With the race for tomorrow’s driverless cars becoming increasingly fierce, car manufacturers are now having to invest into software technologies. New legal proposals in Germany could see more software jobs outsourced to Bangalore, India.
A senior official from Daimler, the car manufacturing giant may be forced to create more technology and software jobs abroad as it strives to establish dominance in the coming age of driverless vehicles.
With car manufacturers increasingly wanting to develop hi-tech features in their sensor-filled cars which can be exploited through smartphone apps, developing the right software has now emerged as the new battleground among car manufacturers.
German labour rules, developed more than a century ago however, are acting as a major impediment for Daimler’s ability to adapt to the new working habits of this industry.
As per Wilfried Porth, a member of Daimler’s board who is responsible for IT and human resources, the problem may in fact get worse. Already a new legal proposal is dawning which could give labour representatives the right to be informed on the extent of dependency from outside contractors. This could make life a little more challenging and bureaucratic says Daimler.
“While others successfully develop new business models, we’re facing increasing regulation from politics and union pressure,” said Porth during an interview. “We are reaching a situation where the mix between trade union and legal rules make flexible working more difficult.”
New German labour rules dictate that workers cannot work more than 10 hours a day. The new rules are also trying to limit the outsourcing of writing the software to third parties, cumbersome, as per Porth.
“In Silicon Valley, companies can make use of cloud computing to gain access to outside know-how,” commented Porth. “The consequence is that we do not set up many of these activities in Germany, but in India or the United States. This is the only possibility to take advantage of these opportunities.”
Currently, Daimler has employed only 3,000 R&D staff in Bangalore, India and 200 in Sunnyvale, California. Bangalore is central to its digital engineering hub, where engineers work on projects which include myriad complicated calculations revolving around designs and crash test simulations.
If these jobs were to shift to Germany, legal rules and labour unions will have to be more flexible, said Porth.
“We do not want to cut back worker protection, but we need to leave people the freedom to decide what hours they work,” said Porth. Office jobs, as opposed to production line work, requires a lot more flexible working conditions.
He went on to add, “Extremely strenuous physical labour, which requires rigid rules – we don’t have that to the same extent as we used to.”
Categories: Entrepreneurship, Strategy, Uncategorized
manageria.biz 
Leave a comment