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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. "
What are they supposed to do? There's cheaper labor available overseas that can do the same work for less (and with a lower cost of living so the relative pay is probably much closer than most people believe). They're hemorrhaging money at the moment and moving jobs to locations with lower cost of living is a real way to save money. It sucks for those employed but that's just the facts of the situation.
Makes me glad I work for a defense contractor (can't be shipped overseas, at least not easily) in the middle of no-where (much lower cost of living than where most software development takes place). Speaking of which, why don't companies move their development to places within the US with lower cost of living? If you can save $15k per engineer simply because it costs less for housing I would think it would be worth it to large companies.