The Staton Jones Report

The Seattle Times is publishing a article about documentation leaked by an unknown MS employee detailing the offshoring of core product development to India.

A Seattle labor group said it has new evidence that Microsoft is shifting high-level work to foreign contractors, including work on the next version of Windows.

Microsoft has long hired outside companies to supplement its labor force and develop partnerships in the technology industry, but its activities in India are being scrutinized amid the national debate over the outsourcing of technology work to developing countries such as India.

A concern is that even the highest-skilled and best-paying work, such as software development, is now subject to competition from lower-cost locales abroad.

The evidence is a cache of Microsoft contracts with Indian technology vendors that were leaked to the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, an AFL-CIO affiliate that has focused on outsourcing in its effort to organize tech workers.

"The notion that next-generation technology is going to be the exclusive domain of domestic-based employees of the company is rapidly fading away with the disclosure of these documents," said Marcus Courtney, WashTech president and organizer.

The documents include wage lists and projects for Microsoft at Infosys, Wipro, Satyam and Tata Consultancy Services, the four largest Indian software and technology-services companies.

Much of the work involves testing, preparing user guides and building specialized tools. One of the Infosys projects is a guide for customers switching from an Oracle database to a Microsoft database.

White collar jobs are in the same peril today that manufacturing jobs were in the '80s.