Slashdot Mirror
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. "
I'm waiting to find out if my job will be moved to a country where the "cost of a comparable person" is 1/3 what it is in the US. Even in that situation I'm not sure how I feel about this politically and morally. How ever as the unemployment rate goes up, and more white collar high paying jobs move else where, I believe this will become a hot topic politically.
There are many ways I see this as a bad sign for the US. Innovation happens where the engineering talent is located. If the worlds best engineers are no longer heading to the US (for high paying jobs) then the US will not longer be the center of innovation it has been for the last 50 years.
Think Deeply.
I have a few tech friends from India and it's funny because one of them said that on a yearly salary in the US, they could retire comfortably back home. Fact is, a dollar goes really far in other countries and companies could probably provide an even better standard of living for their employees if they were located in other countries. Now, I'm not saying that this is the ideal situation. Just that the reality for some companies is that they cannot or will have trouble surviving/remaining competitive when another company, based in a cheaper location, can undercut them by a significant amount. It's not simply a matter of CEOs fattening their profit margins but that eventually, efficiency will take over. What I believe will happen, is that an economic homeostasis will occur (over several decades) whether we like it or not.
Ah, pay me no heed as I'm just ranting.
which they would if they could get equivalent work;which they can't.
Typically outsourcing works becasue you can get a many to one ration and still save money.
I executives I know that have done, or looking at doings outsourcing talk about being able to get 5 engineers for every single American engineers and save money.
Management needs to be there, and it needs to break the project done into several smaller projects to take advantage of i. Even after that it's still half the cost.
Personally, Corporations tax rate should be based on the percentage of people that work out of country.
100% of your work force in the US? then no corporate taxes. Base it upon work, not hired employees.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
>>>They should just lay them off and hire new people overseas. That's a much better way to treat them.
I hope that was sarcasm. Speaking for myself, I'd rather accept a job overseas than be sitting on my ass (like I'm doing now). You can always continue the U.S. job search from India, and then when you find a U.S. job (if you find a U.S. job), you quit India and come back home.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
ibm will be an indian company
i have spoken to an employee of ibm, who lives and works in the hudson valley (ibm's historical stomping grounds), and he is being relocated to bangalore under this exact program. he is indian anyways, so not that huge of a deal, and he even looks forward to the massive decrease in cost of living
but he's done a lot of recent improvements on his home, like installing 45K worth of solar panels (not including the 10K new york state gives him for doing that), and now he has to sell his home in the current real estate environment. ugh. i don't think this ibm program has a home value relief program?
according to him, ibm had already planned the move in semisecrecy for years, on a 10-20 year timetable. but the worldwide economic recession has meant a rapid acceleration of the process
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
First of all, it's not treasonous to employ people from another country. That's just silly. Most of the countries in the world are not our enemies, particularly the ones where we do business. We have this thing called a trade embargo, you might have heard of it. We've been using it against Cuba for longer than I've been alive. No company that I know of has advocated that their employees move to Cuba, FYI.
Secondly, the reason this is an expensive place to live and work is not because we are a democracy, or because of cruft. It has more to do with our past success and the nature of currency. If we produce goods that everyone wants, it increases the value of our currency. This means that we can afford more goods and services from other countries. Do you only buy American? If not, your rant is completely hypocritical. If a company chooses to hire someone outside the country, they are being more efficient. The inefficiency doesn't come from something that Americans have done wrong, it comes from what we've done RIGHT. Do you suggest that in California we should refuse to hire people from Louisiana because they are (statistically) poorer, and will work for cheap? Somehow our economy has survived the porous intrastate border, how do you explain that in your view of the world?
You ask (paraphrasing) "why should [the companies] be able to make a profit"? The real question is why you think they shouldn't? Do you really believe it should be against the law to buy from someone outside of your town/city/state/country? I think that's the kind of provincialism that leads to cruft and corruption. I think your nationalistic fear and hate-mongering of other countries is just short-sighted.
We net benefit when companies run themselves as efficiently as possible. Protectionism is just a way to protect bad companies by passing on their expenses to everyone else in the country.
-t.
Except that a wholesale lowering of the cost of living is generally referred to as deflation. Deflation can be a huge problem, because once deflation starts it risks setting up a deflationary spiral which will continue to weaken the economy until something finally shakes it loose.
You are absolutely right. Some of things are fault of us, citizens - for not making laws that protect a worker or citizen from corporate abuse.
An example is a company who makes record profits and lays off people, just to please analysts and maintain stock price.
In "at will" states worker have almost 0 rights. The illusion of rights comes from that workers have unique talent or skills that are not easily replaceable in a high numbers. So company "plays nice" just to keep the workers because they are irreplaceable.
This is true for every company to some degree.
Actually I think a LOT of it can be traced to "owners like you and me" BS. Why? Because we USED to have a nation with investors. Now, we have day traders. And there is a BIG fucking difference. An investor is in it for the long haul. He knows that you have to spend money to make money, that you have to build your business clientele and infrastructure, basically they are looking at the long term picture and investing accordingly.
Compare that to the short termer or even worse, the day trader. They are strictly looking for that short term profit baby. They don't care if you burn the fucking company to the ground as long as the insurance you gets pays them a good dividend. They do NOT want you to fix anything, or spend the money needed for you business(and this country) to grow. Because that affects the short term profits and that is all they care about. If they don't see the numbers in the quarterly reports that they are looking for they'll dump your stock like it was made of toxic waste and you can watch you company become nearly worthless if they get in a panic.
But the simple fact is we NEED investors, not short termers. We NEED the heads of companies to be looking at the long term. We NEED them to invest in the business, the infrastructure, all the things that will help them to grow(and hire more of us to work as they do). But instead a company has to run overseas, they have to let the buildings rot around them. Why? Because if they don't hit those quarterly earning reports the stock market can rip them apart. Because nobody is looking at long term. That is why we have such volatility in the market, and why if Steve Jobs coughs the stock tanks at Apple. Because the stock market has become a giant casino instead of what it originally was, which was companies trading their stock to investors to grow their business and paying them dividends in return for their investment.
Personally, and I know folks REALLY don't want to hear this, but I believe that all this passing the buck and profits above investment will cause this economic crisis to be much worse than they are predicting. I believe that the governments are going to keep pumping money to their friends and flooding the market with cash trying to keep the party rolling and it won't end until we have gone through "Great Depression Part II". Maybe then we will look to straitening out this mess, and we'll reward investment in this country instead of punishing it with tanked stock prices. We'll just have to wait and see.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.