You will all have no doubt by now seen the momentum in corporate law circles toward offshoring work to India (about which we will write more soon), but the current move in accounting firm circles, lead by PwC, is in our view an egregious profit-grab that has a very real prospect of damaging the firm’s brand. For example, presumably the firm doesn’t want its professional work to be associated with the following 12/01/2010 report from Times Online:
Indian towns and cities are treating less than 30 per cent of their sewage, allowing a staggering 26.5 billion litres of untreated wastewater to flow into its rivers and coastal waters every single day, a new government report has revealed… India’s 900 million Hindus revere many of the country’s rivers – especially the Ganges – and devotees often bathe in their waters to symbolically cleanse their sins… This week alone, several million people are expected to immerse themselves in the Ganges at a festival called the Kumbh Mela – renowned as the biggest human gathering in the world. But the Ganges and many other Indian rivers are now so polluted that they contain more sewage than freshwater, as well as industrial effluent and partially burnt corpses from cremation grounds along their banks.
If you’re a fee-paying PwC client, is it reasonable to expect that the staffer ultimately doing your high-priced work will reside in the same country where you originally contracted for the work?
Should a free bottle of Ganges River Bog Brew whiskey be part of the contractual bargain?
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In July 2009, a large burgh named Kilmarnock in east Ayrshire, Scotland,’ made global headlines. It became something of a symbol of how far globalisation had come and the perils that had come along with it.
The reason: Kilmarnock was the birth place of Johnny Walker Scotch whiskey and its single biggest employer, but a decision was made to shut the factory doors to source cheaper labour internationally.
At the time, WSWS reported the following:
Much like the way in which consumers of Johnny Walker “Scotch” whiskey might now be questioning whether the Red Label in their hands is just some bogus ‘Ganges River Bog Brew’, so too must clients of PwC now be wondering who is doing their work and how they are going about it.
You see, our sources have been telling us repeatedly that PwC is orchestrating a carefully calibrated scheme to siphon jobs away from expensive-labour regions like the US and Australia, to cheap-labour regions like India. And, like our article yesterday, it is a major concern for those at university hoping to score a graduate job, not to mention (of course) those anxiously clinging to the jobs they currently hold.
We received the following excellent tip-off from an anonymous PwC spy last week:
The hyperlink leads to an article that in relevant part reports: