Nielsen Collects FL Tax Breaks, Then Outsources Jobs

theodp writes "The poop is hitting the fan over tax breaks given to ratings giant Nielsen Co., which pocketed millions in Florida jobs-creation tax concessions but has turned around and dismissed hundreds of local workers after inking a $1.2B outsourcing deal with Tata Consultancy Services of Mumbai. Lou Dobbs is on the case. Lou may go even more ballistic once he sees the Nielsen-Tata pact, which assures Nielsen that OT worries are a thing of the past ('there shall be no additional charge for overtime work'), allows Nielsen to have unsatisfactory Tata hires replaced within 4 weeks of starting with no charge for the original or re-performed work, gives Nielsen up to 6 man-weeks of free labor when a Tata worker is replaced, and allows Nielsen to make 'any TCS Resource' disappear with no more than 5 days notice if their presence 'is not in the best interests of Nielsen.' Nielsen execs have launched a PR counter-attack, pledging not to bully 85 year-old ladies in future layoffs. In a Letter to the Citizens, Nielsen CEO David L. Calhoun explained that Tata won a 'rigorous competition' to get the job, failing to mention that Tata was also tapped by Nielsen EVP Mitchell Habib in his CIO roles at both GE and Citigroup."

Comments

Re:This Is Not News For Nerds

[Mongoose Disciple]

How the fuck news about the Nielsen company make the front page here? They don't do techy things, make techy things or relate to tech at all.

You're quite mistaken. Their business extends well beyond TV ratings.

A friend of mine manages a team of developers there. I'm sure interested in what's going on.

Re:People in India

[WindBourne]

Yes, but it is time that India starts to play fair. The west has created many open trade policies. India is doing a china action back at all the other countries. They have total protectionism in place. For example, we can not sell there, unless there is company created there. That company must be 51% owned by Indian. When I go to India, I am charged a ridiculous rate because I am white. My SO is Indian, though british born, so we put things in her name. That way, we get charged 1/50th of the price.

Yes, I agree that India needs the jobs. So do we. But if there is to be real competition, then open your borders. And at this time, I say that we really should change our policies to match the countries that we deal with. The west has pretty open borders WRT business. Yes, there are still barriors there. But shortly, EU will throw up tariffs based on pollution as well as openness to trade. Before that time, America will have changed our attitude WRT to CO2 emissions (new president), as well to jobs.

Re:This Is Not News For Nerds

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

How the fuck news about the Nielsen company make the front page here?
They don't do techy things, make techy things or relate to tech at all.

You mean like http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/ ?

Re:My experience at Citigroup..

[zippthorne]

We as American tech workers need to stand up against this. The first thing we need to do is to refuse to cooperate in any way with any Indian company. It may mean that we lose our jobs, but it's better to lose them for taking a stand than losing them to some half-assed outsourcing company.

If that's your plan, then the zeroth thing you need to do is form a union. This kind of collective bargaining business doesn't work unless there's...a collective. Also, mob ties, to keep the collective in line.

Re:Hmmmm - interesting..

[clam666]

I've consulted at two companies now, which I won't mention, which used Tata in order to outsource, and in both cases the people that "made the deal" were getting a "per-hour" arrangement with Tata.

If you've never contracted through a third party before...it's common to receive a few bucks an hour of the billable time any other contractor you recommend to your agent or third party. I've made a dollar-an-hour "finders fee" for recommending someone that was later picked up by the client for every hour they billed. This is much like the bonuses at companies that give you a taste if you recommend another employee to be hired.

At the companies that used Tata, the same system was at the top level too. The executive at the top level that made the deal also got a small percentage of every Tata resource that was utilized. Multiply that by several dozen resources or more, and you can imagine the incentive to move as many jobs to Tata as possible by this executive.

I even saw a benefit by this. One of my clients that I was placed at had a large contract with the agency I went through. They "let me go" as a contractor during a time that they were cutting costs, but because the budget had already been sent to the agency, they continued to pay me to "work from home" and do virtually nothing just so the Director of the division could get his percentage cut.

One wonders what Nielson needs to outsource to Tata for anyway. Their internet and TV ratings divisions daya can be analyzed and OLAPed by any basic data analysis of the participating members...one wonders what they need to outsource. Pay them to watch the shows themselves?

The way Tata use people

[simong]

Tata will have agreed to the terms to get the business. Nielsen may well be disappointed at the actual execution. A seemingly common trend within Indian outsourcing companies seems to be the eagerness in which they will pitch for work without considering the implications of the requirement. I worked on a project a couple of years ago where one of the biggest Indian consultancies had undercut a major IT services company by 30% to get the contract, but then found that they needed hardware and expertise with it to get the job done, and consequently hired the IT services company to provide it. The attitude to manpower was also interesting: if for example they needed an Oracle DBA, the manager would call the HR department in Bangalore and say 'find me someone with Oracle on their CV', and someone would step off the plane a couple of days later. If they proved not to be up to scratch (quite rare, as most of the staff were at least good at one thing), they would be back on the plane fairly quickly. I don't think Nielsen will be losing out having such a clause in their contract, and Tata certainly don't see it as losing out, just the way they and the other major Indian consultancies run their business.

"Unregulated market" is an oxymoron

[TapeCutter]

"A free market is an unregulated market, with no government subsidies, bailouts, handouts, or funding, where the customers ultimately are responsible for the successes or failures for business based on whether they patronize them."

Sorry but there is no such thing as an unregulated market, "the market" is a system and by definition a system has rules. The 'free' part in 'free market' does not mean free from interference/change/rules, in fact the "free" part is a reference to a rule of the market that says everyone is free to participate in the market. Without rules to determine who owns what and who can/can't use force to uphold the rules, the 'market' part of "free market" is meaningless.

Some things work well under your definition of the "free market" but some such as transport and health don't. After all there is a vast difference between running an airport/hospital and swapping home grown vegtables with the neighbours. I'm not suggesting you personally adhrere to a rigid ideology, but to assume regulation and government interference is always a bad thing is to deny the importance of things as trans-US railroads, the Panama canal, the moon landings, equal pay for women & blacks, etc.

My outsourcing experience

[aepervius]

1) the firm I work with, we went through a turn around of 10+ coworker out of Mumbai
2) 8 out of 10 could not code out of a paper bag, making obvious error that anybody having more than 1 week of experience should not do, and NEVER EVER testing what they produced before delivering (sometimes it did not even COMPILE).
3) after years of saying "everything is fine" management finally admitted they did not get from outsourcing the benefit they waited for (hint : it costs them 2 millions more in operation instead of the waited 10 millions money spare)
4) that was not an isolated case, the problem is that just like in the boom of the internet bubble anybody was calling themselves coder when in reality they had no idea on really developping software. The result was that there were a lot of people could not code out of paper bag in my own country either. I think the same is happening locally in India where the one which can code get better paid job / develop stuff,whereas the cheap guy which NEED to learn is put out to outsourcing departement.

I am sure there are many case where outsourcing was successful (who knows maybe a majority), but after seeing my firm declaring it was a success to the outside world, and only after 4 years admitting internally it was failed for the main objective, I begin to suspect many of the success touted by consulting firm are not that successful in reality.