20) India's Media Welcomes Outsourcing Work

Video editing, digitization and other production processes can be exported digitally and worked on offshore. This has resulted in an issue in the offshore outsourcing market. UNI's media and entertainment sector (UNI MEI) is appealing to union rights in India's rapidly growing offshore outsourcing business in television and film production work.

The market is overwhelming. It was presumed that in 2005 the global media and entertainment industry would be worth $70 billion and that figure would be due to rise to trillion by 2009. The TV industry in India is flourishing with the 3rd biggest cable TV market in the world and a multiplicity of channels.

The UNI MEI world executive acknowledged in a recent meeting in Mumbai that media, like other sectors, would be more and more influenced by the outsourcing of services internationally.

UNI MEI is not only demanding new job opportunities for members affected in exporting countries, but also union rights in the new processing centers. NDTV (a Murdoch spin off) and Genpact (partly owned by US giant General Electric)，two big Indian media operations，have made a pitch earlier this year for TV work from the BBC in the UK and other broadcasters in the USA, Canada and Australia.

The proportion of digital media work they revealed is 70%, which could be done at a lower price in India. In comparison to $15 in India, editing suites cost $140 an hour in the developed West.

“We concern jobs in the BBC as well as in the film production work,” said Suresh Chawla, of the UK's media, arts and entertainment workers' union BECTU.

Many other professional white-collar jobs are being exported as well. USA is estimated to have 10% of its legal work and 12% of its accounting work undertaken by India within the next five years.

Moreover, the BBC is also taking into consideration outsourcing some of its finance work. It is believed that more and more work will be outsourced to cheap labor destinations like India and China with the globalization of economy.

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