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Hertz Had Sheriffs On Hand the Day It Cut IT (computerworld.com)
dcblogs writes: About 300 Hertz IT employees, most located in Oklahoma City, are being impacted [by] a decision to expand its outsourcing to IBM. About 75 will be hired by IBM and those workers [are expected] to receive offers this week while others are facing layoffs. The news was a shock for IT employees. There was "anger, resentment," especially by employees who "sacrificed that work/life balance to keep things going here," said one employee. Hertz took precautions. On the day that IT employees learned that their work was shifting to IBM, employees noticed Oklahoma sheriff patrol vehicles in the building's parking lot. They believed plainclothes officers were inside the building.
"We consider the safety and security of our people whenever there are circumstances or events that could increase the risk of a disturbance or some form of workplace violence," said Bill Masterson, a Hertz spokesman. "Knowing that this was a difficult announcement, we had additional security on hand," said Masterson. "Going forward, Hertz IT resources will be focused on development of future products and services for customers," he said. The majority of services will be cloud-based. According to the Computerworld article, along with severance pay, benefits also include three months of outplacement assistance. IT employees can receive up to $4,000 toward retraining or skill certification, said Masterson. IBM India Private Limited, a IBM subsidiary, has filed paper for H-1B visa workers for Hertz Technology offices.
"We consider the safety and security of our people whenever there are circumstances or events that could increase the risk of a disturbance or some form of workplace violence," said Bill Masterson, a Hertz spokesman. "Knowing that this was a difficult announcement, we had additional security on hand," said Masterson. "Going forward, Hertz IT resources will be focused on development of future products and services for customers," he said. The majority of services will be cloud-based. According to the Computerworld article, along with severance pay, benefits also include three months of outplacement assistance. IT employees can receive up to $4,000 toward retraining or skill certification, said Masterson. IBM India Private Limited, a IBM subsidiary, has filed paper for H-1B visa workers for Hertz Technology offices.
As a result of this move I have begun the process of severing our business relationship with Hertz. We do over $300,000 of business annually with them, or at least we did. I will make it very clear why we are terminating our relationship. Hopefully other companies will do the same.
Why do you think that profitable businesses do this? It isn't to spread the wealth and any spread is incidental to ensuring that the shareholders make more per share. The goal of these moves is to make the shareholder richer and increase the gap between rich and poor. The US is working hard to move back to the age of the robber barons. Look it up if you don't know what that was...make sure you look up the concept of the "company store" while you're at it numbnuts.
they no longer need to show there are no qualified Americans. The law was very quietly changed to allow them to replace American workers. Vote Left. Bernie Sanders, hell Trump if you have to (better than Cruz/Rubio, at least he talks about the issue). Join a Union if you can find one. If you think they're not coming for you your wrong. Only a matter of time.
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what's really fun is when the Sheriff is used to intimidate the employees into signing their rights away. I saw a lot of that when the outsourcing started and companies didn't want to pay unemployment. You'd be put in a room with two mean looking guys with guns and not allowed to leave until you signed a paper saying you voluntarily quit.
Said it before, say it again: Vote Left. Vote for the most left leaning candidate you can get your hands on. Bernie. Trump. Hilary if you have to ( not that she's Left, but she's not Cruz/Rubio/Jeb). Join a Union. Start a Union. Vote in your State elections.
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It doesn't matter what Hertz thinks. I've seen this movie before. It ends when workers actually get shot by law enforcement or private security forces by daring to not like it when they have careers ended just because some dumbass in management has a stupid idea. The problem is that IT types tend to be special libertarian snowflakes who think their massive skills and personal bargaining power is all they need--until it isn't. You've all bought into the no worker protections of any kind conservative and libertarian propaganda, and this is what happens when you do that.
Now, just as in the early 20th century, reversing that is going to turn bloody and it didn't have to if working people would stop voting and acting against their own interests. I just don't see how this abuse of people who just want to do their jobs ends any other way now.
The sad thing about the accounting standards is that they fail to consider the bigger picture.
Which accountant ever calculated that HE was the one to be booted out? With the whole US workforce on welfare, who will be "the market" to buy all the crap made for "less" money?
Every generation has to figure out how to deal with new realities, the challenges our grandparents were facing are very different, in many cases.
A shrinking economy (the US) will have all sorts of bad shit happening, cost savings is a no-brainer for dumb-ass accountants.
Suppose Henry Ford had made the Model-T in the 3rd world for less money than in the US, not the double the average wage he paid, who would he have sold them to? Henry Ford effectively created the middle class, and manufacturing economies will always have buying power.
I would say the middle class is based in manufacturing. No manufacturing = no middle class.
Brain-dead billionaires don't get this, or they do and don't give a fuck. The sluggish but stable economy in Japan, refuses to adopt advanced productivity enhancement to keep full employment. I suppose they value their fellow citizens.
In the US a worker is just a piece of cord wood for the fire, a completely disposable piece of shit. Citizens are degraded to "consumers" in the political discourse.
Killing the middle class will hurt the 1% in the long run. The value of money and savings is not guaranteed. Reichmarks became pretty worthless after the war.
IT suffers from the same problem as engineering. When you do your job right, nothing happens. When you do your job wrong, the world implodes and costs your company millions, and the fault can be traced back directly to you.
Contrast this with, say, sales. When you do your job right, a new contract is signed and the company gets millions in additional revenue which can be attributed directly to you. When you do your job wrong, nothing happens.
I've been trying to come up with some sort of algorithm which corrects for this, and correctly quantifies a worker's contribution regardless of how easy or difficult it is to see. Without such a correction, you tend to see the former type of employees as less productive than they really are, and the latter type as more productive than they really are. (I leave management out because that's mostly take credit when those under you do stuff right, blame those under you when they do stuff wrong. To correct that, you need to get feedback from the people they're managing.)
(Another more complicated example is HR. While it seems like their good or bad hiring decisions can be attributed back to them, that's not actually true. Only half of their decisions can be attributed back to them. If they fail to hire a great applicant or decline to hire a terrible applicant, nothing happens and they get no blame/credit for it. Your "stellar" hiring manager who's hired some of your best employees may in fact be costing you money because he's using irrelevant criteria to thin out the applicant stack to reduce his workload, resulting in him turning away other skilled applicants who might've been even better employees.)
Yes, but it has led to an increase in standard of living elsewhere, and really, the disparity was not going to be sustainable in the long haul. It had to start to even out, and we're starting to see that happen now. When you have a tiny fraction few % of the world's population living high on the hog compared to the rest, that isn't going to last. Enjoy it while you had it, but don't think that's how you get to live forever.
Is IBM in business to increase the standard of living elsewhere? No. Is it US government policy to increase the standard of living elsewhere, while lowering it here? No. This is being done to increase the standard of living of the few at the top of the organizational food chain. But don't worry, it will self-correct. Eventually, when most Americans can no longer afford to purchase goods and services from these American companies, they will go out of business. Of course, by then, the US won't be a leader in anything other than poverty.
"Eventually, when most Americans can no longer afford to purchase goods and services from these American companies, they will go out of business."
No they won't. They'll sell products to Chinese and Indian Middle Class... What's that?
"No middle class in India?"/"The Chinese won't allow a foreign corporation a level playing field with domestic/stated owned corporations?"
Ok: you win. They WILL go out of business, but not before being cannibalized for the personal profit of shareholders.
The formula is simple:
Step 1) build a business establishing brand recognition/equity while creating jobs
Step 2) take the company public
Step 3) shareholders gut the company like a fish for short term profits, then sell their position to the next greatest sucker(retail investors) who fall prey to the fallacy(read: deadly investing sin) of extrapolating past performance to predict future returns.
Step 4) Wealthy insiders realize they've bought a dry milk cow. They elect a conman CEO to bail them out.
Step 5) Conman CEO realizes the company is insolvent and being sustained by inertia. Lacking remaining value to loot, they take out loans from lenders whose ability to set interest rates is controlled by the government(graft via proxy). This temporarily improves balance sheet performance at the expense of future profitability. This is the last call to insiders to GTFO before the titanic hits the iceberg. Executives give themselves a pay increase to embezzle the borrowed money in Salary/Bonuses(Golden Parachute is their compensation for volunteering to take the credibility blow of being at the helm when the ship sinks).
Step 6) Product/service prices go up while value-proposition to customers has officially jumped the shark. Brand reputation has been looted, customers leave for new love affair with different band.(Outsourcing is the means to this end)
Step 7) Corporation declares bankruptcy/is acquired by competitor at fire-sale prices to dissolve/absorb remaining assets.
Step 8) CEO of consumer's new love interest takes company public
Step 9) Rinse/repeat.
This cannot be a surprise though, it should be obvious to everybody (even though it is not for some reason) that USA labour market became unsustainable with the USA taking the world off the gold standard in 1971 while being the issuer of the world's 'reserve currency'. The inflation that hit immediately after that happened was all government creating new fiat. This forced input business prices to go up and up while creating more and more demand for government intervention from the general public.
USA economy is dead. It will not be revived with more collectivism, it can only be reset and fixed with more freedom, which comes from less government intervention, not more. It comes from real money, not fake fiat. It comes from removal of income and wealth related taxes, not more of them to force some to pay 'fair share' (whatever that is). Clearly businesses and people who run them do not in any way consider their taxes to be fair. The businesses and people are moving, the money and businesses are moving out and the only thing that remains is more and more poverty and desire for more government intervention by the majority. The majority is screwed by the government intervention but they think that the solution is government intervention.
Basically there is no way to fix any of this until the attitudes towards freedom change and in the USA the attitudes so far are only changing towards more authoritarian and/or more collectivist approach to the economy and society.
Authoritarian and collectivist systems act as virus (as described in The Matrix, the original one), while free market capitalist systems actually care about their profitability and thus they care about the property that makes them profitable. On balance the only way that is tested and that works to have a working economy and a wealthy society is to allow as much freedom to individuals as possible, not to take it away.
The reality is that most people do not understand any of what I just said, they take it as an attack on themselves because they truly do not understand economics, productivity, production, business, trade, money, politics. There is no way to fix it by demanding more understanding, the only way to fix it will be through appeal to emotion (as always) and eventually the emotion will turn away from the collectivist approach and towards more individual freedom. Unfortunately for the emotion to do that it will have to be based on blood and murder of unimaginable proportions.
We will go through a period of blood before emotion can no longer deal with that much murder and misery and will demand freedom from the collective, freedom to be an individual and not to suffer the collectivist ideology. This will take a while.
You can't handle the truth.