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A multimillionaire business founder has warned employees working from home that their roles can be easily outsourced to countries such as India for a fraction of the price.
Iqbal Singh, founder of financial advisory firm Innovative Consultants, warned that those in the West resisting returning to the office could easily be replaced for as little as ten per cent of the cost.
The business mogul said that Indian investors are increasingly looking at opportunities across industries such as finance, education, healthcare and minerals.
“We are the largest consumer market, so we are looking at these three or four areas we can collaborate and at the same time mutually benefit from,” explained Singh, whose company is based in Northern India.
“Support staff, IT, finance, mortgages, all of those can be supported because of a lower-cost, and at the same time they are an English-speaking workforce,” he said.
“There definitely are a lot of alliances and collaboration that can be created, because we in India have a large workforce of resources who are working on the back end.”
Singh suggests that outsourcing work to developing countries could give employers “more efficiency at a lower cost” of “maybe around 10-15 per cent of whatever the current cost is”.
Return to office mandates
Employers across almost every sector have been encouraging their workforce to return to the office in a bid to increase productivity and bring an end to flexible work cultures. Yet, many of these demands have been met with disdain and resistance from workers, with some deciding to leave a company over conforming to their new rules.
Amazon is one of many tech companies that mandated its workforce return to the office - the firm’s CEO Andy Jassy famously said to staff “it’s not going to work out” if they refused to come back into physical workspaces.
As companies are put under increasing economic pressure, the above may indicate a growing trend of employers outsourcing work to foreign countries for cheap labour. This could be encouraged by the fact Western workers are becoming more expensive – the Office for National Statistics recently reported record high salaries.
From an employee’s perspective, as cheap foreign labour becomes an option at a business leader’s disposal and AI threatens to replace roles, job security weakens dramatically.
