Niyamath Parveez

“Lets all laugh at Rangers, lets all laugh at Rangers, ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha.”

A chant that has been heard at many football stadiums around Scotland as fans of all different teams take great delight in things not going the way of Glasgow Rangers on the field of play. Even national pride is put to one side when they are demolished in Europe and this season, with 4-1 home defeats against Sevilla and lowly Unirea from Romania, has given plenty to cheer about for those who do not like the Royal Blues.

However, there now appears to be an even bigger reason for non followers to have a riotous laugh at the Teddy Bears as their financial crisis gets darker and darker with each passing day. There may be an emerging twitter trend of skin rangers spreading around the world but the worst case scenario is unlikely to happen.

The set of fans who used to wave money at other clubs as they bossed and bullied around the 1990s now look as though they could be going bust in the 2000s although no one seriously expects a Scottish institution to go to the wall. An institution is what their loyal fans consider Rangers to be but no doubt many other people consider the institution which housed two of the clubs founders to be a bit closer to the mark.

The hope for Rangers surviving lies with Dave King and if he can take over from David Murray? Murray earned himself the nickname Dodgy Dave due to many issues, notably the amount of outsourcing jobs he took away from Ibrox, but King is Dodgier Dave. Where his money will come from, no one knows as it is currently frozen in South Africa whilst King faces over three hundred charges of fraud. You would think King has more on his mind than the future of the team he walked from Castlemilk from Govan every second Saturday to see but it just shows the passion felt by fans of the club.

Sure they have traditions like having a sectarian signing policy for most of the 20th Century, fans who riot at the flicker of a TV screen and an arrogance that knows no ends but there is good about the club too, which is why they deserve to be saved. The clubs generosity to serving members of the Armed Forces is limitless, shown by the tickets given away recently for a Champions League game match against the champions of Romania and all the way back to the time when two Canadian soldiers were greeted warmly by the clubs then manager before they went back to fighting during the War.

However, it is not so straightforward and Lloyds, the bank who now holds the purse strings, knows this. Any prospective buyer will see that cash streams, vital to so many clubs such as food stalls, merchandising, ticket offices and much more have been outsourced away from the football club. They were outsourced to companies which appear to have a strong link to David Murray, the outgoing chairman who the media will never blame for the fall of the Empire but questions need to be asked by someone.

The news of job losses is hardly a surprising story these days with so many firms having to cut back on their labor costs or even go release all of their staff. Such is the scale of the credit crunch that is blighting the world at the moment, no one is really safe with respect to their job but there are still companies where job losses make people wince. The banking industry has clearly been affected heavily and even though there have been a number of redundancies in the industry, there are still more expected to come. One of the recent announcements has come from Lloyds, who have said that over 2,000 jobs are being shed.

Part of the reason that a company like Lloyds can make this sort of decision and still keep trading successfully is due to the importance of outsourcing. There seems to be a difference of opinion these days over whether outsourcing is still popular and improving. Some say yes, some say no and it’s all a matter of what you are basing your expectations on. In the current climate, it is probably unlikely that any company or industry will have true success but the outsourcing industry appears to be reacting okay to the current slump and will likely be okay in the long run. However, there are some political pressures that are impacting on the ability of some firms and companies to offshore outsource. When jobs are being lost left, right and centre, it can be a PR disaster for some companies to offshore their work to a different country. They would be viewed as monsters by the public and it could lead to a massive drop in sales, which no organization needs at this moment in time. Therefore, some companies are finding it makes sense to place some clauses in their outsourcing contracts to ensure the public doesn’t think too badly of them.

The British government has long had outsourcing contracts which state that the jobs must be retained in the United Kingdom, which clearly negates some of the benefits that will arise from using outsourcing. As other countries have standard of living and minimum wage levels that are far lower than their UK equivalent, it stands to reason that it will be possible to find lower wage levels in other countries. Not being able to send tehse jobs abroad will make it harder for an outsourcing supplier to competitively tender for jobs but many are finding a way around it.

It has been noted recently that some Governmental departments and Lloyds Banking Group have had an increasing number of workers being shipped in to work with them as outsourcing staff from the company Capgemini. According to notorious right wing English newspaper the Daily Mail, these workers are being shipped over from India in an attempt to undercut the UK workers and the paper thinks this is a disgrace given that the UK unemployment levels have topped the 2m mark. Unsurprisingly, there has been no official comment made about this situation so it is unclear whether it is true or not but if so, it could well spark a dangerous precedent with regards the future of outsourcing.