Treacherous Aussie Companies

[Jerry_Atrick]

Th QANTAS (or iIMHO, QANTARSE) shipping 840 jobs off to India (and hiding the fact there was an AI element) seems to hve created a bit of a backlash. But this is not the first time they have done it and won't be the last. In fact, the earliest I know of was in the mid 90s with Telstra offshoring a lot of its information technology jobs, too. 

 

So I asked chat to generate me a table of private and publicly listed Australian companies that have off-shored jobs from Australia. Its context response is:

"I’ll consolidate this into one table and distinguish four measures: Australian roles transferred, offshore staff hired to support Australian operations, proposed transfers, and jobs brought back onshore. I’ll exclude global headcounts unless there is evidence they serve Australian operations."

 

Here is the table:

 

So offshoring not necessarily that bad, but look at the second table - People they outright hire overseas to support Aussie operations. .which means rather than create the job here, create it somewhere else. 

 

Also, note that there are a couple of offshoring initiatives I know of that are missing, so this is an understatement. Consider there are no resource/mining companies in that mix. And the QANTAS maintenance outsourcing.. So, I would suggest the numbers are a lot higher than the above and a decent more number of companies 

 

Also consider that there have been foreign takeovers of Aussie companies that may have shipped jobs O/S before the takeover but certainly did afterwards. And this does not include foreign companies.. e,g, IBM and the like, which no doubt take work in Australia (e.g. build  government department a bespoke system) and then ship the work to a low cost destination. I am not saying IBM have done this... it is hypothetical, but it is a good way for the government to get the benefit of cheaper overseas resources without directly offshoring its operations. 

 

So, I get the backlash against QANTAS. But, there is a lot more doing and have done so for a long time, And I bet QANTAS are betting, like the backlash when they exported maintenance jobs overseas, it will all die down and because they have the lion's share of the capacity in Australia (airport slots/gates), it will blow over and not materially impact the bottom line And, no other copany on the above list seems to have suffered as a result of that they have done..