Investor greed.
This indicates the problem with companies being almost completely driven by shareholder value. What is happening here is that the constant attempts of pushing up return to investors, even during austere times can only be achieved by aggressively cutting costs, and, well, people in developed countries are always seen as a high cost.
I'm not any type of Marxist leftie, but the current monoculture of maximizing profits is what is at the heart of the entire financial crisis. When will people realize that it is just not possible to increase ROI year-on-year forever.
Maybe some of us techies should set up a mutual organization to offer IT outsourcing. Only problem is, where can we get the start-up capital?