. From South Africa to Russia to Hungary to China, ambitious nations and companies are rushing to build call-center capacity and back-office processing units to claim their share of America’s rich outsourcing pie. So, even as US presidential candidates and labor unions bemoan their loss of jobs, there is growing global ability to attract American work. That means it may even get easier and cheaper for US firms to ship jobs overseas…In 2003, US firms struck $119 billion worth of million-dollar-plus outsourcing deals - up 44 percent from 2002, according to Gartner, a research firm based in Stamford, Conn. In 2004, Gartner projects there will be 30 percent more US firms doing outsourcing than last year.”

The article goes on: “South Africa is in the top echelon of India’s IT competitors, according to Gartner. The group also includes Canada, China, Hungary, The Philippines, Poland, Russia and others. A second tier includes Belarus, Costa Rica, Egypt, Estonia and Venezuela. Promising rookies include Ghana, Mauritius, Morocco, Nepal, Senegal and Vietnam. ‘We’re in a global market,’ says Richard Matlas, a Gartner research director. ‘Even though some politicians are trying to jump on the bandwagon of keeping jobs in the US, corporations have to look at global delivery of their services to stay competitive.’”

Viewed in the context of an increasingly integrated word economy, the outsourcing of jobs from the United States and other sophisticated, industrialised countries is just another telling characteristic of globalisation prophesied by social theorists in recent decades. It would be a borderless world in which capital would follow efficient systems and skilled workers to any part of the planet. Efficient nations with state-of-the-art communication and transportation systems will be headed for prosperity leaving by the wayside those producers and states that are unable to compete in the global marketplace.

Addressing members of the American Chamber of Trinidad and Tobago in April 1997, West Indian scholar Wendell Motley described globalisation as having the potential of becoming the most seriously destabilising force in the Caribbean as well as the world. He predicted the emergence of a new global elite, who, through knowledge, skills and the access to information, “will stand as toll-keepers at several access points to the fantastic new wealth machine that is the global economy”. The Yale economics graduate then painted the obverse picture. “In contrast, there is the other aspect, the masses of humanity numbering in the billions and including millions in the so-called developed world, who, because of their lack of education, training and socialisation, have been rendered not just unemployed, but irrelevant by those technological processes that are super-productive, increasingly knowledge-driven and capital-intensive.”