For decades, American manufacturers of everything from blue jeans to semiconductors have searched the world for the cheapest labor they could find.

It may have cost hundreds of thousands of American jobs, but it’s made American products more affordable. Now, some of the most familiar companies -ones we deal with every day - are moving a whole new class of jobs overseas.

They call it outsourcing. Not the old economy assembly line jobs, but jobs in the new economy — anything that involves a computer or a telephone.

As Correspondent Morley Safer first reported last January, that person at the other end of the line is more likely to be in India than in Indiana.
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To many American employers, India is Nirvana. It has a stable democracy, an enormous English-speaking population, and a solid education system that each year churns out more than a million college graduates — all happy to work for a fraction of the salary of their American counterparts.

And India epitomizes the new global economy — a country that often looks on the edge of collapse, a background of grinding poverty, visually a mess.

And yet, whether you know it or not, when you call Delta Airlines, American Express, Sprint, Citibank, IBM or Hewlett Packard’s technical support number, chances are you’ll be talking to an Indian.

“We’re doing customer servicing there,” says Raman Roy, chairman of Wipro Spectramind, a leading outsourcing company. He helped start the Indian call center boom in the ’90s when he came up with a business plan for American companies to direct their calls to India.

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