Will offshorers buy up U.S. jobs to transfer home?
Despite the slowdown in offshoring contracts, Vemuri says Infosys is shopping around to buy an American consultancy — and possibly a European consultancy — to supplement or complement its front-end consulting capabilities. “We are sitting on $2 billion in cash,” Vemuri tells me. However, unlike other foreign companies that plant a flag in the United States and go on to open up job opportunities here — I’m thinking of the auto industry in particular — Pettibone warns that if Infosys buys a U.S. company, it may be buying just the clients and taking the work back to India. It’s a clear example of more of that “labor arbitrage” I was talking about.
