IT Employees At EmblemHealth Fight To Save Jobs (computerworld.com)

Reader dcblogs writes: IT employees at EmblemHealth have united to stop the New York-based employer from outsourcing their jobs to offshore provider Cognizant. Employees say the insurer is on the verge of signing a contract with Cognizant, an IT services firm and one of the largest users of H-1B workers. They say the contract may be signed as early as this week. They fear what a contract with an IT services offshore firm may mean: Humiliation as part of the "knowledge transfer" process, loss of their jobs or a "rebadging" to Cognizant, which they see as little more than temporary employment. Many of the workers, about 200 they estimate, are older, with 15-plus-year tenures. This means a hard job search for them. The IT employees have decided not go quietly. "We're organizing," said one IT employee, who requested anonymity. "We're communicating with one another. They need the knowledge that we have. They can't transition [to Cognizant] without the information that we have. That puts us in a position of strength — they can't fire us for organizing; we're protected by the law," she said.

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Re:It sounds like...

[bluefoxlucid]

Fun fact: If we brought back all the jobs from China, somewhere around 40 million Americans would need to become unemployed due to the consumer market not having enough money to support them; and our Welfare system wouldn't handle the load, so they'd just have to go be poor and die somewhere. The rest of us would live with less stuff--if we simply reverse the trend of the last 50 years, that "stuff" would be non-essentials and *healthcare*.

This is how we went from living in mud huts to living in sky scrapers with running water and medical care, kid. It's how we'll get to a life where all the poorest people live like the median income families ($54,000 currently), while the median income families live like today's upper class ($150,000-ish), and the rich people own their own moons and shit and we all whine about them.

Oh, and it's how it became financially possible (circa 2013, actually) to eliminate all homelessness and hunger in America *without* large tax raises (I'm still under 45% on the top even with the high cost of transitioning; and the small 1%-3% I project can be diffused by slowly rolling out my middle-class tax plan, which is so fucking strong that a person with an $80,000 salary takes home more than $80,000 in total).

I only want these types of layoffs to come slowly--0.1% or 0.5% or such of the population losing their jobs per year. Imagine if we switched onto automation all over the place in 3-5 years, and laid off 50% of all American workers. Imagine. Do you know what kind of damage that would do? If we transitioned slowly, over 2-3 DECADES, we'd all wake up to find we're spending 70% of our income on bullshit like Xbox, and 30% on food, clothing, healthcare, our homes, etc, after a period of unemployment somehow rising by 1%-2%, then falling again.

People have such small minds.