Offshoring and Migration: A Global Labor Process View

• In Event: 20459 - New Frontiers of Globalization

Abstract

Using a global labor process framework, this article extends Saskia Sassen’s work on the relationship between migration and offshoring within global capitalism. Through an original survey of the software services sector—an industry heavily reliant on migration and offshoring—and in-depth interviews with employees of one of the largest firms in the industry, I map the tasks performed by migrants and offshore workers in the software services labor process. I find that while both migrants and offshore workers perform all technical tasks (e.g., coding and testing of software), migrants are more likely to be engaged in architecting software and supervision of coders, given their ability to do client-facing tasks that require onshore presence. The study unpacks the firms’ role in shaping labor migration by detailing how they structure their global labor process. I argue that once firms offshore those parts of their labor process that can be performed offshored, they both create the need for someone to bridge the onshore-offshore divide and create a pool of workers suited to play that part.

Author

• Bhumika Chauhan, Georgia Institute of Technology