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Offshoring to a Ship in International Waters
JasdonLe writes "Sourcing Mag posted an article about Roger Green and David Cook, who hope to avoid US visa regulations that usually accompany outsourcing, with their company SeaCode, and a used cruise ship, sitting in international waters three miles off the coast of Los Angeles.""
Apparently, they have plans for 600 software engineers on this ship. Their major point of having them on the ship appears to be that they can maintain low costs to produce software, while only being 3.1 miles off the coast of Los Angeles. I am assuming they don't have to pay corporate taxes to any entity.
But this just seems to be asking for a lot of trouble. Humanitarily speaking, since they are not actually in any country, who protects the rights of those 600 laboring software engineers? Does anyone have the authority to make sure that it's not (child) slave labor? No government agency can make sure that working conditions are safe and healthy.
SourcingMag says that SeaCode will treat their workers fairly. That's great and all if we suddenly believed that corporations are honest and will regulate themselves. How many times have companys ran sweat-shops and claimed that they were treating their worker's fairly?
At first, I thought this was a joke. I am still unsure if it is.
Not too bright.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
How would this affect taxes?
Agile Artisans
Not sure this plan will hold water. I hope they've weighed all the options.
Waiting for an amusing sig.
Dumbest idea EVER. I do not understand this infatuation with outsourcing professional workers. You can't tell me it's anywhere near as cost effective as they're making it out to be. (My own experience says otherwise.) I smell another crash of DotCom proportions...
But if they're going to do this thing, they should at least do it in style. By utilizing an inexpensive aircraft carrier they could at least send these people home for occasional weekends and vacations. Under the proposed plan, they're basically prisoners on the ship unless they can manage to get a Visa to enter the country. Which, of course, negates the entire point of not messing with H1-Bs. And how do they think the government is going to react to having these people parked right off our shore? (Hmm... maybe they could refit the guns on the old carrier to keep the coast guard off their backs.)
Did I mention that this is a dumb idea?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
...of a horde of unshowered, dropcloth wearing Indians chained to a deck with oars next to their keyboards...
(first post?)
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Arg! Torpedo to the server room!
Now, with our awesome Slashdot power, we have now set fire to the servers on the ship, and it is in the process of sinking.
Good job, everyone! Now, World Domnination is within our grasp!
"Visa regulations" do not accompany "outsourcing". Visa regulations accompany the importation of foreign workers. The problems cited with outsourcing are mostly related to distance.
... I wonder what the tax implications for the workers are. And what happens if a crime is committed in International Waters? What about a guarantee of workplace safety and anti-discrimination policy?
I see lots of problems here.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
until they anchor it three miles off the coast to tell them the US claims territorial waters twelve nautical miles off the coast?
L. Ron Hubbard ALREADY owns the patent to this! Just ask his friendly help desk people at the scientoloaserfgad
asdfasdfasdfa
ASDFAESRFA
NO CARRIER
This won't last. Fed and State of Cali won't like a busniess operating outside its jurisdiction and will make their lives a living hell...
Buying stuff on the ship? Customs time. Don't forget, the DEA will have to check your luggage as well.
Want to go home? Sure thing, we'll just need to make sure your passport is in order. What, you didn't bring a passport? You did know you were leaving the country, right?
-- Terry
No, the U.S. considers the fishing, mineral, and sphere of influence within 100-150 nautical miles. U.S. LAW only applies to within 3 miles to shore. The only thing backing up this position is the 15 carrier taskgroups it can call upon. That's pretty much enough so that the U.N. doesn't want to make an issue of it.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
I'm gonna get a speedboat and pirate there software!
I'd hate to be a coder on the ship during a good storm. We'll probably start seeing variable names like upanddown, backandforth, sidetoside, puke, makeitstop, and soseasick.
I totally want to set up a web server there and illegally distribute Windows ISOs from there, just so I can be charged with Piracy on the High Seas
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Would it be cheaper, to use an abandoned offshore oilrig instead?
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
"International Waters" has been 12 nautical miles for like 40 years now. I'm not even going to go look for links since I bet that 30s and google will tell you that.
From TFA: Staff can make the three-mile voyage into town in their off hours by calling a water taxi. Or they can spend time shopping in the on-board duty-free shop.
I've done my fair share of time aboard a ship, and let me just say that anchoring out and taking a ferry (or water taxi, or whatever you want to call the vomit inducing small craft that transport you to and from the port) a "mere three miles," is a much bigger pain in the arse than you might think. If you're lucky, they run once every 30 minutes. In a situation like this, it's more likely to be every hour, or every few hours.
Do some shopping during the day, and now you'd like to change and grab some dinner and maybe go out? Enjoy catching the ferry back to your boat and then waiting for the next one to get back to land.
Oh, and that moderate sized TV you just bought? Have fun carrying it up the brow.. not to mention just getting it off the ferry, which is probably using its own power to stay pressed against a barge tied alongside the ship. Oops, you slipped? That's a shame. Dropped your TV in the drink? Hope you have a good credit card company, and they believe you.
But I guess maybe it's better than the pay and conditions in the country you come from, and I'm just a spoiled American.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
"International waters" don't start three miles off-shore. The US maritime claims are as follows:
Maritime claims:
territorial sea: 12 nm
contiguous zone: 24 nm
exclusive economic zone: 200 nm
continental shelf: not specified
In other words, they'd have to be at least 12 miles from shore, and possibly (depending on who's doing the interpretation) over 200.
Also, as far as I'm aware, the ship will have to be flagged somewhere, which means that it's effectively that country's territory when in international waters.
Someones tax man will find them.
Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
And while you're at it, why not just drop a super long anchor out at sea, declare your cruise ship to be an artificial island, and petition the U.N. to recognize you as an autonomous state?
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
it's all fun and games until Hiro Protaganist shows up and carves a hole in the hull with his chain gun on steroids.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
This must be a fake ....
Notice how their first "Company News" lists an Article-FORBES with no link. If you go to Forbes.com and search their site for "SeaCode" you get: "Sorry, your search for SeaCode did not return any Documents. Please revise your search and try again."
Besides, 3.1 miles makes no sense as your not in international waters.
1. To code in the sea.
2. To live in sea.
3. To live by the code of sea.
Rrrrr, it be a pirates life for thee
Imagine a passed over supertanker refitted with lots of small decks (a la being John Malkovitch). Fitted with UV lighting and irrigation many plants could be harvested in international waters. Customers would
arrive via boat.
Eventually some pissed govt sticks a torpedo in it.
It should be pretty easy to get a high power and supremely noisy transmitter to play havock with this threat to national security.
Might even make the pringles cans go 'POOF'
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Furthermore, since I think Reagan, the US (unilaterally) declared that its waters extend for 200 miles: the first 6 miles belong to the state, and the rest 194 miles belong to federal government.
Either way, 3.5 offshore is not International waters.
First of all, the 3-nmi line serves only as the boundary between state- and federally-controlled waters. The end of federal jurisdiction and the beginning of International waters actually occurs at the line 12 nautical miles from shore.
The official 3- and 12-nmi lines are demarcated on the highest-resolution NOAA charts for a particular area. These charts can be hard to find on-line, though it is possible to find certain areas though various state GIS websites and such. I also think the NOAA is systematically making vector data of the lines available.
In the case of Catalina Island, it has it's own 12-nmi belt of territorial sea, but the space between it and the mainland (so long as it is at least 12 nmi from either shore) is International waters.
There is a belt extending 24-nmi from shore called the "Contiguous Zone", in which a nation may exercize authority mainly to enforce environment and customs regulations. This area is still considered Internation waters, however.
But this just seems to be asking for a lot of trouble.
You raise a good point (-ed fanblad), what happens if the 600 software engineers make the pointy haired bosses walk the plank and sail off for Tahiti?
Call her the FSF Crimson Permanent Assurance, and you'd have a great movie and some killr appz!
Oh, come on. No one would hire child slave labor! Everyone knows child slaves are horrible at commenting their code.
You know what?
The IRS will point out to the proprietors that, while it was an amusing idea the first time it was tried (decades ago -- "Hey, if we operate a casino on the high seas then we don't have to tax winnings!"), they're still responsible for federal income taxes on income earned in places America has no soverign jurisdiction over. Thats why, for example, I have to file a tax return every year from Japan. Of course, the ship could just try to ignore them, but they'd have bank accounts and shore leave in places where the long arm of the law reaches quite easily.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
maybe you should have used your additional 23s to find http://www.csc.noaa.gov/opis/html/summary/ts.htm where noaa mentions reagan signing the 12 mile territorial claim in 1988 giving the US full sovereignty over that area. this was part of the 200 mile claim over fisheries and other rights.
CIA Factbook
Maritime claims:
territorial sea: 12 nm
contiguous zone: 24 nm
exclusive economic zone: 200 nm
continental shelf: not specified
I'm pretty sure they would be pretty safe that far out. They'd only notice a swell. The wave doesn't break until it gets to shore or shallow water.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Umm... no. The ship, being of US registry, can be confiscated and searched by US authorities. Not to mention that the US *has* enforced its borders beyond its 3 mile claim in the past.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Sea++.
Thank you. I'm here all week.
"You can't simply shut down your propulsion system and drift in the sea lanes three miles off the LA coast."
If they are really talking about 200 miles out to sea (outside of the U.S. Economic Zone), yes, you can indeed shut down and drift as long as you want.
Inside, you can do the same, as long as you're not in a navigation channel. That covers a lot of territory, but then they'd be subject to other U.S. laws, which is what I think they want to avoid.
Heck, off the port of Humbolt on the Northern Californian coast, way out to sea, the ships actually ANCHOR out there, waiting for a spot to dock. It's a pretty odd site when you come up to them in the fog; it looks like a fleet out in the middle of the ocean.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
I rather doubt the Coast Guard or Navy will have any difficulty claiming jurisdiction over a vessel that is more or less permenently "anchored" within 200 miles of the U.S. coast.
You get to live on a cruise ship in international waters, and work "below the radar", so to speak. What a great way to lie low until the heat cools off. Shoot, forget running there AFTER the feds are looking for you, it seems like a great place from which to RUN all kinds of criminal activity.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Scurvy.
-- Mace only makes me hornier.
Furthermore, doesn't this venture sound like a geek-cruise
http://www.geekcruises.com/ gone bad?
This would make an interesting reality TV show where once a week
a coder is voted off and has to walk a gang-plank to sleep with the phishes.
"You ARE weakest geek...Goodbye."
Think Gillivan's Island meets The Aprentice meets MTV's The Real World
and call it: The Virtual World
sailing the ship to india seems a bit expensive. on the other hand if they stay a few miles off of LA, the indian coders will need to fly into LA, get admitted into the US, and then take a boat to their cruise ship. something tells me the immigration officers at LAX will not like that.
in addition to that, if they want to go anywhere once they are on the ship they have to either enter the US without a visa, which is a felony and will get you banned for 10 years, or find a way to get a visa while on the ship. good luck!
Dev elpizw tipota, dev phoboumai tipota eimai lephteros http://euclidian.org
Stuck on a ship at sea with 599 other programmers? Kill me now.
Here's what I'd like to see.
Week 1: Operations launch. Works getting done. Going well.
Week 2: Work is better.
Week 3: Pirates came in and confiscated all our computers and electronic equipment. Called the coast guard. I think I heard them laughing in the background.
Week 4: We've drifted into China due to a complete lag of navigation or ship control systems. I, for one, welcome our new communist overlords.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I've wanted to do something similiar on a small scale for a *long* time now, I run my own consultancy and do most of my work for clients remotely, there's no real reason I need to be land based to do any of that stuff, so I started looking into maybe buying a houseboat on a local river, with the advent of wireless internet it was entirely practical to do so, and I thought that I could travel up and down the river and drop anchor closer to clients and thus have a shorter commute in the event that I ever did need to make onsite visits. That turned out to be a fairly feasible idea with no obvious gotchas, you run diesel generators for excess power requirements with a large battery pack hooked up to solar and wind generators, and you're fairly self sufficient when it comes to low end energy requirements.
This is from a twenty five year old guy that had lived all his life on land, and I have to say I consider myself a fairly practical person, so something about the entire idea just kept hitting me the wrong way, it had that "no, this is pie in the sky, it can't happen" feeling to it, and I just couldn't figure out why. I went into dramatic levels of detail in speccing out the lifestyle, you can purchase water generators which will create freshwater from seawater using nothing but energy (provided from the aforementioned power infrastructure) and there's plenty of storage room in a houseboat for food, which is pretty much the only thing you cannot harvest directly from your immediate environment.
That last statement triggered my attention and I thought, well, what about the ocean? What does it really take to make ocean passages on the high seas? or even just clinging to the eastern coast of Australia? If all the provisioning you've done so far works for a houseboat, why wouldn't it work for an oceangoing vessel?
So I looked into that some more, and found it very interesting indeed, there's an entire subculture, admittedly mostly of retired people, that live onboard their sailing yachts, travelling the world mostly at leisure. They had all the facilities that I had imagined you would need for a life at sea, large capacity batteries, solar and wind generators, backup diesel capacity, watermakers, etc etc etc, and lived almost entirely self sufficiently, travelling where they wished, when they wished.
This sounded like a pretty ideal lifestyle to me, I'm actually currently in the process of saving up enough money to buy a suitable vessel for precisely this purpose, investigating further I found that catamarans provided a very good level of stability and comparitively low preparation time, as monohull vessels would tend to have a more severe angle of keel whilst under passage, catamarans were a better choice for a real working environment.
The only remaining hurdles are *absolute* global internet access, and raising enough money to buy the catamaran itself, I've tentatively decided on a Perry 57 catamaran, as I figure if I intend to spend the rest of my life on a vessel, I had best get something I'm not soon going to tire of.
I hope by the time I purchase the vessel broadband global satellite access may be a step closer to reality, if not it will likely be mostly hugging various coasts for doing actual real work rather than wandering the ocean blue at a moments notice and entirely on a whim, but even that is a hell of a lot more freedom than a five day a week desk job back on terra firma.
All I can say is, it sounds crazy, but it isn't. The only reason I can come up with that this deep seated belief that it really is insane remains with me is that we're conditioned from birth to believe that the infrastructure modern society and government provides us with in order to aid our survival is so complex that we could never hope to sever that link, because if a large amount of people really did do this, it would greatly reduce the current "democratic" and utilitarian justifications for the absolute power of modern government.
Don't take my word for it, though, if you're feeling restless, ill at ease, whatever, investigate it yourself, you may be pleasantly surprised at the results of your enquiries.
What Carnival does is to cycle employees through the Miami head office (whoa, that's not the HEAD office, for tax purposes, of course, it's just where... well, all the heads are) and the employees will do "training" for six weeks or a month and then, maybe, go visit a ship for an afternoon to collect their "training pay."
Of course, they don't work on the ship, and they are staying in a hotel in Miami, sometimes for two years at a stretch, but that's one way that Carnival employees people.
When it becomes inconvenient to even pay this lipservice to the rules, they don't. Illegal foreign employees are a dime a dozen. And H1B's? Don't even consider them -- they're passe, Carnival uses nothing but the latest worker visas allowing "training."
Two floors of lawyers means that Carnival doesn't have to obey the same rules that everybody else does.
And no, they don't pay taxes on the vast, vast majority of their earnings. Hey, it wasn't earned in the US. And their "head office" is in Panama. Welcome to America.
Foreign registed ships have the right to employ foreigners without local visas, within both the 200 mile economic zone & the 12 mile line.
Foreign registed ships have the right to employ foreigners without local visas, within both the 200 mile economic zone & the 12 mile line
As they'd be working for the ship's owners they'd be consided ships crew regardless of what they do. Just as when a ships' owner comes aboard with his own personal staff for a trip, or the owners' fleet management people are onboard on a trip, they have the same status as ships' crew when in foreign waters & ports.
SeaWhores.
*clap* *clap* *clap*
Just the potential wordplays might be worth it...
um... you do realize it's a freaking pleasure ship, pleasure being the primary word here. The entire boat was designed for people to have fun on, you make it sound like a jail.
The pleasure does not derive from the ship itself, it derives from the crew that is there to care for you and to provide you with luxury. The pleasure also derives from the ship being something new and different.
If you want a ship that is a more appropriate comparison think the navy. You get food, quarters, laundry, exercise room, etc. Yet the chaplains have to keep an eye out for the kids on their first cruise getting suicidal. A shipboard workplace gets old very fast.
UV lighting would kill your plants in no time. chlorophile absorbs in the visible spectrum, the most around the yellow wavelength IIRC.
Besides, you can just grow pot in your own backyard, or some out-of-sight land nobody seems to care about/look after.
Or if you want it more expensive: do the indoor cultivation thing and only use the stuff for yourself, lots of people do it that way.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
...Programmers Wanted
;)
Good Rates
Free Food
Free Accomodation
Must have C experience
The RIAA was reported to be in negotiations to purchase a "kilo" class submarine from the former Soviet Union.
A spokesman for the RIAA said that while they could afford it, a nuclear sub was not necessary. "We will only be going out three miles or so, so a diesel sub will do just fine".
If this takes off I'm going to start a business to supprot their staff.
I'm thinking that they'll probably have several hundred programmers. Given the current environment, they'll be about 90% male. They won't be able to enter the US because of their status.
I think running a boatload (literally) of women to them on payday is a guaranteed money maker.
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Summary: corporations owe to the state, state owes to the people, and so corporation owe to the people.
The logic needs to go a bit further bit further -- where do the people get their riches? Without employers (mostly corporations), the people would have no money. Without consumer goods makers and retailers (mostly corporations), the money paid by a job would have no value. So the people owe their riches to the corporations and we have come full circle.
The point is that economies are mutually dependent networks with no simple linear chain of who owes whom. I'm not saying the current balance of power is right, only that people are dependent on corporations and corporations are dependent on people.
Seeking profit does not necessitate a race to the bottom on wages. Henry Ford knew that if he could make his workforce more productive he would both create wealthier workers and create a product those workers could afford. Ford paid higher wages than other companies at the time and was rewarded with high productivity. Ford also designed systems to make those worker vary productive so that the amount of high-wage cost per car was low and the car was affordable to a great many people (including Ford's own workers).
If any company or country wants to compete on the world market its need to find a way to create more value than costs. Yes, cut-rate wages can avoid costs and some companies try to go that route, but it is a dead end. Smarter companies find a way to create greater value per unchanged unit of cost (Ford actual increased wages) and then use greater productivity, greater efficiency, and better products to create extraordinary value.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
If they'd just cruise the baby around the world for a year or so I'm sure they could get a boat-load (ha) of programmers who'd be happy to work for a very low wage. I'd be tempted to work for low pay for a year in exchange for the opportunity to see the world and travel to exotic locations. Slogan: See the world, meet interesting people, and replace them with small shell scripts!
I find laziness to be an excellent motivator.
Ever try reading a book as a passenger in a car? What happens to you?
Now, imagine a computer screen and a gently rocking boat, and a programmer's work week. You'd need an IV drip bottle of Dramamine to survive this gig.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
"Staff can make the three-mile voyage into town in their off hours by calling a water taxi."
I smell something rotten here. Specifically the usage of the word "staff".
I smell a number of things rotten here, including the fact that the "entrepreneur" (or article writer) hasn't a fucking clue about international waters, which extend twelve miles from shore, not 3. This is the 21st century, not the 19th, and maritime law may not have changed much, but the definition of "international waters" has.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Bah dum dum TCHSSSSSHHHHHH!!!!
Karma: NaN
Conversely, would you do business with a company that leverages every advantage that they legally can to provide the best services at the lowest prices?
:) But that's my thoughts on it -- we, as developers, have to start playing a better game because I doubt offshoring is going anywhere.
Like it or not, offshoring is legal. Business often lets morality and ethics and so forth take a back seat to the bottom line and that's where many go off their tree about offshoring, not about its legitimate use in the business model. Employees are out to save their ass, and employers are out to save theirs. When you get to something like offshoring, you're talking about certain employees unable to save their ass because the employer is saving theirs.
What we really need is a better way to play the game, as employees, so that offshoring is either a) no longer appealing or b) no longer a threat to us. Note the differences in those two statements. Either developers need to make it so that offshoring is unappealing -- by developing better, smarter, faster, etc. -- or by making the threat of offshoring inapplicable to our state as employees, probably by developing skills, abilities, and knowledge that make no sense to offshore.
Now, HOW to do this is not something I've come up with.
Blog,Twitter
Yes, the US can enforce laws out further than that. On the other hand, you don't need a work visa if you work on a ship that just happens to anchor in territorial waters.
How this falls out depends on what politicians make of it. They can prohibit this sort of conduct and send the coast guard to send the ship packing, or they can actually view it as a reasonable political compromise that doesn't force them to touch the H1b issue one way or another.
I suspect that, if this ever were to become a big thing commercially, inaction and silent toleration would be the preferred course for most politicians. Only if it looked like it became a media debacle would they likely start acting.
If you're BOTH hard working and knowledgeable, nobody would dare take away your job. Problem is you're maybe not one of the two you mentioned you are...
By reading this signature you agree to not disagree with the post you just read.
People get wealth from work. Workers are the source of all wealth.
The second sentence does not follow from the first, assuming that the first is even true. The output of any given individual worker is not really worth anything unless that worker (or someone connected to that worker) can find a market or consumer of their work product. In an idyllic era of agrarian output or simple hand-crafted products, it may have been possible for individual workers to sell their individual work. But the increasing sophistication of both products and services in the modern world mean that individual workers are valueless without some entity to coordinate, connect, and manage a grouo of workers who each contribute an individually value-less effort to a collectively-valueable output. As governments have proven horribly inept at managing workforces, it falls on the shoulders of managers in corporations to provide that valuable service. What corporations do is create an organized structure that efficiently connects workers to work and work output to markets.
If corporations really were mere leaches, why wouldn't workers leave and go into business for themselves? In a world in which corporations add no value, any individual worker would be able to undercut the price charged by a corporation because that worker would not have to add the leach's fees and profits into the price. The answer is three-fold. First, many workers do start small businesses that grow and inevitably recreate the corporate structure of management and workers. Second, some work is not individualizable -- building an automobile requires the coordinated effort of hundreds or thousands of people. In this case, corporations provide value in management. Third, individuals often lack capital for equipment, start-up costs, etc. -- and capital is hard (in-efficient) to raise in small quantities. Corporations provide a convenient, cost-effective way of raising and managing capital.
You can say in theory that seeking profit does not necessitate a race to the bottom in wages, but look at what happens in practice. The vast majority of corporations take the easy route and do everything they can to cut wages and other labor costs.
I blame "The People" for this. How many people buy the lowest price whatever with no regard for the management practices of the company that made the product? There are companies that try to treat their workers well, but does that translate into more sales? Instead, 100 million people shop at Wal-Mart everyday despite the well-known wage and benefits practices of that company. For a company, a competitor to Wal-mart or a supplier to Wal-Mart, the choice is clear, the people have spoken. The People want cheap goods and will gladly go to another company to buy them. Faced with a choice between closing the factory because nobody will buy high-priced goods or cutting wages & benefits, most sane, ethical, and moral managers chose the cuts.
How many US companies offer full medical coverage now, or pensions?
Defined benefit pensions are a deathtrap for a company and that fact will only get worse as the Baby Boomers age. Look at the old steel companies in this country to see what happens when the retiree population exceeds the employee population. Companies can read the actuarial tables, take one look at the ballooning numbers of retirees and know that they cannot afford to pay for everything. Moreover, in a world where people move, change jobs, change careers, it makes more sense to create defined contribution retirement plans or leave it up to each worker to use their pay as they see fit. In some ways the lessening of retirement benefits is a lessening of the golden handcuffs that keep workers tied to an employer.
The problem with medical coverage is even more insidious -- we've separated the benefactor (the patient) from the payor (the employer/insurance company). Patients have no incentive to manage their own healthcare costs. Healthcare costs
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.