However, the experienced reality repeatedly doesn't live up to the promise.
Nobody would risk disrupting smooth running operations by introducing offshoring to save a few pennies, when free money was raining from the sky, but now that money is getting tighter and covid opened the doors to accepting more work done remotely and less work done in sync face to face, then offshoring is now a lot less risky and off-putting than in the past.
Plus, unlike the Indian offshoring scare of ~20 years ago, besides the remote work thing, offshore labor is a lot more skilled at IT task now. There isn't that massive gap anymore, where only Americans or Germans new how to write SW, and the eastern world only knew to make sneakers and do call support. Thanks to STEM universities, access to good education sources, FOSS and self learning, people outside the west can code just as good but at a lower cost when you keep the same hiring bar and don't just pay some offshore middleman consultancy for the cheapest labor.
And the proof is in the pudding as most big tech companies have large pools of workers in India at this point. You can say all you want, that offshoring isn't gonna work because of quality or culture or whatever, but it sure seems like it is working for them, and I don't think this genie is going back in the bottle.
However, the second an IT union gets established they’re just going to say the hell with it, India ain’t so bad.
How isn't it working? Most big tech companies have large pools of workers in India/Asia/LatAm/CEE at this point. So something must be working if they keep growing there.
Where I live now in Austria, there's some union of IT workers, but it's small and toothless because they know their work can be offshored and have no leverage especially that the country is already not attractive to investors as-is due to high costs, high taxes and regulations. IT workers giving themselves even more benefits and protections through unions, like the rail workers have for example, would just mean non critical IT work leaves the country ASAP to neighboring Hungary or Slovakia or something.
In a globalized free market without trade and regulatory barriers, where the products and the "labor" travels freely over a wire with no borders or tariffs, the best value players win all, and everyone else is stuck in a race to the bottom trying to match that even if their operating costs are higher due to regulations, taxes, etc
Unions only worked in jobs where the workers could collectively use the leverage they had all along against their employer but were too afraid to use due to retaliation, but unions can't fix real world economic and trade facts that make your leverage zero to begin with. See the VFX industry for best example.