The Plan
Page 66
Xavier Delauny crossed the English Channel to join INI in London as the financial sector was convalescing, recovering after the disaster that had hit the UK banking industry, which had threatened the sector with systemic collapse. As a specialist in systems security he had been hired by INI as part of the in-house team set-up to supervise the work of their IT service providers. It was a well-paid job. Luckily for Xavier banking security came at a high cost, which precluded any idea of sub-contracting work to Mumbai, or any other offshore service company.
The global labour market in specialized professions, the so -called knowledge economy, which had in the past been reserved for the West, was undergoing a rapid transformation due to the growing availability of higher education in countries such as India, driven by the development of digital processing and high speed Internet technology. The pressure of low cost offshore subcontracting was weighing heavily on wages paid to IT specialists in London and just about every other service centre in developed countries.
Ten years earlier Xavier would have been well paid because of the relative rarity of his skills, but since then salaries had stagnated, in spite of an ever growing demand for qualified IT specialists. The knock-on effect of the crisis and the availability of low cost alternatives, seriously affected the pay of engineers, accountants, medical analysts and countless other white-collar workers.
A point of no return had been reached. The dominant place occupied by Western economies and their workforce was now in danger. The transformation brought about by communications and technology had now reached into every nook and cranny of the planet’s economy, opening the market to those who, in the past, could have never dreamed of competing in markets that had always been the reserve of Westerners.
What had commenced as outsourcing low skills at low prices was turning into a backlash as the number of university graduates doubled, offering a supply of highly qualified workers for added value jobs. The barriers that separated the West from the rest have fallen as the number of university students in China and India overtook those of the US and Europe in the fields of IT, technology, engineering, science and mathematics.
The golden days were gone when expatriates in Hong Kong dominated banking and business in a wide range of positions. Within the space of a decade, technical, managerial and professional roles were occupied by locals and the number of expatriates dwindled. At the same time the cost pressure in manufacturing and service sectors, once driven by Western companies, rebounded, hitting labour costs in the US and Europe, forcing their economies to adapt to the global market demand as competition from emerging economies grew.
Globalisation had commenced in Hong Kong, when its entrepreneurs began outsourcing low-skilled, low-value tasks in nearby Mainland China. In 1979, Shenzhen was established as a Special Economic Zone by the Chinese government for reasons of its proximity to Hong Kong, at that time a booming British colony. Since those early days outsourcing was transformed into a global business demanding high-skills for complex products, as demonstrated by the assembly of Apple products at Foxconn in Shenzhen, the world’s largest maker of electronic components, with its one and a half million employees.
The growth of transnational corporations, that owed their loyalty to none but their shareholders, functioning wherever conditions were most favourable in the global market place, left workers exposed to global change, where even those with solid educational backgrounds struggled to maintain a middle-class lifestyle, precipitating large swathes of the West’s salaried workers into precarity and exclusion.
Western nations found themselves confronted with growing social instability and perhaps strife as unemployment, inequality and institutional poverty became fixed parts of society as governments failed to come to terms with change.
As competitive pressures increased and global options grew for businesses, educational excellence became essential for those who could afford it. Middleclass families were forced to invest in competitive advantage for their offspring: sending them to the best schools, colleges, and universities. Those relegated to lesser known universities, for economic reasons, would be faced with a narrower choice of job opportunities, and certain would end up as part of an ever-growing highly qualified, but low paid workforce.
Delauny like many others of his class voted with his feet, selling his skills to the highest bidder, as politicians struggled to adapt, their ideas fixed in the past, proposing out of date solutions to new and complex problems, unable to come to terms with the progress of global capitalism.
Xavier was one of those fortunate enough to have chosen a sector of increasing importance as Chinese and Russians, led an underground economic war, hacking into the West’s government, business and banking IT systems. The battle for economic power took another turn in what promised to be a fight to the death, where the winner took all.
Chapter 66 SHADOW BANKING