Job Fishing

In the 90's, Midwest states like Ohio went out of their way to give fat tax breaks to Japanese companies like Toyota to attract tech and manufacturing firms to open North American shops.  In the Oughties, it was China.  As the Teens open up, the shift has moved again to Ohio attracting firms from another high-tech country:  India.

Ohio Governor Ted Strickland is quick to admit that he doesn’t “particularly enjoy heights.” So why would he climb into a cherry picker to be lifted 40 feet in the air?

To show off a 196,000-square-foot office park in the Cincinnati suburb of Milford to executives from Tata Consultancy Services, India’s biggest tech company and a thriving part of the Tata Group conglomerate.

To sweeten the deal, Strickland threw in $19 million in tax credits and invited the TCS crew to a state dinner at the governor’s mansion. “The economy is difficult,” Strickland says in the Jan. 11 issue of Bloomberg BusinessWeek. “I will go wherever I can to find jobs.”

TCS said yes, and in November Strickland showed up at the sprawling wooded campus for a ceremony to mark the hiring of the 300th employee at what has become the cornerstone for TCS’s North American efforts.

Tata has hired some 250 graduates of Ohio State University, the University of Cincinnati, and other nearby schools. Soon the facility may employ as many as 1,000 Americans doing back-office and technology outsourcing for U.S. health-care companies and local governments.

The irony is pretty thick here however: Ohio has found a firm from India to come here so that other Ohio companies can outsource their jobs to it. Here in Cincy, TCS maybe be providing 1,000 jobs...but they may be displacing even more as in-house IT workers vanish.

Having said this, I can tell you that IT has been headed down the managed services path for years. I've worked for managed services companies for quite some time now. I can tell you however that the decision is always "We'll get rid of our in-house IT guys and hire the outsourcing company for the same money or even less, and get far more resources for our dollar."

And right now, that's a very, very attractive sales pitch to businesses.