I do not doubt the figures from the BBTK. I honestly don’t know how many Indian IT specialists are currently in our country. I do however know how many IT people we need. It’s in the thousands. This is what Agoria is hearing from its members. And that permanent shortage is almost always the topic of discussion when I speak to colleagues in the sector. It is difficult for us all to fulfill vacancies, in spite of great wages, benefits and a huge investment in time and resources to create the most pleasant and dynamic work environment. Believe me: we go out of our way to do that. Recently, we even had an info stand at Facts, a quirky fair in Flanders Expo dedicated to comic and gaming fans, Trekkies, Star Wars fans and who knows what else. You can look it up on Facts.be, if you dare. But that’s another story. I think this job loss is not so huge. Those Indians are not taking our jobs away, we need them to fill in the gaps. It’s a good thing they exist! Because no IT specialist willing to work is out of a job for long here. In many companies, you don’t even need an official diploma anymore. A good self-taught person is better than an open vacancy.
What I refuse to believe, however, is that ‘employers’ purposefully try to save on social security by employing low-cost workforce. That generalization is too easy. For your information, at Codit we are talking about one in 130. And that one Indian colleague is paid according to Belgian standards. The same way we reward our employees in France, The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Portugal according to local conditions, regardless of their nationality. Does our Indian colleague earn a lot? To Indian standards, certainly. To Swiss standards, perhaps not.
I’m afraid the BBTK is barking up the wrong tree. People being taxed in their country of origin as a result of a trade agreement is a policy issue. Individual employers and their employees have little to do with it. And in any case, it is primarily rearguard action in a globalized economy. The vast majority of those cheap Indian IT employees work in ‘Belgian IT’, but not for a ‘Belgian company’. There are a lot of international players in our market. They are indeed trying to acquire work as cheaply as possible in order to stay competitive. I could call this distortion of competition. The thing is that we at Codit (and many other Belgian IT companies) look beyond the local market.
I invite the trade union to expand their field of view as well. Let’s do something about that shortage, because it is putting a brake on the growth of Belgian IT companies. In our knowledge economy, we need to invest in talent. And that should not be limited to young people. We have a lot of people ‘on the bench’ whose skills no longer match the needs of our companies. Perhaps the trade union can help warm them to a career switch? Imagine meeting our ambitions and our country having lots of internationally relevant and innovative IT companies. That would be much more beneficial to our welfare state than fighting over breadcrumbs.
Stijn Degrieck is CEO of Codit, a fast growing and internationally active IT company headquartered in Ghent.
Note: This opinion was first published via De Standaard on 2 May 2017 (in Dutch).
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