To move a part or all of a UK business to India or Eastern Europe must be one of the easiest - and possibly laziest - decisions that management can make.

If you're in manufacturing, you up sticks to the Czech Republic. If you have a big call centre operation, then you move it all to India. Easy-peasy. You save pots of cash on inconveniences like salaries, your business becomes more profitable, and you probably get promoted to a better job at another company where you can repeat the process all over again. The latest corporate offender is HSBC - "the world's local bank" - moving 4,000 UK call centre and back office processing jobs mainly to India and Malaysia, but also to China. It's a move, according to Bill Dalton, HSBC's chief executive, that is necessary because the bank has a "responsibility to all its stakeholders to remain efficient and competitive." He didn't, however, make mention of the bank's responsibility to those workers in Swansea, Birmingham, Sheffield and Brentwood who will lose their jobs. "You can imagine how people feel. We've all got mortgages and families, so this is very bad news," said one in the sort of trite, yet hugely affecting language used by those who have employment taken away from them. Equally trite, perhaps, is to point out the vast differences between the management that makes such decisions and those who have to bear the brunt of them, but here goes. Bill Dalton will never know the sort of anxiety that comes from having the working world pulled from under his feet, because Bill, unlike the call centre workers, has to be given 12 months notice. And for making decisions like opting for Shanghai over Swansea, Bill is rather well-paid. Not for him wages that peak at, say, £20,000 a year. Bill's salary last year was £560,000, benefits in kind totalled £26,000 and fees of £35,000 brought the total up to £627,000. And, for good measure, he was awarded share options of £750,000. Now for a package like that, Bill must be the very cream of management. So why has he come up with such a lame strategy, moving jobs to India, something that depressingly seems to be essayed by the majority of companies, even if they only employ half a dozen people to make phone calls? For such a colossal wage packet, shouldn't Bill have been rather smarter than the norm? It is the very least that 4,000 workers would have wanted.

* Ian Reeve is Business Correspondent, BBC TV North-East and Cumbria

lan Reeve is Business Correspondent, BBC TV North East & Cumbria.

Published: 21/10/2003