Slashdot Mirror
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 $4,000 toward retraining or skill certification, said Masterson. IBM India Private Limited, a IBM subsidiary, has filed paper for H-1B visa workers for Hertz Technology offices.
At only 300 Hertz this doesn't seem to be happening with high frequency.
Outsource to IBM? They'll regret that decision very soon. Really. Very, very soon.
There was a paper filed for H-1B? More domestic employees being replaced by a program that is only supposed to be used if there are no domestic employees available?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Maybe use Uber or Lyft instead of renting a Hertz car?
I'm guessing that the CEO of Hertz has no technical knowledge, and no interest in knowing anything about technology. So, to him, someone who supports Hertz technology is just a rent-a-car, just an appliance. Don't think! Get the cheapest!
I doubt he understands the long-term social and technical effects. It seems that his actions make Hertz a place of hurts.
Company A fires one IT worker and hire a H1B, it is illegal. And the company can be prosecuted. Company fires *all* its workers and outsources the department to Company B, it is legal business decision.
Corporations are people! But all it takes is some 100$ filing fee and you have a brand new people with all the rights and privileges from freedom of thought, expression and religion. It is nearly impossible for an real Indian people to get work permit to work in the USA. All that H1B lottery and paper work, and work permits... But it takes no effort for a corporate Indian people to work in the USA!
So company A creates a not-really-companyA in India and brings real Indian people employed by corporate Indian people to serve corporate American people. Real American people get royally screwed. Real Indian people get some bones. Corporate Indian people get a huge slice of the pie because the profits are parked abroad to skirt taxes. Corporate American people get a slice just big enough to pay the CEOs and the cronies large bonuses and pay.
OK, OK go ahead and vote for more tax cuts for the rich, to vote for more abortion restrictions, vote for unlimited mining on public lands, vote to relax envrionmental laws, and then sit in a corner and wonder why the American government always screws you.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It sucks it had 0 IT workers at all who were qualified and could do the job whatsoever. Man we need more h1b1 ASAP!
After all it is illegal to use it as a cost cutting measure right?
http://saveie6.com/
Maybe Hertz didn't consider the dangers of outsourcing completely. It's usually ending up in a situation where things takes longer to perform and becomes a lot more expensive.
If employees are working IT then they also fix stuff that aren't on a trouble ticket but just on a passing event. When it's outsourced everything needs a trouble ticket.
I just wait for the day where someone in an organization has put in a dead mans grip that blows the data as soon as there's a hostile outsourcing. "If X hasn't logged in in 30 days then execute script ZZ that will run", and then have an encryption on the backup with no back-up of the key.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
No, if you're going to screw IT workers, you cut off their computer access suddenly and without warning, then have them escorted out of the building before they can damage or release any of the data they have access to, or even worse, change the admin passwords. Yes, real dickish behavior, but if you had a fiduciary responsibility to protect the shareholders, not the employees, you'd do the same thing.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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.
No it isn't.
Only as of a couple of weeks ago, when West Virginia because the 26th right-to-work state. So it's pretty evenly divided.
You are welcome on my lawn.
...that comment about "work/life balance" sacrificed. There was a great article recently about how one-sided the employee/corporate relationship really is. One side of the relationship has emotions; the other's basically a machine, a mechanism devised by stockholders to increase their investment - when it screws up and has an emotion because one of the parts (your boss) has one, that is corrected ASAP. So it's this relationship between human and machine that *cannot* give anything back, emotionally.
On the human side, people have the emotion of pride; virtually everybody is proud of their "work ethic" and most people describe themselves as "giving 100%" or "giving 110%", that extra ten percent coming out of your personal life, the time you owe to family, friends, and yourself. You have emotions where people become attached to "the team" and don't want to "let down the side" and again, make personal sacrifices not compensated for by pay, because it "just feels good" to help out a team member with a sick kid or de-stress your boss at "crunch time".
NONE of this spirit of teamwork and sacrifice applies to the other side of the relationship. All those emotional, devoted-to-work, sacrificing employees are sacrificed for in turn when their utility falls below zero.
It all represents an ongoing wage theft, in effect: employers routinely profit from the emotional investment, pride, and devotion of employees but don't return it, the way that somebody sacrificing for a primitive tribe would be taken care of in turn by that tribe if they fell sick. Smaller businesses run by owners can react like a normal human group, with a two-way emotional bond. But a modern corporation with absentee owners and professional managers is just a machine that automatically wins these situations because it is never there for the employees that were there for it.
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
especially by employees who "sacrificed that work/life balance to keep things going here,"
That's why you never, ever do that - especially not for a salary. Let some other sucker work there and ruin his life.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
About 75 will be hired by IBM and those workers [are expected] to receive offers this week while others are facing layoffs
What's with the angle brackets? The whole sentence has been rewritten from the article (which says "IBM is hiring about 75 and those workers are expecting to receive offers today"), and in any case those words are attributed to the submitter, so why have two words been picked out for this special treatment?
Sometimes I think Slashdot just does things like this at random because it's seen the grown-up newspapers do it, but isn't quite sure why.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
300 in total affected. 75 staying on. So 225 x 4,000 = 900000
I would like to know what savings the company is expected to award themselves on a quarterly basis through outsourcing. If they are bothering to do it at all, if they are bothering to hurt (really no pun intended) so many people, I'm willing to bet that amount of money is equivalent to pissing and shitting all over those 225 people. $4,000 per person for "re-training or skill certification"? If your looking at investing that into a learning institution, $4,000 is laughable, only in a very sad way. If you have kids, a car payment (or two) and a mortgage, that won't last a month just to support your household, "training" aside. This isn't just corporate greed, it's corporate psychopathy. We really do need laws to ensure that laid off workers receive fair compensation. The training, with employee options on where, what, how to be trained should be paid for by the company within limitations. The actual severance should be much higher. I got laid off by a similar sized company ten or so years ago over the same outsourcing bullshit. They gave me three-months salary and continued my health insurance for six-months along with a whole lot of other people. I checked their financials a year later. They still made out like bandits.
Oh, and the best part? That's "up to" $4,000. I shutter at what that may actually mean.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
So it's too late to mention Adolf Hitler?
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
At-will. The law you're looking for is at-will, and that's the one the vast majority of states in the union have on the books. Far fewer states are right-to-work states.
Right-to-work means you cannot be required to join a union as a condition of employment.
At-will employment means that the employer or employee can terminate the employment relationship at any time for any reason.
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.
That is a crime – kidnapping. You should have gone straight to the Police (to file a report, but don't expect them to do anything). Then lawyer-up.
Install your State ACLU's iPhone or Android app that records all audio (&/or video), but leaves the screen blank. These apps, if anyone tries to operate the phone, immediately upload the whole recording to ACLU servers for safe-keeping. keep it in your shirt-pocket to capture good audio – especially the audio where the goons tells you to turn your cell phone off. And where you protest the kidnapping. And warn them that if they try to operate the phone that the recording will automatical... Then lawyering-up will be much easier.
In some States, if they threaten to withhold your last paycheck or severance, it is a crime. In Illinois, it is a crime with 3x damages. I know. :-)
To be honest, I entirely unconcerned about Trump's ancestry but very concerned about the parallel between his rise and that of NSDAP in the last century.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
What's interesting about this is that management actually senses the fear and hatred and potential for violence enough to bring in the state security apparatus.
It'd be kind of interesting to be a fly on the wall during the meetings where they decided to bring in the cops and if even one of them had the nerve to acknowledge the whole reason they might need them is how badly they were fucking over their employees.
I also wonder how many of their senior management had paid goons staking out their houses at night or who decided that day would have been a great one for the family to vacation in Florida.
I seem to remember during the financial meltdown in 2007/2008 reading a quote in the NY Times that high level Wall Street types were going nuts for gun permits and armed security.
I'm not arguing that increasing taxes or changing regulations is the solution. I am simply pointing out the old mantra that you can't tax (or do anything) to business because they are the jobs creators is false. That is the formula for corporatism which is the politically correct term for fascism.
The reality is that it is the middle class that demands goods and services which creates jobs. Off-shoring middle class jobs actually has a negative impact to the economy (something Germany and Japan learned long ago). Importing workers because of a shortage artificially increases the supply of skilled workers, which depresses wages (again supply and demand) which discourages more from entering the field. Particularly in the Hertz case, where there is no shortage because they are actually laying off workers that are then replacing.
I do agree with your signature that guest worker programs create indentured servants. But it is better to be an indentured servant than an unemployed pauper.
... Is the biggest fscking scam/joke of any layoff process. That's about as useful as getting a free year of "Credit monitoring" when yet another company is sloppy with your credit card data.
there's nothing illegal about what these companies are doing. See here. The key part is that companies just have to say they are not adversely affecting American workers. That's a loophole you can drive a mac truck full of H1-B visas through. America is technically at full employment. You and I know those stats are bullshit, but judges rule on the side of property. They're part of that class. How do you think they're going to rule? You think they'll just down the program? You think our Supreme court will? Good luck with that.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
You might want to look into those free speech zones. They were first used by the Democrats at the DNC in New York in 1988. So, while you still might remember Bush's, you might want to remember where they originated and realize that the Republicans aren't the only ones nor the originators.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."