#ukmfg #warwick Speaking in the House of Lords recently, the head of the Warwick Manufacturing Group said that the Government “must press companies and organisations to repatriate out-sourced jobs from abroad.” Lord (Kumar) Bhattacharyya said: “We need to be supporting ‘re-shoring’ — bringing back the jobs that left Britain due to globalisation and cheap labour overseas. In both manufacturing and services, rising wages abroad and technological innovation at home could mean that these jobs come back, if we
make their return a priority.”
Lord Bhattacharyya (pictured) said that the question was “less whether such jobs will come back to the West than which countries they will return to. In America, there is an expectation that those who get government help will return their back-office and IT functions to the USA. That is why ‘buy US’ clauses have appeared in many bailed-out companies’ purchasing contracts.
“Today, a combination of informal pressure, immigration rules, tax changes and US wage competitiveness means that companies like General Electric and General Motors are creating IT jobs in America, not India. Indian out-sourcing companies are facing tough times; their growth and profits are down, and the out-sourcing market is projected to stagnate or even decline, yet the UK seems uninterested in supporting re-shoring with its own money.
"If we were to demand that such direct Government spending was done in the home market, we would immediately create many thousands of jobs in Britain.”