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IBM Offers to Send Laid-Off Staff to Other Countries
TheAmit writes to tell us that many recently laid off IBM employees have been offered jobs if they will only move somewhere it is cheap to employ them. IBM's new Project Match program offers some financial assistance for moving and immigration help for visas. "However, the move has not gone well with the IBM staff union. Slamming the offer, a union spokesperson said that not only were jobs being shipped overseas, but Big Blue was trying to export the people for peanuts too. He added that at a time of rising unemployment IBM should be looking to keep both the work and the workers in the United States. "
on low pay and see how long that idea will last.
that this is going to go well for IBM. Management is openly admitting that their present American workforce has the skills they need; it is just a question of cheap labor. This is not the time for a company to be picking this sort of fight.
What if that happens to be your home?
I know IBM must employ a lot of workers on visas. Are they targeting that group?
Americans workers would like to work in America for American wages. However, are they also willing to pay the prices of American made products?
Our culture has put such a premium on the price of goods, at the expense of quality, that it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone when (like all other resources), labor also finds itself subjugated to this rule. You are now on the dollar menu, Citizen. Ah, but let us rail against our evil corporate overlords instead--it's so much easier to blame anyone but ourselves for this. Labor is dead in this country. You've got "at will" employment, anti-union legislation, and did you know we are the only industrialized country on the planet without a Labor party? Our entire culture has been split up and sold off piece by piece thanks to "intellectual property". You don't own your car, your home, or anything that costs more than about $5,000 these days, stuck paying student loans for the next thirty years, with debt-collection law changes now on the books that make starting over an impossible proposition. We call ourselves a "capitalist" society where the individual has the power and the choice, but tell me dear reader, when was the last time you bought something that didn't come with a contract or a legal document stating what you could and could not do? Want to watch a movie? Read the FBI warning. Use a computer? Read the End User Licensing Agreement. Drive a car? You'll need insurance and a car loan for that. Live in a house? An apartment? Sign here please. You can't even enter a building without "giving consent to search", no cameras or recording devices please (except for us, see the black globes?). Freedom? Where, pray tell, is your freedom?
One Nation, Under Contract. Please sign on the dotted line.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
IBM is gaming their stock price not competing. If they wanted o compete they would want a highly paid domestic workforce that would buy their customers products thus making their customers flush with cash and wanting to buy some more IBM consulting.
Has IBM announced consulting price-cuts to go along with their now lower wages? If not then they're really not competing. They're just trying to get a larger profit margin out of their current pricing scheme. We should start calling bull on this sort of thing. Let's change the headline to:
"IBM hopes to raise stock price by sending laid-off staff to other countries where the can rehire them for cheaper thus boosting their profit margins."
The general reaction seems to be that IBM is in the wrong here.
I think it's also possible to interpret this as a sign that IBM recognizes that the people it's laying off are both a valuable resource that it doesn't want to lose as well as a resource that it cannot afford to keep paying. The union's reaction, of course, is hardly surprising of course -- it has its own interests in mind.
Naturally, this offer isn't one that will appeal to everyone. Obviously laid-off employees with families probably aren't in a position that they can just uproot and move to another country. For others, though, I can see this being an intriguing opportunity.
I know that if I were in this position -- laid-off, facing unemployment, and offered the chance to go live overseas and stay in the company, I'd seriously consider it.
TFA calls it an "innovative" solution. That seems about right. It's not perfect and it's clearly not motivated by altruism, but it might actually work out for some people.
"Cut word lines. Cut music lines. Smash the control images. Smash the control machine." - William S. Burroughs
These jobs were already moving overseas. Now IBM's offering their existing employees a chance to keep their jobs, plus assistance with travel, visas, etc., provided they're willing to move with the jobs and accept local wages (along with a corresponding decrease in cost-of-living). This can only be seen as an improvement for their American engineers compared to the original plan.
Obviously IBM is also benefiting from the arrangement, since they manage to keep some of their trained employees, but they had already committed to relocating the jobs -- and hiring local engineers to fill them -- at the time the offer was made.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
why does that instinct require moral validation?
that is an instinct which has driven the entire history of human innovation and technological progress
the guy who goes "say, i could make a mechanical loom powered by a waterwheel, and sell yarn at $1/ yard rather than $10/ yard" does you a service. of course, he also puts 5 human yarnspinners out of work
but based on some sort of "moral validation" argument, we should not pursue technological progress. we shouldn't, in order to continue employing the human yarnspinners, and to continue paying $10/ yard for yarn
no, sorry, not going to happen
this "moral validation" argument is hollow, and is really just an argument for luddites, and an absurd one at that, since we are both sitting at computer keyboards, arguing over fiber optic cables: innovations that would otherwise be impossible, innovations that, ironically, some of which happened at ibm
innovation is something that flows directly from human laziness and cheapness. we want more for less. and our minds are such that we can actually dream up ways to make that happen with novel organizational structures, energy sources, and bizarre new materials
so i say, fuck "moral validation", fuck the yarnspinners, and fuck the out of work american ibmers
progress isn't all fun and games, and is often cruel. but one of those laid off ibmers will innovate the next big thing that will employ the children of those laid off ibmers, and none of them will question the principle of creative destruction, and they will look at their father's mode of employment the way we look at blacksmithing jobs and chimney sweeping
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Odd logic you seem to use, isn't it.
That almost all the outsourced labor is non-union labor would not imply to me that the cause was unionization. Could you explain that to me?
Virtually all the textile work was non-union before it went to India and Bangladesh. Literally all the programming jobs that were outsourced over the last 15 years have been non-union (the very few union programmers had healthy jobs until Boeing started having trouble). And tech support, let me think, I don't know of any company that had unionized tech support, and that's one area that seems 100% outsourced these days.
Of course, fast food is an area that's non-union and not outsourced. And it's no wonder - how can you do that long distance?
[Posted anonymously, since I'm an "at will" employee and not interested in a career change.]
Nobody is forcing you, the self-importance filled "American Citizen", to move abroad, work abroad, or take any job less than what You the Great want to make. IBM is moving the position overseas; you have the option to follow it, not the requirement. It's hard to fault IBM; the cost of employing people in the US is egregiously high compared to other countries, and the international business laws offer no strong disincentive for doing so. Regardless, though, nobody will be forcing You to take a job paying less than you want; there may just not be many jobs up to Your standards soon, though.
Except that protectionism has never fucking worked and was one of the biggest reasons the Great Depression lasted as long as it did, but that's OK.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
The downside is that you cannot simply demand that a company create jobs or bow to your demands that they pay for your society.
Yes we can. The privilege of a corporate charter, and all the benefits that come from that are granted by the people of the United States. It is NOT a RIGHT. The trend over the past hundred years has been for corporations to take more and more while giving less. The expectation that a corporation will exist to serve the public good is all but gone now and pretty much anyone with the requisite fees can become incorporated.
Maybe allowing that to happen was a mistake, but, the ultimate authority in this country, the People, have been misinformed, lied to, and manipulated by the same people who own and run these corporations. It is not impossible in these 'connected' times that enough people will become fed up and start revoking charters.
The wage earners of this country are the engine that drives everything in our present economy, not the stock market, not the capitalists. A strong and healthy middle class is needed to support YOUR standard of living. Take care of it or you too will suffer.
Regarding your insult to the poor and uneducated in this country (der takin oar jorbs): Your place in society is not at all secure, and if you continue to speak and behave as if it is, you will be the one responsible for your children or grandchildren becoming one of the same people you ridicule. The number of upper middle class 'slots' is becoming fewer and fewer every year and there might not be a chair for you the next time the music stops. The way things are going, it could even happen in your lifetime -people don't always get what they deserve, but you just might.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
Yet another instance of the prisoner's dilemma.. We're each better off individually to buy the cheapest thing possible regardless of where it comes from, but as a society we'd be better off to support only businesses that contribute back to our economy (i.e. American businesses).
Protectionism, in the forms of high taxes and tariffs, has given many European countries a very comfortable lifestyle. Why not the same for us?
"Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains." --Thomas Jefferson
Vancouver to DC is a little different than say Poughkeepsie, NY to Bangalore.
Not from a Canadian perspective...
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
After all, that worked well for the UAW.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Ah, I see you are the proud owner of a Wal-Mart franchise! Welcome to slashdot.
I'd recommend taking a Basic Economics course, and not one of the ones you took for your MBA, because they deliberately skip certain topics. Specifically, pay careful attention to the lectures on "inferior goods."
I'll be glad to work for 80% less money... when my cost of living is 80% less. I know, as a society, we'd probably have to forgo things like cutting-edge medicine, government programs that attempt to reduce some of the unfairness in daily life, police forces that cut down on mob and gang rule, scholarships for higher education for the middle and lower classes, courtrooms that strive to uphold the Constitution and fight corruption, the ability to launch and maintain communications satellites, the R&D budgets that have given us the technologies we use to post on this very forum, retirement plans, proper nutrition and adequate food supply, and all those other pesky features of a first-world country.