The Hiller Instinct: Saving Money, Costing Jobs

NBC, West Wing
"You're handing out pink slips… We can hold the announcement, but American programmers make forty bucks an hour, in India... it's ten..."

On TV and in real life India has been touted as the symbol of outsourcing U.S. companies and state governments moving jobs out of the country to cut costs.

Count Beacon Hill in.

This benefits card, given to 150,000 Bay State welfare recipients, has an 800-telephone number to contact if there's a problem.

Dial the number and the call is answered in India, though no one there will tell you that...

Viyale, Customer Service Representative
"Thank you for calling customer service, this is Viyale, how may I help you?

Andy Hiller
"Where are you getting this call?"

Viyale, Customer Service Representative
"I'm sorry, sir, due to security reasons we are not authorized to tell where we are located."

Jack Hart, Massachusetts State Senator
"I would never have known it unless you had come and told me that."

A key legislator says the Bay State’s outsourcing has been a virtual secret…

Jack Hart, Massachusetts State Senator
"If we're not aware, then I don't think anybody in the commonwealth is aware."

Hart is filing a bill banning Massachusetts from outsourcing public sector jobs.

Jack Hart, Massachusetts State Senator
"I want government jobs and tax dollars spent here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, not overseas."

Gary Nilsson
"I've actually seen it happen and I was part of it..."

Gary Nilsson is president of a local union that has lost thousands of private-sector jobs to outsourcing. The layoffs, including Gary's, came when work was moved from the lucent technologies plant in North Andover overseas.

Gary Nilsson
"It's got to turn around. If it doesn't, we're not going to have a consuming class anymore, we're not going to have a working class, we're going to have a poor class."

But don't blame India, blame the laws of economics. Outsourcing means big savings for companies and consumers…

John McCarthy
"Average is in the 15-25 percent range."

...Says economic forecaster John McCarthy, predicting there will be much more.

John McCarthy
"We expect by 2015 that 3.3 million jobs are going to be off-shored, and that represents roughly about $136 billion in wages."

A prediction picked up on West Wing…

NBC, West Wing
"They say it's going to be 3.3 million over ten years."

But West Wing also says what many politicians won't…

NBC, West Wing
"We can't save your jobs… The world's moving faster. We can't stop it. I wish we could."

But wishing won't change anything. For Americans, who still dream of high pay, low prices and tax cuts, the dream ends as all do… when we wake up.