It is well known that IBM, like most other large IT companies, has been outsourcing it's jobs to India and other countries for years, And it was just a matter of time before the Indian workforce exceeded that in the US.
Well, now it's happened. Exact numbers are hard to come by, because IBM stopped reporting them a few years ago. However, several sources indicate that IBM has about 90,000 US workers and about 110,000 workers in India.
In the grand scheme of things, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Adam Smith, in his great work "The Wealth of Nations" wrote eloquently that in a free enterprise global economy, jobs would migrate to the areas with the lowest wages. Recent stats show that the average wage in the IT industry in India is $17,000 per year, very low by US standards, or Canadian standards for that matter.
Over time, Smith said, the wages in the low wage country will rise, until some sort of parity is achieved. Then the outflow will stop and perhaps reverse. In the meantime, consumers will have benefited from lower cost goods and services, giving them higher discretionary income, which means higher levels of savings, higher levels of investment, growth in business and the rise of home grown employment in, say, service industries, where wage rates are more comparable globally or in industries that cannot be outsourced. The outsourcing country will benefit from higher exports, because the other countries have more money to import with, creating jobs in export industries and helping to offset the lower employment from outsourcing..
What that means is that everyone benefits. Win-win. That's the theory.
You can read more about the IBM employment situation in this article.
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