Job Losses as India Tech Workers Face Cuts: Bloomberg does a flip-flop. Trump to be Blamed or not?

There are two interesting headlines on layoffs in Indian IT, both from from Bloomberg.

The one from today (25th May 2017) claims "Trump Blamed for Job Losses as India Tech Workers Face Cuts."  The other headline from May 11th claims "These Job Cuts Aren't Trump's Fault"

The article in Bloomberg today basically quotes some former Cognizant employees to make an argument for a headline on Trump.
  • The Article quoted Swapana Bhosale from Cognizant “Pulling people out of projects to sack them is unheard of in our industry,” said Bhosale, who demanded to be fired rather than resign so she can take legal action. The 36-year-old sees an unusual culprit behind job losses in the country’s outsourcing industry: U.S. President Donald J. Trump. 
  • Bhosale’s not alone in blaming Trump. In cities like Bangalore, Chennai, Pune, Hyderabad and Kolkata, thousands of engineers who have been axed or face dismissal are banding together on social networks and WhatsApp groups to decry Trump’s policies. They are discussing the creation of the first industrywide IT labor union, (link) which may foreshadow broader changes in a $110-billion business at the heart of India’s economy.
  • “People are angry,” said 25-year-old Pankaj Kumar Singh, a software analyst who was dismissed from Cognizant’s Kolkata operation after two years at the company. “They feel Trump’s policies have a lot to do with the firings.”
In an earlier article, Andy Mukherjee a Bloomberg Gadfly columnist writes

  • India's outsourcing firms are firing workers. Don't blame it on President Donald Trump's hawkish stance on U.S. visas.
  • The "end of hyper-globalization" story makes for compelling headlines. But the Indian code-writers' misfortune has more prosaic roots in technology and customer tastes.
  • The Indian industry is coy about the word "layoffs." That's politically sensible, considering some of Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp.'s employees have already gone to the labor commissioner in the southern city of Hyderabad, alleging they're being coerced into a voluntary separation.
  • Last October, when Gadfly wrote about the Indian outsourcing industry's failure to embrace the future, Trump was yet to win the election. Offshoring firms like Infosys are hoping to counter his subsequent threat to curb H-1B visas by hiring more engineers in the U.S. But as my colleague Tim Culpan has argued, it's more important that those jobs are in the right technologies.
One is left wondering if Bloomberg is highlighting two sides of the same coin; or it is hinting that it is time for Indian IT workers to move beyond layoff?

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