So — How Little Are The Publishers Paying Their New Employees In Asia

Not very much according to this post at the US Law Librarians Blog…


The whole post is well worth a read.. but this section comparing workers rates.

Hodnicki the author of the piece, as you will see, does not accuse the publishers of running information sweatshops? but we are left with questions about how these operations are run simply due to lack of information about this the? new wave of Wexis employees.

It’s not hard to see why they are choosing the Philippines over India looking at the table below. And as Hodnicki points out.. the only way we are going to find out how these information factories work is by visiting the sites…. Here at HOB we suggest a number of law KM’s / Librarians form an international group and force the publishers to let a representative visit these new “factories” twice a year to ensure workers are being treated fairly and also to ensure that the people hired are actually doing the job that the client needs.

Full post at?? http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/law_librarian_blog/2010/05/offshore-information-factories-in-legal-publishing.html

Hodnicki writes:

US Legal Publishers in Low-Cost Foreign Counties. This is the Tao of labor economics in a global market. The easiest way to reduce unit labor costs is to reduce the most flexible cost component, namely employee compensation. One relevant comparison in this instance may be the salary range for Information Technology Services jobs in the US, India and the Philippines. Doesn’t take a math whiz to figure out why jobs are moving overseas.


IT Services Salary Ranges: US, India, the Philippines

Country??????? Salary Range (USD)????? Salary Range (National Currency)??? Exchange Rate
US??????????????????? $44,470 – $65,593??? ???
India????????????????? $9,022 – $18,147?? ? ?? INR 399,455 – INR 803,493???????????????? 1 USD = 44.2750 INR
Philippines?????????? $4,667 – $7,139?? ? ???? PHP 207,456 – PHP 317,362???????????????? 1 USD = 44.4500 PHP


Sources: Payscale.com salary surveys for India, Philippines and US. Exchange rates from XE.COM


If one wants to critique legal publishing outsourcing in a now very well established globalized labor force market, the examination should focus on employee compensation — wages, hours worked, health and retirement benefits — and working conditions based on international labor standards and local labor markets to determine whether the legal resources and services we are acquiring are being created in foreign sweatshops. If they are, we as law librarians and institutional buyers certainly can make a case for protesting legal publishers who are engaging in these practices. Remember Nike?

The odds are high, however, that no sweatshop criticism could be leveled against legal publishers today. Certainly there is a mix of lower-skilled clerical and higher-skill professional work being performed at wages substantially less than what would be paid in the US but I doubt we are talking about workplaces full of unskilled workers who may be compensated under high productivity quotas and employed under other questionable working conditions. — think goods factories like the ones producing Nike shoes in the 1990s or information factories full of Taiwanese workers performing data input of legal texts like the one suppling digital content for LexisNexis in the 1980s (assuming that story was true). The editorial production work being sent to India and the Philippines is probably relatively higher paying jobs than most others in each country’s labor market and I have serious doubts that any international labor standards are being violated.

Someone, however, may want to test this assumption by making site inspections to legal publishers’ “information factories” in foreign lands. [JH]