Last week I flew a US Airways 737 to Charlotte, NC even though I was headed to Chapel Hill. I didn't want to fly direct because the only airline flying direct to Raleigh-Durham from Newark was Continental Express through its regional affiliate, ExpressJet. After the January 2009 Buffalo crash of a Continental Express plane, after which we learned that pilots for regional airlines have less experience, work crushing schedules, and are paid peanuts, I didn't want to trust my life to one of these regionals.

Instead, I dealt with a too-fast approach and landing, a ridiculous line at the Avis/Budget rental car counter, and a cancelled return flight.

But at least the planes I were on did not spring holes at 31,000 feet:

It's harrowing enough when a commercial airliner mistakenly announces an emergency landing over water -- or, for that matter, when air passengers capture footage of an actual emergency landing on their cell phones. But passengers on a recent American Airlines flight from Miami to Boston experienced a much more vivid sense of airborne peril when a 2-foot hole opened up in the plane's fuselage about 30 minutes after takeoff.

The Boeing 757 was cruising at 31,000 feet Tuesday when the cabin began to decompress rapidly -- a "super-terrifying" experience, a passenger told WSVN-TV in Miami. The flight was carrying 154 passengers and six crew members.

But soon enough, the crew established emergency procedures: The passengers donned the oxygen masks that drop down when cabin pressure decreases, and the pilots were able to reverse the flight and land the damaged plane safely at Miami International Airport.

"The crew declared an emergency and made a normal landing. There were no injuries," American Airlines said in a rather terse statement. "The aircraft has been taken out of service."

Once the plane was on the ground, inspectors discovered the problem -- not that it was exactly easy to miss. A 2-foot-by-1-foot hole had opened just above the "A" of the logo near the plane's front left cabin door. Initial reports indicate that the plane probably took off with a smaller crack in the fuselage -- and that wind pressure caused it to expand after the jet's takeoff. However, investigators say that they have yet to isolate the precise cause of the hole. Both the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating.

As mistermix notes, we're told that being bombarded with radiation by semi-skilled TSA workers every time we get on a plane is necessary for our safety in the air, but we're also being told that businesses, including the airline industry, are so burdened with regulation we can't even institute the kind of regulations that would make airlines take unsafe planes out of service. After all, it's easier to just deal with the lawsuits if hundreds of people die because too-old planes or planes serviced by outsourced, non-FAA-certified mechanics, are not taken out of service when they are no longer safe. The airlines are allowed to do financial cost/benefit analysis with YOUR LIFE.

Tomorrow I'm getting on a plane. It's a 737. Hopefully it won't fall apart in midair. But show the above-lined article to your friends who are tempted to vote Teabag on Tuesday and tell them that this is what Teabag America is going to look like.

Labels: air safety, deregulation, FUBAR, outsourcing

They'll be voting for the Chamber of Commerce:

Now isn't that big old cuddly Chamber of Commerce just out there waiting to protect the common man against the evils of gubmint?

Labels: outsourcing

While teabaggers were out there enjoying the 9/11 attacks all over again (it IS wingnut Christmas, after all), something that ought to have gotten the attention of every teabagger whose job was outsourced during the last decade and a half got ZERO coverage here at home:

President Barack Obama today underlined his determination to end tax incentives for companies that create jobs overseas, saying he will provide a generous tax credit to companies that create more jobs in the US.

Amid indication that outsourcing could become a hot issue in the November elections, Obama said the tax breaks should go to companies that create jobs in the US and not overseas.

"One of the keys to job creation is to encourage companies to invest more in the United States. But for years, our tax code has actually given billions of dollars in tax breaks that encourage companies to create jobs and profits in other countries,” Obama said in his speech on economy at Cleveland, Ohio.

The President said he was determined to change that. "I want to change that. Instead of tax loopholes that incentivise investment in overseas jobs, I'm proposing a more generous, permanent extension of the tax credit that goes to companies for all the research and innovation they do right here in America," Obama said with Ohio Governor Ted Strickland standing by his side.

But of course why let coverage of something GOOD that Obama wants to do get in the way of relentlessly flogging the ravings of a religious lunatic or endless discussion of whether the President's response about said lunatic was adequate.

Labels: Barack Obama, hack journalism, outsourcing

If your job in any way involves generating paper, network packets, and talk, you are at risk of having it outsourced overseas. Because outsourcing isn't just for IT anymore:

Wall Street’s losses are fast becoming India’s gain. After outsourcing much of their back-office work to India, banks are now exporting data-intensive jobs from higher up the food chain to cities that cost less than New York, London and Hong Kong, either at their own offices or to third parties.

Bank executives call this shift “knowledge process outsourcing,” “off-shoring” or “high-value outsourcing.” It is affecting just about everyone, including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Credit Suisse and Citibank — to name a few.

The jobs most affected so far are those with grueling hours, traditionally done by fresh-faced business school graduates — research associates and junior bankers on deal-making teams — paid in the low to mid six figures.

Cost-cutting in New York and London has already been brutal thus far this year, and there is more to come in the next few months. New York City financial firms expect to hand out some $18 billion less in pay and benefits this year than 2007, the largest one-year drop ever. Over all, United States banks will cut 200,000 employees by 2009, the banking consultancy Celent said in April.

The work these bankers were doing is not necessarily going away, though. Instead, jobs are popping up in places like India and Eastern Europe, often where healthier local markets exist.

And cheaper labor, which is the real motivation behind outsourcing. It shouldn't come as a surprise that the very same bankers who got us into this mess are looking to shore up their own jobs by jettisoning the grunts in the trenches -- even if those grunts were making six figures. As the hidden motivations of those behind the financial mess in this country become clear (most notably the systematic and deliberate elimination of the middle class), I have to wonder if jettisoning those six-figure junior level employees was part of the plan all along.

But if you really want to see the back of your own head explode, read this part of the same article:

Press officers for most banks asked not to be quoted or argued over semantics. For example, one spokesman said his bank’s fast-growing India support operations are not an outsourcing facility, but a “center of excellence”; another argued that large cost cuts at his bank’s New York and London headquarters were really “re-engineering” so the bank should not be included in such an article.

"Center of excellence." If the workers in India are so excellent, then why don't you want to pay them what you would pay workers here? For that matter, if they're so excellent, shouldn't you be paying them MORE?

Labels: economic death watch, greed, outsourcing

Emily Steel starts out her Wall Street Journal article, "More Digital Ads are Produced Offshore", with this eye-opening statement:

Outsourcing has hit Madison Avenue.

I don't think that's exactly late-breaking news, but if that's what the WSJ implies, than in a sense, it is late-breaking news.

The article continues:

Until recently, Web ads were produced mostly by creative types in downtown lofts in places like New York City or San Francisco. But big marketers are now increasingly shipping off that work to little-known businesses in places like Costa Rica and Bulgaria.

One company reaping the rewards is avVenta Worldwide, which has 415 employees in San Jose, Costa Rica; Kiev, Ukraine; and London, as well as Charleston, S.C. Since avVenta launched in 2005, it has built a business out of doing behind-the-scenes production work on Web ads for the agencies that work with some of the world's biggest marketers, including General Motors, Microsoft and Bank of America, at rates about 20% to 50% lower than what agencies pay for similar work in the U.S., ad executives say.

The article then goes on to talk about exactly which processes are being outsourced, and how American advertising agencies view outsourcing as necessary for survival.

Of course, it isn't always about lower costs. Emily Steel nicely says that "The campaigns are labor-intensive to produce -- and most ad agencies can't find enough talent in the U.S. to fill their needs." The article then talks about a Charleston-based company that expanded into Costa Rica "...because its time zones are compatible with those in the U.S., and it has a high concentration of English speakers and a work force with experience in design and development."

I didn't realize that Costa Rican schools were producing such prodigious quantities of ready-made digital design workers. Sigh! I guess we'll just have to lengthen the school day by one more hour so our children will learn yet another skill in order to become competitive in the global economy.

This guy wasn't as nice as Emily Steel in talking about American workers: "

There are a lot of talented people in this country, but there is just a different work ethic that comes with working with people from another country," said Dan LaCivita, senior VP-executive director of Firstborn, a 40-person digital agency headquartered in New York. Referring to a one-to-ten scale system, he said that in the U.S. you can hire "100 'sevens' or 'eights', but you can't hire 100 '11s'. And I want there to be 40 '11s' here."

LaCivita's quote was taken from AdAge.com (login ID required, but the article was copied into one of Rob Sanchez' Job Destruction Newsletters).

I decided to visit the Firstborn Multimedia website. Was it designed by one of their "seven's" or one of their "11's"? Is it my eyesight? Do I not have some sort of essential flash media installed on my PC? Or is it most of it almost (besides the pretty pictures) totally unreadable? I immediately found out why they can't find qualified American workers. It must be some sort of "If you can't read this, you're not good enough to work for us."

I was curious how a foreign-born "11" working in the United States is paid compared to a Costa Rican working in his or her own country. I have no way of knowing how much Costa Ricans earned, but I could find out a little bit about the H-1B's working for Firstborn through the Department of Labor's Foreign Labor Certification Data Center website. According to the Labor Condition Applications (LCA's) filed for fiscal years 2006 and 2007, a Senior Designer makes $65,000 per year, Flash Developers make between $50,000 and $70,000 per year, and a Senior Producer makes $80,000 per year. I doubt if the Costa Ricans are making that much money.

I also can't help but notice that Emily Steel doesn't seems to think the necessary talent exists in the U.S., while LaCivita says, yes, we have the talent, we're just not very good.

Food for thought. If we start producing a bunch of American-born "11's", would the ad agencies start bringing the outsourced jobs back into the U.S., or start replacing the H-1B's with Americans? Shouldn't we start demanding that our nation's executives and politicians also be "11's"?

(Note: John McCain, in a recent Silicon Valley fundraiser, was very sympathetic to donors complaining about the low H-1B limits, and the fact that foreign students "must return" back to their own countries after graduation rather than seek employment in the United States. Do you think McCain is an "11"?)

Cross-posted at Carrie's Nation.

Labels: H-1Bs, offshoring, outsourcing

My Anonymous Tipster sent me a link to a January 29, 2008 blog post, "David Perla - Anti-American Traitor". You may or not recall reading Perla's name before in a prior post I did dated January 15, 2008, where he was one of the main speakers at a Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) summit in New York City. Perla, the co-CEO of the LPO firm of Mumbai-based Pangea3, has a very dim view of the abilities and work ethic of American workers.

In his view, the temporary [American] lawyers typically hired to perform document review on major litigation have minimal skills and zero motivation. In contrast, Pangea3 can attract the best and the brightest young lawyers in India, fluent in English and trained in English common law. Perla said clients have held "bake-offs" in which the Pangea3's Indian lawyers were asked to perform the same tasks as U.S. contract lawyers. He said the Indians soundly trounced the Americans.

The article this quote is taken from, in Law.com, goes on to state:

The only lawyers who work for [American] staffing agencies, said Perla, "are the ones who couldn't make it as real lawyers."

Don't think this type of attitude doesn't affect the salaries and job prospects for all of us good worker bees.

I actually ran across this blog site, Temporary Attorney: The Sweatshop Edition, once before. I neglected to bookmark it, so I lost track of it. It's a horribly depressing, but informative, site chronicling how entering the legal profession is hardly a sure road to instant wealth. Take a look through some of the other blog posts. It's a real eye-opener.

My Anonymous Factchecker sent me this link for a company named NRISoft, which bills itself as being "The Un-Sweatshop". ("NRI", by the way, stands for "Non-Resident Indian".)

I thought it was a joke at first, but it's a real company and a real web site. However, we have a little story within a story. On Monday, when I first read this web page, it said the following under "Who Is eligible to apply for jobs at NRISoft?"

NRISoft is taking applications from professionals holding H1b visa status. We predominantly serve the H1b community. Although we do accept professionals with greencard and American citizenship.

[Note from Carrie. That part about accepting professionals with American citizenship is probably just a little CYA].

By a wild coincidence*, today, the wording has changed to:

NRISoft is an equal opportunity employer. However among professionals residing in America, the ones with H1b visa find our services most useful because of the inequity of pay of a H1b workers vs US citizen/greencard holders. Only jobs that cannot be filled by US Citizen are offered to H1b workers.

[Whew! A little more ass is covered now.]

So why should a potential employee work for NRISoft?

Why is NRISoft so generous?

We at NRISoft, do not consider ourselves generous. We just happen to think that most other consulting companies are just unfair. For example, you spend 4 yrs at an IIT. They pay you $80,000/yr or ($40/hr). They bill you at $100/hr. Are they being fair? They will tell you, that you are not being fair leaving them. At the end of the day, we all need to watch out for the best interest of our family.

War on Sweat Shops and Body Shops! Is NRISoft fighting this war?

No, NRISoft is not fighting the war against exploitation. NRISoft is just a weapon. If you are a first class professional, we hope you will make the right decision to get paid what you really deserve, based on the wages in America (not in India/China/Russia).

A commenter in the "Guestbook" section took issue with NRISoft claiming to be a more generous bodyshop than the others. Unfortunately, that comment was deleted before I could copy it. However, the gist of it was "I'm taunting you because you are a little company that is doomed to fail because you are paying your workers too much. I work for a highly successful company that pays its workers much less, and owner of the company is one of the richest men in the world." (It sounds like he was describing Wipro's owner, Azim Premji.)

The remaining Guestbook entry is just as illuminating, as the worker described how he used to work for a company that paid him $36,000 per year, but billed him out for $160,000 per year!

*That wild coincidence being, Rob Sanchez, the perpetual thorn in the side to H-1B apologists, posted an article about NRISoft at VDare earlier today. I discovered his post just as I was putting the finishing touches on my own post. I opted to publish this as is.

(Cross-posted at Carrie's Nation.)

Labels: H-1Bs, outsourcing

Yesterday I ran across what I thought was an extraordinary article by Ashok Mitra from The Telegraph out of Calcutta, India, "Agonies of Connection - How a New Government in the US May Affect India."

I often read online Indian newspaper articles because I often find out more about a story than what is being told to us in the States. (For example, details about the Chrysler-Tata deals.) What I found fascinating about this story was what I thought was the depth of analysis about the upcoming U.S. presidential election, particularly concerning the outsourcing of American jobs to India. (Note: Mitra has some intelligent commentary about the war in Iraq, which really deserves its own post.)

I thought Mitra really hit the nail on the head when he talked about the challenges of using campaign rhetoric in order to be elected, coupled with the challenges of being held accountable for that same rhetoric after being elected into office.

Here are a few choice tidbits regarding outsourcing:

It is not altogether inconceivable that the resolve once expressed by a past chairman of the Federal Reserve Board — he would bring the prime rate down to the level of zero if that would save the American economy — might well be rendered real by his present successor. Even that most extreme measure could be of little avail. For meanwhile, business process outsourcing has cast a shadow across the nation’s landscape. [Emphasis mine]. If to the American entrepreneur an open economic system offered the opportunity to outsource work whereby costs could be markedly pared down, the crisis in employment would persist irrespective of whatever happened to the interest rate structure. Low interest rates will encourage the induction of relatively more capital-intensive technology, while the supply of trained personnel to operate such technology could be ensured by persuading the authorities to issue generous H1B visas. The thrust of the presidential poll campaign has been directed against both BPO and H1B visas, with politicians crying hoarse for a return to a non-liberal regime; leaders of the badly scarred American working class have been shouting the most. Not surprisingly, proposals about how to restore for domestic workers the estimated three million jobs the Bush administration has exported out of the country have held centrestage in the campaign debates.

It's amazing how the Bush administration is reluctant to even admit that there is even a problem, while an Indian newspaper is stating all of the above as fact! Mitra says a little later on:

All the greater reason to expect that greater attention will be riveted on the pre-poll commitments on economic issues. The cry of saving the jobs of American youth will grow shriller. Pressure will intensify to close loopholes in trade laws to prevent placement of orders on foreign firms on work that could be as competently done at home [emphasis mine] never mind if at higher costs. In case necessary, some tax relief may be considered for firms offering extra consideration to domestic workers. Penalty for breach of legislation enjoining preference to domesticemployees, could be stiffened too. There could also be a drastic reduction in the number of H1B visas issued each year.

I'm fascinated by this analysis. From where I'm sitting, I can't possibly see any of the above ever happening, even if a Democrat is elected President. The lure of corporate money flowing into campaign funds is just too difficult to resist. Loopholes could be closed, but other loopholes could be opened just as quickly. Companies would find more ways to send profits to offshore pirate coves (as Elaine Meinel Supkis would say), or, companies could simply just close shop here and move overseas. However, in India, they have reason to monitor the situation very closely, and they are worried.

How will all this affect India? The fastest growing among our industries is the information technology-related services. Many of them depend for as much as 90 per cent or more of their activities on orders flowing in from the US. A substantial part of India’s high rate of growth of GDP, touching more recently almost 9 per cent per annum, has a strong link with the high rate of growth in IT services. Suppose a severe contraction occurs in the activities in the IT sector following the ushering in of the new administration in the US next year. The spin-off could be a major setback for our GDP growth too. Whether such a possibility would turn into a probability can only be speculated on at this moment. What is however obvious is that an interdependent global system has its positive as well as flip sides. Foreigners can offer us bliss; excessive attachment of foreigners can also bring problems in its train.

Mitra practically admits that India's economic success can be greatly attributed to the offshoring of American jobs to their country. Contrast India's growth of GDP with research by economist Susan Houseman, where she states that costs savings from outsourcing and offshoring is incorrectly being applied to U.S. GDP. Ironically, jobs pouring into India is helping their GDP, while these same jobs pouring out of the U.S. is also helping our GDP.

Even in a world ruled by neo-liberal ideology, economics does not decide everything. Just because in an international framework of costs and returns, our software industry has proved to be a world-beater, we cannot expect the Americans to favour us perpetually, if to do so would hurt the interests of their own workers. Economic calculations cannot afford to ignore the desideratum of national interests. [Emphasis mine.]

See that? Even Indians recognize the importance of national interests over pure money-making economics. Do you think they'd ever treat their citizens this way? Mitra finishes up by saying:

Should not we at least prepare ourselves for the contingency of a sudden shrinkage in the demand from the US for our IT-related services? If we have to maintain the momentum of our GDP growth, we need to look for a substitute commodity or service to fill the space the IT sector would be forced to vacate. Do we have the faintest notion where to look for it? In case we have not a clue in that regard, we would have to fall back on growth induced by demand germinating within the domestic economy [emphasis mine]. That would however call for a drastic restructuring of income and assets distribution, including widespread land reforms. This is where China has scored over us. China’s export boom is pivoted on exports of commodities, not so much on outsourcing. That apart, it accomplished one of the most thoroughgoing programmes of land reforms the world has ever seen before it set on the road to export-led growth. It did not put the cart before the horse; we did.

Imagine that! Redistributing assets so that economic growth would depend on increased demand within a country's borders! Do you think we could ever come up with anything so radical? The Indians are looking ahead to what will happen if the influx of IT jobs into their country all of a sudden comes to a halt or even reverses. Mitra does not claim something ridiculous like 4.5 to 7 jobs will magically appear every time they lose a job in the IT sector, or that Indians will move on to higher and better careers in a "new economy", or even that the inevitable "green technology" bubble will transform the entire subcontinent. Mitra and others realize that their nation needs to look ahead and do some serious planning for the future.

(Cross-posted at Carrie's Nation.)

Labels: Election, H-1Bs, India, offshoring, outsourcing

While most industries are going to take a bath this year, there's one industry that's likely to enjoy explosive growth:

Debt collection.

The potential profits to be made from debt collection are huge. But is that enough for the companies in this business? No, they're outsourcing the function to India:

In a glass tower on the outskirts of New Delhi, dozens of young Indians are on the telephone, calling America’s out of work, forgetful and debt-stricken and asking for cash.

“Are you sure that’s all you can afford?” one operator in a row of cubicles asks politely. “Well, how do you take care of your everyday expenses?” presses another.

Americans are used to receiving calls from India for insurance claims and credit card sales. But debt collection represents a growing business for outsourcing companies, especially as the American economy slows and its consumers struggle to pay for their purchases.

Armed with a sophisticated automated system that dials tens of thousands of Americans every hour, and puts confidential information like Social Security numbers, addresses and credit history at operators’ fingertips, this new breed of collectors is chasing down late car payments, overdue credit card debt and lapsed installment loans. Debt collectors in India often cost about one-quarter the price of their American counterparts, and are often better at the job, debt collection company executives say.

“India will be the only place we grow this year,” said J. Brandon Black, the chief executive of the Encore Capital Group, a debt collection company based in San Diego. India is the company’s largest operating area, with about half the company’s collection force of more than 300.

Although the stereotype of a collector may be “some guy with chains and a cut-off shirt,” Mr. Black said, collectors in India are “very polite, very respectful, and they don’t raise their voice.” He added, “People respond to that.”

Companies like Encore buy bad loans from banks and credit card issuers for pennies on the dollar and pocket the cash they collect. The delinquent borrowers often owe at least a thousand dollars.

So far just a tiny fraction, maybe 5 percent, of American debt collection is done outside the country, industry executives estimate. But new business is in the pipeline.

Financial services clients are saying, “We want you to collect my debt, to analyze it and change the way that we sell” the loans, said Tiger Tyagarajan, executive vice president at Genpact, the business processing company spun off from General Electric that has roots in India. Genpact, which works with lenders to get customers to pay, rather than buying loans directly like Encore, employs thousands of debt collectors in India, Romania, Mexico and the Philippines, and is hiring in all those locations.

In the past, the prevailing wisdom about wringing money from late payers has been “if you’re calling the Midwest, you want someone from the Midwest to twist their arm,” said Mark Hughes, an analyst with Sun Trust Robinson Humphrey who covers the industry. That theory is changing as the pool of trained phone professionals in India and other locations deepens, and companies look outside the United States for lower costs.

Telephone debt collection represents new, more aggressive territory for India. “This is really a sales job,” Mr. Hughes said. “It is commission-intensive, and you’re paid on your ability to collect.”

Like many sales teams, Encore’s collectors in India gather for a daily pep talk before their shift. In one recent session, they were schooled on the intricacies of American tax policy.

“One hundred thirty million U.S. families will get a tax rebate this season” as part of the new economic stimulus package, Manu Sharma, the team leader, explained to a roomful of top-earning collection agents, most in their 20s. Those who qualify for the rebates will get as much $600 a person or $1,200 a household, he said, and “the I.R.S. is going to start paying this money in May.”

Start bringing up the rebate during calls, he told them. “This gives you an advantage so you can increase your wallet share,” he went on. “Get them set up on minimum balance arrangements” based around their tax rebates.

Aside from the fact of someone across the sea having access to the kind of personal information that makes identity theft easy, there's something about this notion of polite, soft-spoken people from India shaking people down for their tax rebates that completely encapsulates the American Condition in this last year of the Bush Administration, wrapping corporate greed, American consumerism, outsourcing of the American job base, the soullessness that is the call center environment and the false promise of the tax rebate into one horrific package.

Labels: debt, outsourcing

All of the Big Guns are firing the battle cry for increasing the numbers of H-1B visas being issued, as dictated by Bill Gates in his Committee of One testimony in front of Congress. The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New York Times, and others dutifully lined up to spout out the same, tired old high tech industry party line. (Yawn!) More foreign guest workers are needed in order to remain competitive, and American jobs will disappear if the visa cap is not raised.

Network World came up with this innovative solution for working within the current 65,000 H-1B visa cap:

One option that eliminates the need to work with immigration lawyers is rooting out potential candidates for the open position already on staff. For many hiring and IT managers, training in house technical employees on skills that are considered critical going forward is a better option that [sic] looking outside the company for talent.

"Managers can look for internal talent that may need a little more training or need to work in a different style," says Albert Porco, CIO at Kings County Medical Center in New York. "There are times when the most talented person is two or three levels down in the organization. Also at times, you don't need superstars, you need staff that can get the job done."

Talk about thinking outside the box! That ranks right up with the unusual idea of having a company set up a booth at a career fair to recruit recent college graduates!

How's this for particularly hateful commentary:

Kamal Jain, Director of Operations and Customer Service at Auraria Networks in Boxborough, Mass., agrees saying if IT hiring managers exhaust options outside of the company, then they need to look at the pool of talent already producing at the company.

"Consider career-changers who have the right attitude, intelligence, demeanor, etc. to fit your needs and then take some chances on training and development," Jain says. "It’s not a good way to get senior people, but it can bring in a great pool of talent which can free up enough experienced people to allow them to grow into the senior roles you may need filled."

I can write an entire post about this statement alone, but notice how the concept of hiring IT staff that have already reached "senior" status is completely missing.

Finally, (buckle your seat belts - you won't be ready for this one.)

Digitas' Russell says that her team and the company’s management is using a new mantra when it comes to hiring external or internal candidates that involves considering a broader range of qualified candidates.

"Management and recruiting is pushing people to consider what could be trained. If a candidate has 80% of the skills needed, we can hire them and we can teach the other 20% of skills," she says.

A company willing to look at a candidate who is not a 100% match for the position? I thought I'd never see that happening again.

The Washington Post waited a while, but they finally came up with "Visas Needed" in their Editorials section. According to Vdare, Norm Matloff at UC-Davis has put out the call to bombard the Post with letters protesting this story. He reminds us that Mrs. Bill Gates sits on the paper's board. Matloff advises us to "Let your draft sit for at least an hour, then revise it with a clearer head, before submitting."

(Phooey! I want to write it while my blood pressure is still elevated.)

Finally, here's a pretty good Op-Ed piece I found in Newsblaze that gives the other side of the H-1B story. In "The Current H-1B Visa Program Must Be Abolished or Reformed", John Wallace points out that:

The H-1B visa program was originally created to assist American employers who were having trouble finding American high-tech workers for their businesses. It allowed a fixed number of foreign workers come to the United States to "temporarily" fill those positions while the American companies and the federal government invested time and money in upgrading the training of American workers to meet the new skill levels required.

Here's how the H-1B program really works:

The H-1B work visa program was supposed to be used to bolster the U.S. economy by helping American-owned companies. Under the program, American companies can use the speciality visa to hire foreign software programmers or computer scientists with rare skills in order to encourage innovation and improving competitiveness. Instead, foreign companies such as Infosys and Wipro are using our own government program to undermine the American economy by wiping out American jobs. These foreign-owned companies are bringing low-cost workers into the U.S., training them in the offices of American business clients, and then rotating them back home after a year or two so they can provide low cost, out-sourced tech services that causes American IT workers to lose their jobs. How is this helping American workers and American businesses?

Notice how Wallace's story can only be printed in a media outlet that hardly anyone has ever heard of (as TooTruthy points out in the end of her blog post).

(Cross-posted at Carrie's Nation.)

Labels: Bill Gates, H-1Bs, outsourcing

As part of the annual Rite of Spring, Bill Gates will be heading from the state of Washington to Washington, D.C. to beg for an increase in the number of foreign workers who will be allowed in the United States. As Patrick Thibodeau in his March 3rd ComputerWorld article points out:

The topic of the hearing is familiar ground for Gates on Capitol Hill. But what makes his scheduled appearance on March 12 potentially explosive is its timing, less than three weeks before the start of the annual application rush for H-1B visas.

April 1 is the first day that U.S. immigration authorities will begin accepting H-1B applications for the federal government's 2009 fiscal year, which begins in October. Last year, the government stopped taking applications after receiving about 150,000 in a single day — far more than enough to exhaust the annual cap of 65,000 regular visas and 20,000 set aside for foreign nationals who have advanced degrees from U.S. universities.

Like last year, Bill Gates will be expected to be the only person to appear before Congress to address this issue. He will testify that Americans are too simple-minded for technical work and that only foreign workers have the talent and ability to take on these jobs. Also like last year, people like Kim Berry from The Programmers Guild are expected to rebut each and every charge, and declare that the only shortages Microsoft, Cisco, and Oracle et al are facing is a shortage of Americans who will do the work at substandard wages.

For a look at the ideal employee Gates has in mind, watch this video taken at the Microsoft Canada Development Center in Vancouver. Remember, this is the development center Microsoft claims they were forced to open to skirt the limits on foreign workers allowed in our country.

I see their point. The United States is definitely lacking in young programmers who don't like to work particularly hard and are champion Foosball players.

Naturally, there are intriguing events leading up to the drama. Job Destruction's Rob Sanchez reported on the behind-the-scenes machinations staged by Nancy Pelosi to try to increase the cap on H-1B and other guest worker visas, in addition to trying to (of course) offer another amnesty for illegal aliens. Far away from the big players in Washington D.C., I reported on the suspicious timing of a job fair where Michigan recruiters are trying to (don't laugh - this is so quaint) match up engineering students with local venture capitalists and their startup firms.

Patrick Thibodeau, the hard-working staff member of Computerworld who I find myself linking to more and more, posted this story of how Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) issued a letter describing even more abuses of the H-1B system:

"Everyday we're learning more and more, but it appears that most H-1B visas are going to foreign-based companies," said Grassley, in a statement. "U.S. businesses that need highly skilled workers are getting the short end of the stick."

In regard to the leasing of H-1B workers, Grassley, in his letter to Chertoff, charged that "hundreds" of foreign workers are "standing by, waiting for work" and are being offered for lease by their employers. The information about this practice came from a constituent in Iowa, not identified in the letter, who was being "bombarded" by these requests to lease H-1B workers, wrote Grassley.

"My constituent even said one company went so far to require him to sign a memorandum of understanding that helps the H-1B "factory firm" justify to the federal government that they have adequate business opportunity that requires additional visa holders," wrote Grassley. "It's a complete falsification of the market justification for additional H-1B workers."

I nominate this story for the annual March Surprise, where the important-sounding National Foundation for American Policy (which, according to Rob Sanchez, is merely a front for H-1B cheerleader Stuart Anderson), issued a report claiming that 5 to 7.5 jobs are created for Americans for every H-1B worker hired. I have some severe doubts as to the cause and effect of jobs magically appearing for Americans every time an H-1B visa is issued, and so does Rob Sanchez. He should have one of his Newsletters devoted to this issue showing up in his archives within the next few days.

In the meantime, MainStreamMedia and industry mouthpieces are dutifully running the story at InformationWeek, PCWorld, the Washington Post, InfoWorld, the National Association of Manufacturers Blog, and CNET News. Be sure look at the comments section on these sites, which are often more informative than the main articles.

(Cross-posted at Carrie's Nation.)

UPDATE: Here is the link announcing Bill Gates' appearance in front of the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Science and Technology.

Labels: Bill Gates, employment, H-1Bs, outsourcing

I have one of those freebie subscriptions to Information Week that go on forever and serve mostly to add to the paper coming into the house. Most of the time, IW has at least one article on how you can save your company money by shitcanning those greedy Americans and farming out your programming (and in creasingly your remote data center administration) to other countries, primarily India, where you can pay peanuts and not have to worry about pesky things like health insurance and 401(k) plans that interfere with your ability to give your CEO a forty kazillion dollar pay package and make Jim Cramer and Larry Kudlow happy.

But why stop at sending corporate jobs to India? Why not outsource the very work of replacing ourselves as well? Yes, folks, foreign adoption isn't enough, because it doesn't serve the needs of western people to perpetuate their gene pool -- something an adorable Chinese baby just doesn't do. Now the hard work of pregnancy is going to India too:

An enterprise known as reproductive outsourcing is a new but rapidly expanding business in India. Clinics that provide surrogate mothers for foreigners say they have recently been inundated with requests from the United States and Europe, as word spreads of India’s mix of skilled medical professionals, relatively liberal laws and low prices.

Commercial surrogacy, which is banned in some states and some European countries, was legalized in India in 2002. The cost comes to about $25,000, roughly a third of the typical price in the United States. That includes the medical procedures; payment to the surrogate mother, which is often, but not always, done through the clinic; plus air tickets and hotels for two trips to India (one for the fertilization and a second to collect the baby).

“People are increasingly exposed to the idea of surrogacy in India; Oprah Winfrey talked about it on her show,” said Dr. Kaushal Kadam at the Rotunda clinic in Mumbai. Just an hour earlier she had created an embryo for Mr. Gher and his partner with sperm from one of them (they would not say which) and an egg removed from a donor just minutes before in another part of the clinic.

The clinic, known more formally as Rotunda — The Center for Human Reproduction, does not permit contact between egg donor, surrogate mother or future parents. The donor and surrogate are always different women; doctors say surrogates are less likely to bond with the babies if there is no genetic connection.

There are no firm statistics on how many surrogacies are being arranged in India for foreigners, but anecdotal evidence suggests a sharp increase.

Rudy Rupak, co-founder and president of PlanetHospital, a medical tourism agency with headquarters in California, said he expected to send at least 100 couples to India this year for surrogacy, up from 25 in 2007, the first year he offered the service.

“Every time there is a success story, hundreds of inquiries follow,” he said.

In Anand, a city in the eastern state of Gujarat where the practice was pioneered in India, more than 50 surrogate mothers are pregnant with the children of couples from the United States, Britain and elsewhere. Fifteen of them live together in a hostel attached to the clinic there.

Dr. Naina Patel, who runs the Anand clinic, said that even Americans who could afford to hire surrogates at home were coming to her for women “free of vices like alcohol, smoking and drugs.” She said she gets about 10 e-mailed inquiries a day from couples abroad.

Under guidelines issued by the Indian Council of Medical Research, surrogate mothers sign away their rights to any children. A surrogate’s name is not even on the birth certificate.

This eases the process of taking the baby out of the country. But for many, like Lisa Switzer, 40, a medical technician from San Antonio whose twins are being carried by a surrogate mother from the Rotunda clinic, the overwhelming attraction is the price. “Doctors, lawyers, accountants, they can afford it, but the rest of us — the teachers, the nurses, the secretaries — we can’t,” she said. “Unless we go to India.”

It's hard to know where to begin on the many appalling aspects to this. There's the obvious one of exploiting poor women, but there's also the whole Handmaid's Tale aspect to women being kept in special hotels as incubators for Westerners, where they live under rules that keep their Sacred Wombs™ free of Bad Things like alcohol and tobacco. There's the ethnic/racial aspects of dark-skinned women being used as incubators for Caucasian babies (note how these surrogates don't provide the eggs either).

What does it say about the Americans and Europeans who are perfectly able to justify this kind of exploitation with warm fuzzy thoughts that they're helping these women to eat? The article goes on to say that of the approximately $30,000 that is paid for Indian surrogacy, the actual surrogate woman only gets around $7,500.

That, folks, is exploitation, I don't care how many pictures of happy American couples with babies they couldn't have otherwise you show me.

It's unfortunate that the article focuses on one couple in Israel, leaving the door open to the "Rich Jewish Princesses Who Don't Want to Ruin Their Figures" image and thus exonerate the many Americans and Europeans who are going in for this practice.

It's easy for me to judge, because I was mercifully spared the kind of baby madness so many women go through that makes women resort to desperate measures to have a baby. So I'm not necessarily opposed to reproductive technology (though I question how much of the American health care dollar it warrants). Given how American surrogate contracts have gone (such as the Baby M case), it's understandable that those who want to use this method to reproduce want the person who went through the pregnancy to be as far away as possible. And I'm in no way certain that a woman who needs to carry a baby for others in order to eat and put a roof over her head is exercising anything resembling free will. But if you're going to start outsourcing pregnancy to the developing world, at least make sure the woman herself is handsomely paid, not the middlemen who seem to be making the real bucks off this kind of womb-selling.

Labels: outsourcing, Women's bodies

I have good news for you! Instead of your harsh slogan of "Kill all the lawyers", you can do the next best thing and send them out of the country.

On Wednesday, January 16 and Thursday, January 17, 2008, the American Conference Institute will be hosting the "India LPO Summit" at The Grand Hyatt in New York City.

Forrester Research forecasts that the value of legal outsourcing to India will grow to $4 billion by 2015 from $80 million today. Legal Process Outsourcing, or LPO as it is popularly called, is the latest trend in outsourcing. The impact of globalization along with the significant cost savings and increases in productivity and efficiency which can be realized, are but a few of the reasons why law firms and in-house counsel are shifting operations abroad.

Some of the latest legal specialties and tasks that "...are susceptible to outsourcing": (or, in other words, Jobs Americans Won't Do - JAWD) are:

• Litigation - Document reviews, compliance and research (legal and business information)
• Corporate - drafting and revising, abstraction, due diligence, corporate governance and corporate secretary, credit analysis.
• Patent - search, drafting, analysis, enforcement and monetization, and patent litigation.

To be honest, most of this work is not even done by full-fledged lawyers, but by law clerks, paralegals, legal secretaries, word processors, or (if given a chance) even just smart people off the street. Junior lawyers may be found doing this work as entry-level work assignments.

Is it even necessary for me to say that many Americans enjoy this type of work, and find it challenging and rewarding rather than mundane and routine? Or how about the fact that top-level lawyers start off by doing this kind of work, which can serve as a solid foundation for a successful career?

One of the speakers is David Perla, the Co-CEO of Mumbai-based Pangea3 LLC. The Careers section of their website indicates openings in India for contract lawyers, scientists, engineers, technologists, patent lawyers, legal researchers and litigation lawyers. Notice how the New York office only publishes openings for a Litigation Sales Lawyer and a Patent Lawyer. Notice also how the openings in India specify they want applicants who have between 2-10 years of experience or 1-7 years of experience. I'm not sure what 40-year old Indians are supposed to do with themselves after they've reached the upper limit on the experience chart.

Check out the Pangea3 blog section where Kevin Colangelo, on December 6, 2007, wrote about the presentation he gave at the Center for Economic Policy Studies’ (CEPS) Fall Symposium at Princeton University:

Simply stated, it’s clear to me that the intellectual debate over offshoring has become merely that: intellectual. Finally. Complex, thoughtful discussions on global economics are indeed valuable and necessary, but at the end of the day, a roomful of non-attorneys did not seem fazed by the notion of Pangea3’s Indian attorneys doing U.S. and U.K. legal work. Their questions were focused on the details of how we do the work, rather than whether it is good for the economy or how this will impact the distinguished U.S. and U.K. legal professions.

I’m hopeful that the insight demonstrated at this Symposium is further proof that offshoring, and in particular, the offshoring of legal services, has matured to the point where it is viewed as a key, but uncontroversial, element of our economy.

In other words, the offshoring geniuses don't have to justify sending our jobs overseas anymore. They are off the hook. Everyone does it now, and there's not a damn thing the peasants can do about it.

(Special thanks to a loyal reader for letting me know about Pangea3. Cross-posted to Carrie's Nation.)

Labels: offshoring, outsourcing

Don't get all up my ass about being xenophobic. It's no secret that I have major problems with the parade of IT jobs being sent overseas, and I have even more problems with the way call centers are being run. You don't work in IT as long as I have without recognizing the idiosyncracies in speech that are characteristic of India, no matter how many Shilpas identify themselves as Sharon and Sanjeevs identify themselves as Steve. Frankly, I'd rather deal with Shilpa and Sanjeev, because at least then I know with whom I'm speaking. I've worked with people from India, I've had friends from India, and I have no problem understanding people from India.

My beef isn't with people in India who take these jobs. I can't object to someone who just wants to earn a living, and often these call center employees are as exploited as any other worker dependent on a giant multinational corporation. I really try to separate out the individual person at the other end of the phone from the policies to put him there and the companies that make their jobs well-nigh impossible to do properly, but sometimes it's difficult.

My place of employment is a Dell shop. We deal with Dell for all desktop machines. And usually Dell's business customers are routed to American customer service reps. We had a particular line of desktops with heat problems, and as the motherboards went, our tech support guys would call Dell and get new motherboards. One time the call was routed incorrectly, and our guy ended up having to deal with no fewer than three different people reading the same script about the tests that had to be done "in order to identify the problem." He ended up calling again and again until his call was routed to someone in the U.S.

Mr. Brilliant and I have succumbed to the siren song of high-definition television. We don't go out all that much and don't spend much on entertainment, so the prospect of spending $130/month for pay TV doesn't seem as horrifying as it would otherwise, particularly when it gets you almost 300 channels of nothing you'd want to watch. Right now we have about 147 pieces of this lovely Craftsman TV stand strewn all over the living room floor, waiting for one or both of us to find the Rosetta Stone that will decipher the assembly instructions, but if you want to schedule installation of the HD line, you have to get on the phone. So yesterday, with almost no voice in the seventh day of being down with the Winter in New Jersey Crud, I called Dish Network to arrange for the HD receiver and the installation.

The call center rep identified himself as "Maxwell", and I almost immediately realized that I had reached a call center in India. After I had admonished "Maxwell" twice to please speak into the microphone, he started by asking me for my account password. Not my account number, but my account password. There IS no account password, other than the one you use to log into your account online, which apparently was NOT the "password" to which he was referring. When I said I didn't know what he was talking about because there is no account password other than the one used for the online account, he told me to ask my husband for the password.

That's when I let him have it. I told him that assuming a woman didn't know the password because her husband had it was insulting (especially when it's my name on the account), and asked if he was in the U.S. When he said no, I said "If you were in the U.S., you would know how insulting it is to tell a woman to ask her husband for information just because she doesn't know what the hell you're talking about because you're asking for something that doesn't exist." He then asked me AGAIN to ask my husband for the password. I also said I hoped that the call was "being monitored for quality assurance" because the quality assurance on this call was God-awful.

I asked to be transferred to someone in the U.S., and he said he couldn't, that calls were routed to the next available operator. I told him I was hanging up and that I would keep calling till I get someone in the U.S. I tried again and this time I got "Tanesha". I had a pretty good idea that Tanesha wasn't a name that someone in an Indian call center would identify as American, and when I asked if she was in the U.S., she said yes, she was in Philadelphia.

I nearly wept with joy and gratitude. Tanesha didn't ask me about a password. I explained that I had some questions about the best way to set up my HD setup, what the various costs were, the differences between the two receivers that were my options, what the installation rebate was, and what the commitment was. Then she set up the appointment. Not one question about a password. And she was even politically correct by asking if I celebrate Christmas before wishing me a merry one. I thanked her profusely for her assistance abd said I hoped this call was being monitored because I wanted her boss to see what a good job she's doing.

In retrospect, it occurred to me that "Maxwell" was probably asking about my account number, not my password. But once there was that breakdown in communication, the fact that these call centers tend to work by written script in an attempt to avoid some of the issues of national idiosyncracies in the language cited in the article linked above became an insurmountable obstacle to completing the call. It showed me that "Maxwell" wasn't equipped to do more than take orders for installation.

I'm the kind of customer that a company like Dish Network should embrace tightly. We've had the service for eight years, despite the relentless sales pitches for Optimum services (offered by Cablevision, one of the most odious and crappy cable providers in the known universe) and the creepy and obviously unscreened door-to-door salesmen that Verizon is hiring to aggressively push its FIOS TV/phone service. We pay more to buy our phone, internet, and TV à la carte just because we like the way Echostar does business. Echostar CEO Charlie Ergen is the kind of cult hero to the company's customers the way Steve Jobs is for Apple's. I like the company so much that I bought some of the stock for my IRA. And I like the service offered so much that I would rather have a lower stock price than see the company sold to AT&T, which was widely expected earlier this month and still may happen given the company's splitting into two entities -- Echostar retaining the set-top box/satellite businesses and Dish Network Corp. offering the subscription service.

Alas, I expect the subscription service to be sold to AT&T sometime next year anyway given this move, which will create a huge moral dilemma for whatever remains of our eighteen-month commitment at that point. Somehow I can't imagine that an AT&T-owned Dish Network is going to keep channels like Free Speech Television, Worldlink, and Veria. But in the world of premium television, it's pick your poison. And eventually, given the FCC's determination to consolidate the media into ever fewer hands, it won't matter anyway. All you'll hear anywhere is what the government wants you to.

Labels: globalization, outsourcing

This article by Roger Bybee on the false promise of globalization and outsourcing is definitely worth your time. It focuses primarily on Wisconsin, but it's applicable to any state that is seeing its industries move overseas.

Excerpt:

Standing resolutely against any consideration of "human capital" in trade agreements is an extremely influential group of American pundits, led by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, author of the best-selling book The World Is Flat. Friedman strongly opposes the notion that the workers of the world possess any economic "entitlements," arguing that prosperity will be generated through governmental deregulation, higher levels of education, and the free flow of technological advances in the hands of unrestricted corporations.

Friedman reserves special venom for "The Coalition to Keep Poor People Poor." This is the term he uses for labor and environmental activists who claim to seek higher wages and better conditions for Third World workers, but whose real agenda, he divulges, is actually protecting unionized jobs in the U.S. None of Friedman's anger is directed at the corporations responsible for miserable wages and living conditions.

Instead of Friedman's "flat world," we are witnessing Himalayan levels of inequality. Internationally, the gap between the world's richest and poorest one-fifths has increased from 30-1 in 1960 to 78-1. The world's three richest individuals possess more wealth than the combined Gross Domestic Product of the poorest 48 nations.

In the U.S., inequality is reaching levels not seen since the 1920s. To cite just one striking measure: the richest 1% — about 300,000 people — earn 16.2% of all income, more than the 150 million who make up the bottom 40%, according to various news reports. Those fortunate few earning over $4.5 million — the richest 1/10 of 1% — earn 6.9% of annual income.

[snip]

Perhaps the most chilling aspect of the impact of globalization — a.k.a. outsourcing — on the U.S. economy is the prospect that what we've seen so far is only the beginning.

Princeton economist Alan Blinder, a self-described "free trader down to his toes," has estimated that up to 42 million highly technical U.S. jobs — ranging from computer programmers to accountants to economists — are "highly off-shorable" (Wall Street Journal, 3/28/07).

Blinder bases his projections on a detailed analysis of 817 job classifications. He predicts this next wave of job shifts will go far beyond relatively low-skill jobs like those in "call centers" used by insurance and credit-card companies, and reach even people with Ph.Ds.

Favored sites will likely be low-wage nations with large numbers of well-educated people, like China, India and countries in Eastern Europe. U.S.-based corporations that relocate professional jobs overseas will thus be able to rely on the public expenditures for higher education made by other nations, even as they fight to lower their taxes in the U.S. and thus undermine higher education here.

That the U.S. government is in service not to its citizens, but rather to the corporations that shovel campaign cash into the pockets of incumbents, should be no secret to anyone. That Jay Rockefeller, a recipient of a goodly sum of telecom cash, should march 100% in lockstep to the industry's tune that it should receive immunity from prosecution for its role in wiretapping American citizens is just one example.

John Edwards has been out on the campaign trail decrying the imfluence of big money on politics. Whether he is successful against the juggernaut of corporate cash being thrown at Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama remains to be seen. But corporatism is no longer a function of party, with Republicans in the pocket of multinational corporations and Democrats being the good stewards of the public trust. Right now NO ONE, save a few mavericks like Bernie Sanders, is representing the interests of American citizens. Those who think that Hillary Clinton is somehow going to represent a break from the stranglehold that the monied classes have on our system need only remember her statement at the Yearly Kos debate last summer -- that lobbyists are Americans too.

Labels: corporatism, globalization, outsourcing

It's no longer cheap enough to outsource tech jobs to India. As the tech industry in India has grown, workers are demanding higher wages. So now, Indian companies are outsourcing FROM India, so they can pay even less. But what's even more disturbing is that one of those "developing countries" is low-cost areas of the United States:

One of the constants of the global economy has been companies moving their tasks — and jobs — to India. But rising wages and a stronger currency here, demands for workers who speak languages other than English, and competition from countries looking to emulate India’s success as a back office — including China, Morocco and Mexico — are challenging that model.

Many executives here acknowledge that outsourcing, having rained most heavily on India, will increasingly sprinkle tasks around the globe. Or, as Ashok Vemuri, an Infosys senior vice president, put it, the future of outsourcing is “to take the work from any part of the world and do it in any part of the world.”

To fight on the shifting terrain, and to beat back emerging rivals, Indian companies outsourcing companies based in India are outsourcing jobs to developing countriesare hiring workers and opening offices in developing countries themselves, before their clients do.

In May, Tata Consultancy Service, Infosys’s Indian rival, announced a new back office in Guadalajara, Mexico; Tata already has 5,000 workers in Brazil, Chile and Uruguay. Cognizant Technology Solutions, with most of its operations in India, has now opened back offices in Phoenix and Shanghai.

Wipro, another Indian technology services company, has outsourcing offices in Canada, China, Portugal, Romania and Saudi Arabia, among other locations.

And last month, Wipro said it was opening a software development center in Atlanta that would hire 500 programmers in three years.

In a poetic reflection of outsourcing’s new face, Wipro’s chairman, Azim Premji, told Wall Street analysts this year that he was considering hubs in Idaho and Virginia, in addition to Georgia, to take advantage of American “states which are less developed.” (India’s per capita income is less than $1,000 a year.)

For its part, Infosys is building a whole archipelago of back offices — in Mexico, the Czech Republic, Thailand and China, as well as low-cost regions of the United States.

Thomas Friedman, DLC Democrats and Republicans who sing the praises of outsourcing (easy to do when it isn't YOUR job that's in danger of being shipped overseas) will point to these 500 jobs that Wipro is creating and say that outsourcing works for everyone. But I'd be interested in knowing for how many jobs formerly in the U.S. Wipro handled the outsourcing to India in the first place, and I'd also be interested in how many of these 500 jobs will be filled by H-1B programmers.

Labels: employment, outsourcing

Two stories of customer non-service in the Republican era.

First, Susie Madrak is robbeed BY a bank:

It’s been one of those weeks. It started Monday morning, when my battery was dead. Then I got three estimates on replacing the battery core and guess what? They all came in at slightly under $1000!

Now, it also appeared that my paycheck cleared earlier than they told me. It was listed as available funds on the 7th. They posted my rent check and charged me an $88 fee for the uncleared check, but they also posted the balance as available funds.

So I, you know, lived my life. I put gas in the car, went food shopping - you know, the usual. (Oh, and in the meantime? They still hadn’t cleared the donations readers had made to Paypal and Amazon last week, which usually takes 3-4 days. Hell, they still haven’t cleared all of them as of this morning!)

[snip]

Then last night, I checked my available bank balance again and I actually gasped. Because no, the check hadn’t cleared - and they’d hit me with an additional $315 in unavailable-funds fees for a grand total of $403!

Read on here.

Meanwhile, Pierre Tristam has his own customer service woes with AT&T:

When I call back to speak with the DSL universe, it’s no longer Bell South, no longer the United States. It’s AT&T, from somewhere in India. This is going on Friday afternoon. I’m dreading a three-day weekend without DSL—the three-day weekend critical to three people in this house: I have that project to complete by Monday. Cheryl is in the middle of her new school year’s recruiting drive for her youth orchestra. Sadie is in the middle of crunch-time with her virtual schooling (all online). And here’s the scratchy man from India telling me we may have a problem setting a DSL technician’s appointment before Tuesday. The pitch of my voice begins to rise. And what’s with the line being so scratchy? The guy at the other end of the line cuts out every sixth word. I mean, this is AT&T we’re connected with, and you’re telling me that we have to be talking on a back-assed Internet connection on the phone, with AT&T? Well, yes. That’s outsourcing.

At least the man manages to set a Saturday appointment. But wait! “I’m sorry, sir, but our computers are down. I’m not able to actually set the appointment.”

You’re kidding. No, this is just a joke. You’re just being funny with me. Outsourcing humor, yes?

“No sir. The computers are down. I can call you back to confirm as soon as the computers are up.”

Yes. And the check is in the mail. But what choice did I have? Sure, call me back. He says he would in an hour. Didn't happen. I call AT&T again sometime after 9 p.m. On hold. Transferred. I ask for a supervisor. I ask for one back in the United States, imagining that somehow there’d be a difference. This whole comedy started at 3:30 the afternoon of Friday. Here we were in bed Cheryl and I, 10 p.m., having an unpleasant threesome with a man in Bombay telling me he’s having a hard time connecting with his supervisor in the United States. AT&T, incapable of connecting with itself. The alleged supervisor finally turns up, only pretending to be a supervisor, telling me he’s in Columbia, S.C., but repeating the very same things everyone else has been saying, and doing so with that revolting obsequious tone that reads placating platitudes from standard cue cards plastered around his office: “I'm sorry you're having all this trouble, sir. I'm going to do everything I can to fix the problem. I'm sorry you feel that way sir.” And under his breath the guy is calling me a motherfucker and picturing me disemboweled and skull-bashed against the shoals of the South Carolina shore. I ask for that Saturday appointment again, now that, I assume, the computers are working.

“Can’t do that, sir. Tuesday is the earliest.”

But you told me I had a Saturday appointment, it was just a matter of computer problems—your computer problems. You have to make it right.

“Can’t do that, sir.”

Labels: bloggers, customer service, outsourcing

If you're an IT worker and you're not reading Carrie's Nation on a regular basis, you should be. Today she takes on the preposterously sunny Thomas Friedman on his insistence that there are bright vistas ahead in the job market in green technologies:

Sorry, Thomas. Anything having to do with green technology can be outsourced in about five minutes. Our "high-wage engineers and programmers" can make their innovative designs, than pass the work on to H-1B tech workers here in the US or to tech workers throughout the world for implementation or further refinements. And does Friedman really think that the nuts and bolts manufacturing of these contraptions will never be outsourced overseas? The total output of our "green collar" Americans would hardly even be measurable in our GDP statistics.

[snip]

Are we supposed to advise our students to enter into "green collar" professions the way we advised them to enter into engineering and computer sciences in 1990? In the year 2020, would we be advising these same students to re-invent themselves and retrain themselves for other professions?

...professions that will pay peanuts and discriminate against them because they are "too old" by then, no doubt.

I share Carrie's disdain for Thomas Friedman's pat view of the working world, coming as it does from someone whose job is to write a column a couple of times a week and who is in no danger of being outsourced.

Labels: idiocy, outsourcing, Thomas Friedman

In the Bush Administration, outsourcing is the equivalent of money laundering. Outsourcing the war to Blackwater and other contracting companies has enabled the war to be waged with no accountability under international law.

But the Administration's penchant for outsourcing goes even further -- they've outsourced national security functions as well:

The most intriguing secrets of the "war on terror" have nothing to do with al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers. They're about the mammoth private spying industry that all but runs U.S. intelligence operations today.

Surprised? No wonder. In April, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell was poised to publicize a year-long examination of outsourcing by U.S. intelligence agencies. But the report was inexplicably delayed -- and suddenly classified a national secret. What McConnell doesn't want you to know is that the private spy industry has succeeded where no foreign government has: It has penetrated the CIA and is running the show.

Over the past five years (some say almost a decade), there has been a revolution in the intelligence community toward wide-scale outsourcing. Private companies now perform key intelligence-agency functions, to the tune, I'm told, of more than $42 billion a year. Intelligence professionals tell me that more than 50 percent of the National Clandestine Service (NCS) -- the heart, brains and soul of the CIA -- has been outsourced to private firms such as Abraxas, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.

These firms recruit spies, create non-official cover identities and control the movements of CIA case officers. They also provide case officers and watch officers at crisis centers and regional desk officers who control clandestine operations worldwide. As the Los Angeles Times first reported last October, more than half the workforce in two key CIA stations in the fight against terrorism -- Baghdad and Islamabad, Pakistan -- is made up of industrial contractors, or "green badgers," in CIA parlance.

Intelligence insiders say that entire branches of the NCS have been outsourced to private industry. These branches are still managed by U.S. government employees ("blue badgers") who are accountable to the agency's chain of command. But beneath them, insiders say, is a supervisory structure that's controlled entirely by contractors; in some cases, green badgers are managing green badgers from other corporations.

Sensing problems -- and possibly fearing congressional action -- the CIA recently conducted a hasty review of all of its job classifications to determine which perform "essential government functions" that should not be outsourced. But it's highly doubtful that such a short-term exercise can comprehensively identify the proper "blue/green" mix, especially because contractors' work statements have long been carefully formulated to blur the distinction between approvable and debatable functions.

I wonder how many of these companies were Bush campaign contributors, and I also wonder how much of our tax dollars they're getting paid?

Labels: Homeland Security, outsourcing

Note the apparent age difference between the two highly-qualified guys in this video who have been unable to find jobs and the pisher tech recruiter who says HE hasn't seen any sign of discrimination against U.S. workers:



Interesting how instead of guys like the recruiter in this report, so much of the outsourcing of recruitment is being directed to immigration attorneys.

Labels: corporatism, greed, outsourcing

I realize that this little bloggeroo doesn't have the kind of high traffic to mount an effective blogswarm, but it's worth a try.

As someone who has watched a spouse go through a number of job searches, plowing through ads with long lists of requirements for completely unrelated skills that no one person can possibly have, it's been clear to me that job recruiting is done with the clear goal of NOT finding qualified American workers, so that H-1Bs can be hired instead.

Thanks to Carrie, who commented here for the first time yesterday and who is being blogrolled as a way of expressing our thanks, we now see that there are, in fact, immigration attorneys who are in the business of helping employers disqualify American workers to facilitate the hiring of foreign workers:



If you are not a tech worker and you think this doesn't affect you, guess again. It affects all of us.

And if you're thinking of supporting Hillary Clinton for president, call her campaign headquarters and refer them to this video and ask what the candidate's official response to this kind of practice is. If you're supporting Bill Richardson, ask how "education" addresses the problem of a policy that allows companies to rig the system to exclude American workers. Then please share with us in the comments what you find.

(More at Information Week and lots more videos of media coverage here. Note how all of the representatives interviewed in the media coverage are Republicans. Does this mean the Democrats support excluding Americans from the job force via these tactics? I think it's worth contacting our Democratic representatives and Senators, as well as our presidential candidates, and finding out.)

Labels: corporatism, greed, H-1Bs, outsourcing