Recently, after I gave a lecture in Helsinki on global labour standards, I got into a discussion with some of my audience on what if any should be the common standard for labour markets in the world. A globalized world, with one country's goods, capital, and pollution flowing into another, will inevitably need some common norms and laws. However, the discussion kept veering into questions of free trade and offshoring of work to developing countries. The discussion became animated and it was evident that this is a topic that is as emotionally charged today in industrialized countries as the topic of free trade used to be in developing countries a few decades ago.

The problem of business process outsourcing (BPO) is however a much misunderstood subject. BPO has been a source of hope and progress for many developing nations, such as India, China, and South Africa. With technological breakthroughs in electronic communication and steady increase in bandwidth, it is evident that many jobs that were done in industrialized nations, but did not really need face-to-face interaction, can be shipped out to poorer countries which have cheap labour, an educated workforce, and computer literacy. General Electric (GE) was one of the pioneers that realized the potential in this. In an interesting paper on BPO, Rafiq Dossani of Stanford University reports how GE achieved an annual saving of $340 million from the shifting of some of its back-office work to India.