IBM Shifts 14,000 Jobs to India 1077
Omar Khan writes "The New York Times reports, 'Even as it lays off up to 13,000 workers in Europe and the U.S., IBM plans to increase its payroll in India this year by more than 14,000 workers.' Slashdot previously covered the black-and-blue strike, in which the union wondered, 'if other cost cutting mechanisms could achieve the same effect without cutting so may jobs.'"
Message sent, but will it be received? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry but IBM is speaking to European workers very clearly here, however I'm not sure they're listening. The constant strikes, the 5+ weeks of vacation, the voting down of the EU constitution to avoid US-style capitalism. These jobs are vanishing into India because of the cost and headache of dealing with European unions, workers, culture, and bureaucracy. Frankly it's a pain in the ass, and for a market that often has little growth potential. Asia isn't just where the cheap labour is, it's also where the growth is, and the governments eager to work with you, and the best bang-for-the-buck for companies seeking to invest. Until European workers learn to compete aggressively we'll keep on hearing stories like this of companies that just shrug and say "fine, have it your way." Apologies, but something's gotta give.
Re:Message sent, but will it be received? (Score:5, Insightful)
They just don't get it. The winners are the consumer who gets to pay lower prices for the products and services. The other winners are the stockholders of the corporation who get higher dividends and portfolio value. Now, we all are consumers of IBM and similar high tech goods and services--every time we use an ATM, an insurance company, a bank, a personal computer--we are benefiting from offshoring of high cost labor and parts.
I think this group that seeks to unionize tech workers needs to rethink its strategy a bit. Raising the cost of labor will not provide for secure employment, quite the opposite in fact.
I don't like to see rising unemployment in the tech sector, either, but unionizing and legislating are not the answers. Innovation, entrepreneurship, and low tax overhead will help. We also have to face up to the fact that there are industrious and hard working people out there who will do our job on the cheap. We in the West need to wake up, start thinking more innovatively, and compete with our best tools: our creativity, education, and tremendous freedom to explore new business opportunities.
Re:Message sent, but will it be received? (Score:5, Insightful)
All true, but it's waaaaay too late to fix this. If anything, IT industry workers as a whole needed to realize this 10 years ago. Today, IT people still think of themselves as deserving of an inordinately large paycheck. And what's interesting is that IT people that I know and that I have talked to all seem to keep this mentality even while they're unemployed. I got my wake up call years ago, and left the IT industry for good, because I know that I'm not willing to sit in a fucking cubicle and commute with the lemmings every day for less than $xx an hour.
Re:Message sent, but will it be received? (Score:3, Informative)
I see 7 hits for "perl" under $30k [monster.com]. 76 under $50k [monster.com].
Did I blink or something and companies suddenly quit using Perl? I get 9 hits for J2EE under $30k. 45 under $50k.
Obviously the future lies with the latest and greatest languages. C# has a whopping 85 entries under $50k. 5 under $30k.
So tell me, what do I need to search for to pull up the 14,000 jobs that IBM has available? Surely I can move in with my parents and give up saving for the future and make myself competitive for one of these po
Re:There was a story when I worked at Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
Um -- you're not paid based on how much money you generate for a company, you're paid based on how replaceable your job is. Guess what? If the janitor stops taking out the trash, eventually the company stops making money. Are the janitors worth a billion dollars a year? No -- because they're paid based on the value of the work they do. They are easily replaceable.
Same for engineers. You are paid based on how unique your work is. If your work can be easily replaced by another engineer, you're low paid. If it is sufficiently unique, then you are higher paid. Supply and demand, man. Supply and demand.
Want to be the one who collects the money at the top? Easy. Start your own company and create some jobs of your own.
Unions can create temporary bubbles where you get higher pay than you deserve, but ultimately it hurts you. Would you rather have a 20% more pay temporarily, but then no job at all when it's outsourced, or would you rather have more stability, just at a market wage?
Europe is choosing "no job" every day.
Re:There was a story when I worked at Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
There, in a nutshell, is the problem. The system we have now is designed to funnel the profits into the hands of a few people, and after multiple decades of this, you end up with a situation like we have now - professionals who used to be able to raise a family in a nice home on a single income now barely scrape by with two incomes.
This is a cycle of free-market capitalism, it's inherent in the structure of business. As the money gets concentrated at the top, there's less to go around. That's why you see small businesses closing left and right, while Starbucks and Wal-Mart open yet another store in your area. Even if you have an employee-owned company with profit sharing, it will eventually get swallowed up or plowed over by a larger company whose owners screwed people over so they could gain obscene wealth.
What's the answer? I don't know. Some say eat the rich. I say form cooperatives. The solution is probably somewhere in between.
Re:There was a story when I worked at Microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)
Where do you think the money goes? Into mattresses? No -- it goes into investment, which creates more jobs. professionals who used to be able to raise a family in a nice home on a single income now barely scrape by with two incomes.
The world you think used to exist never existed. The reason people need two incomes now is because they SPEND MORE MONEY. It is entirely possible to live on one income, if you don't live luxuriously. The last generation simply accepted living on fewer luxuries.
Re:There was a story when I worked at Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
Since 86% of stock is owned by the wealthiest 10%, money speny buying stock (or stock-price appreciation caused by businesses) goes pretty much to the rich, accelerating the concentration of wealth.
I have trouble imagining what kind of economic efficiency, or society, we will have when a (relative) handful of people own everything, and the rest of us are serfs.
Re:There was a story when I worked at Microsoft (Score:3, Interesting)
Poeple keep repeating this "investment" mantra like they never had a thought of their own. Pushing money (stocks) around is not investment, it's speculation and it generates as much value as betting on horse races, which is zero.
It can be an "investment". (Score:3, Interesting)
Otherwise, you're 100% accurate. The "buy low, sell high" stock market mantra is pure speculation and speculation just moves the existing money around without creating anything of value.
http://www.bell.lib.umn.edu/Products/tulips.html [umn.edu]
What happens is lots of money goes to a few people who spend lavishly on extravagent luxuries. That money comes from the many losers in that game.
And that is the problem with the current "investments" in th
Re:There was a story when I worked at Microsoft (Score:5, Informative)
Where did he say "stock"? He said "investment."
- It means investing money in banks: giving everyone else a better chance for a loan at a lower rate.
- It means investing in new companies: giving people jobs, new/better goods and services, and opening up potential for others to invest (shareholders).
- It means starting your own company, that's an investment, too.
- And yes, it means investing in the stock market. And while you may think they are buying the stock "used," if no one buys the stock, the price of the stock goes down because there are more sellers than buyers, and that affects the underlying company in many different ways.
When I buy IBM stock, IBM doesn't see a penny of that money; some goes to middlemen, and the rest goes to a former IBM stockholder.
Uh huh... right. And what happens when IBM pays you a dividend on your shares? And what happens when you sell those shares for a profit somewhere down the road? And what happens when IBM has more power to leverage it's higher share prices.
It's not like you're just paying someone for a piece of worthless paper.
Since 86% of stock is owned by the wealthiest 10%...
Source of this statistic?
Wow. You are stunningly ignorant about the stock market. How does purchasing equity concentrate wealth elsewhere? You have purchased SOMETHING. You can earn profit on it (indicated above). You are investing in the economy.
I have trouble imagining what kind of economic efficiency, or society, we will have when a (relative) handful of people own everything, and the rest of us are serfs.
The reason you may have trouble imagining this is because it is ludicrous. The economy is a pie. The richer among us have a large share of the pie. When the economy grows, the pie gets bigger. Their piece of pie grows, yes -- but so does everyone else's.
It's not a zero sum game. That's just something those interest in class warfare like to put out there for scaremongering.
Re:There was a story when I worked at Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
You still don't get it. If it costs that much to live there, it doesn't matter what your general evaluation of the area is -- it's by definition luxury. I don't care if the place has rats.
San Diego property values are waaay overpriced for what you get.
What you "get" is to live in one of the nicest areas in the world.
You have *no* idea, you're fuck
Re:There was a story when I worked at Microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, it is -- all of your evidence is anecdotal. Because things suck for you, then it must suck for everyone. Well, got news for you -- it DOESN'T suck for everyone. In fact, it sucks a helleva lot less today than it did in previous generations. You just have this rosy colored view of 50 years ago that never existed. People considered television a luxury! People didn't buy books, they went to the library. And people saved for a damn long time to be able to afford a house. Vacations were driving to see Aunt Marge in Iowa.
when in fact the economic environment has changed *radically*.
Indeed. We have more mobility, more communication, more opportunity, more education, more nearly everything. Ironically, we also have far more whining. You're miserable because you have unrealistic expectations of things that are supposed to be handed to you.
I have a friend. Dude is about 42-43, works as a parts export manager at Honda. Dunno what he makes, but probably, eh, $60-70K. He is a millionaire -- from nothing. How did he do it? HE SAVED. He lived very modestly. He invested it. He has a wife and kids, but he still lives relatively modestly. You would never suspect he has that much money.
So did he steal the money? Did his ill-gotten gains come from the backs of the poor?
Re:There was a story when I worked at Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
OK, now look at the average size of a house now, and in 1970. I don't feel like looking for the reference, but houses are much larger now than they were in the 1970s, and especially the 1950s. Why is that?
Just because people spend more on "fixed" expenses doesn't mean that they *have* to spend more, and that's my point. People have unrealistic expectations about their
Re:There was a story when I worked at Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
I wont win any mod points for this but ya know bashing Wal-Mart is easy but the fact is that company is successful because they play by the rules of the game and they play really well.
You should watch the bio on Sam Walton on Biography channel. I despise rock star CEO's that walk in to multibillion dollar companies and run them in to the ground. That is not Sam or the Walton family. He and his family started with next to nothing and a tiny five and dime retail store in a small town in Arkansas. They succeeded because:
- They worked really hard, and I mean really worked as in they all stocked shelves and drove around finding products to sell at good prices
- They gambled everything they had on their business multiple times and they could have easily lost it all numerous times
- They were ruthlessly efficient, it can be cruel especially to workers and suppliers but if you are not you dont succeed in retail.
- They gave people what they want, they sold the products people wanted at the best price in town. That is the classic definition of competition in retail. They did't win through bombing their competitors, or cheating or anything else. They competed, the competed well and they won.
Yea it sucks that they stock their shelves with Chinese goods but the fact is if they didn't someone else would and they would go under. Fact is Chinese goods are way cheaper than American made goods and you can't change that now unless we start restoring trade barriers or push American worker's wages down to 30 cents an hour.
Yea it sucks that they dont pay their employees very well. But you know what, running a cash register and stocking shelves are some of the lowest skill jobs around, especially in the era of bar codes and RFID. Fact is if I dont go to Wal-Mart I go to a grocery story with do it yourself checkout. You see even I can scan bar codes, feed money in to a cash register and put my groceries in to a sack, so I dont see the value in subsidizing a unionized grocery worker to do something that requires no skill. You do have to kind of wonder about the sanity of unionized grocery store workers commanding some of the best wages and benefits in many small towns. They are people with no actual skills and in free markets people are supposed to get paid based on what their worth. Grocery store workers are not worth a lot.
The other thing you need to appreciate about Wal-Mart is they have probably the most sophisticated and efficient computerized supply chain on the planet. They have giant computers in Arkansas that track every transaction in every store and make sure the right goods arrive at the right place at the right time. Your mom and pop store cant compete against that, in retail, inventory management determines the winners and losers, not sentimentality. Wal-Mart now has economy of scale almost no one else can match but the fact is they Walton's still beat their competition when they were in one five and dime in Arkansas because they worked really hard and they played to win.
All in all the Walton family are an American success story. If you are going to ridicule and crucify them for succeeding you are basicly ridiculing every aspect of Capitalism. Its is a deeply flawed system in a lot of ways, but so are all the others. The Walton's are just grand masters of the system they live under.
Re:There was a story when I worked at Microsoft (Score:4, Interesting)
Always has been like that, always will be. The Romans used slaves to build marble villas for the governers. Medieval knights had serfs working the fields to put food on the banquet tables in their castles. Peasants worked in cotton mills to keep the industrialists in mansions. Now office drones sit in cubicles to help chief executives pay for their privates jets. This isn't a new thing, I don't know why you're surprised.
In fact now the gap between the rich and poor is smaller than ever. In the 14th century if you worked picking potatoes, that was your lot, you'd never be anything else. You worked all the daylight hours and lived in a mudhut, most of your children died of disease and you ate stale vegetables and drank filthy water. Nowadays, even the poor have great opportunity. A man with no money living in a box can drag himself up and start a business and become a billionaire. Even the poor live in relative luxury, with housing, food, education and healthcare paid for by the government.
professionals who used to be able to raise a family in a nice home on a single income now barely scrape by with two incomes.
Of course, in the 'good' old days, poor families didn't spend their money on televisions, computers, fridges, microwaves, indoor toilets, supermarket meals, fizzy drinks, new clothes, cars, holidays abroad, central heating, air conditioning, mobile phones, hot water, leather furniture, detached house with four bedrooms, garage and big garden, not to mention thousands of other luxuries which weren't available when only the man of the house went to work. All these things COST MONEY. You want today's luxuries whilst living yesterday's lifestyle. Well unless you're rich you can't have it. I'm sure if you cut out all the expenses, you could live like they did in the 1950s, with the wife staying at home, and everyone shitting outside in a shed.
Re:There was a story when I worked at Microsoft (Score:3, Interesting)
You glossed over a key point. IBM's CEO Sam Palmisano like many CxO's, had absolutely zip to do with founding IBM though to his credit he worked at IBM or a subsidiary most of his life. since 1973. But I wager he's invested very little of his personal wealth in IBM equity other than maybe through the employee stock purchase plan, which is more of a benefit than a case of gambling your per
Re:There was a story when I worked at Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
If you want justice, then stop paying starting engineers straight out of junior college three times the salary of teachers with thirty or more years of experience. Stop demanding it for yourself.
Too bad if you try to do this in the United States without enough money for complete financial security and independance, one of the bigger guys will come and offer to buy out your company. If you refuse, your safe full of company secrets will myseriously disappear to a fire. If you persist in continuing
Re:Message sent, but will it be received? (Score:5, Insightful)
Listen, buddy, you're not going to get anywhere making sober, rational, actually true statements like that here on slashdot. If you can't make your point by bashing large companies and demonizing people in India, then you're just a Corporate Stooge(tm). Like me!
Like me, in the sense that I've still got a tech job in the US because I'm making sure that I do work for people that need something beyond simple certifications. The key to having a tech career in the US is in demonstrating how you can connect your comfort with the culture, language, and business habits of the country directly with the IT project at hand. A SQL query, a backup drive, and NAT settings don't really depend too much on cultural history or a smooth use of American English. But the execution of a project that faces North American business users and consumers is only going to shine if the people working on it don't have to have certain idioms translated, or certain Americanisms explained in detail before a dialog box can be well written or a menu hot key wisely selected.
More importantly, those e-mail threads and meetings that shape the budgets around projects or choose a technology strategy for some problem can be maddeningly derailed by the wrong-continent-ness of off-shored team members, no matter how inately talented or well trained. In short: get tech savvy, and then get in the business of helping tech-dependent organizations use tech resources, even if some of them are overseas. Being the resource is risky, but being an astute student of US culture and knowing which resources make the most sense to use - that's a less vulnerable line of work (and it pays better).
Re:Message sent, but will it be received? (Score:5, Insightful)
A new company formed of the actual talent, with all of the PHBs and their golden parachute collections amputated, ought to compete effectively, or am I missing something?
Re:Message sent, but will it be received? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, never mind the competitive issues for the moment. The real shock to "workers" who try to do that is that all of the sudden they're facing the same issues their bosses did. The fact that they need a management layer, for example. And the people who tend to be really talented in that area can also be wooed away to a better deal elsewhere... which means that the workers are going to have to sweeten the pot to keep around the sort of people that know how to swing investment deals, secure better insurance rates, negotiate mutli-million dollar office deals, talk with the lawyers, and so on.
You can purge the PHBs, but the space they occupy doesn't really go away. Companies populated entirely by engineers, no matter how talented, fail early and fail often. The more so when there doesn't seem to be enough money around to pay for their services (at leats, compared to people in India with the same certifications who will work for a quarter of the price and be thrilled to do so).
Re:Message sent, but will it be received? (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess I missed IBM's announcement they were lowering prices. Got a URL?
I use to work for fortune 500 company that outsourced a bunch of thier IT works (not me). They never lowered prices, but the CEO did get a hell of a raise that year.
Re:Message sent, but will it be received? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Message sent, but will it be received? (Score:3, Insightful)
The mantra of lowered prices is getting waaaaay out of control. People who are not only tossed out of steady work, but are also tossed into big indebtedness, are only going to consume your stupid cheap
Re:Message sent, but will it be received? (Score:4, Informative)
It is down from the all-time high of 67.1% in 2000, but the bubble burt, you know.
Re:Message sent, but will it be received? (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, all major business are speaking (Score:4, Informative)
Honeywell News from Job Destruction Newsletter (Score:3, Informative)
In a recent newsletter I wrote about a new corporate plan by Honeywell that some of their executives called a "Census Adjustment". Their cutsie corporate terminology is just another way of describing their new policy of replacing U.S. labor with cheaper foreign labor. I equated Honeywell's "census adjustment" to a corporate policy of "ethnic cleansing".
Since that newsletter was published I have received credible
information about several of the specifics of
Re:Message sent, but will it be received? (Score:5, Insightful)
So competition means having European workers work at Indian wages, despite IBM being highly profitable?
So you want governments and corporations to work together to ensure that the highest goal is ensuring that corporations are profitable?
Do you truly understand what your saying? Workers have fought for literally centuries to be treated with some degree of respect. Corporations are now making record profits, and still seem to find it necessary to replace their workers with cheaper labor? What the hell is it for? What exactly is the point of all this - we'll all be back to 6:00 AM to 9:00 PM hours, with no vacation, at half the wage so that the elite have growth of their profits.
Capitalism works because people assume that they have a chance of advancing, that the lives of their children will be better. If globalization simply means a gross reduction of wages and transfer of assets to the wealthy, capitalism will lose popular support. How many former IBM employees are going to be praising outsourcing?
Re:Message sent, but will it be received? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Message sent, but will it be received? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is that really true? Record profits?
IBM may be profitable, but IBM is a multinational company that isn't based in Europe. Its officers aren't based in Europe. Why would you expect IBM would have more loyalty to European workers than Indian? And why would Europeans be entitled to those jobs when out-of-work Indians are willing to do the same work for less money?
What exactly is the point of all this - we'll all be back to 6:00 AM to 9:00 PM hours, with no vacation, at half the wage so that the elite have growth of their profits.
I think GM would be a great case study here. The workers managed to wrest lots of concessions from the company, but in doing so set it up for a huge fall when cheaper, higher quality cars showed up in North America. You and I can pass laws so we don't have to compete with Indian and Chinese labor, but IBM will always be competing with other multinationals. They have to contain costs, or they won't be able to compete. This year it might show up as profit, but next year it's the margin they have to lower prices to fend off NEC or Samsung.
Capitalism works because people assume that they have a chance of advancing, that the lives of their children will be better. If globalization simply means a gross reduction of wages and transfer of assets to the wealthy, capitalism will lose popular support. How many former IBM employees are going to be praising outsourcing?
Corporations work because they produce goods and services people are willing to buy. It really doesn't have much to do with how happy the employees are. And it may be that capitalism loses popular support in certain places, but so what? Countries that can't or won't compete will see stagnant growth and high unemployment while the capitalist countries will grow. Did we learn nothing from the travesty that was Communism?
There isn't any reason Europeans can't compete with Indians, despite the wage differentials. European companies have a lot of advantages Indian companies don't have, like proximity to wealthy markets, a better educated workforce (not everybody in India went to IIT), and better infrastructure.
I'd be willing to bet the Europeans could keep their generous vacations and wages, but it's so hard to fire people in Europe it doesn't make sense to hire people. I'll bet it's costing IBM a fortune to lay off 11,000 people. Companies expand and contract with normal business cycles, and forcing them to keep all their employees during contractions means they'll be really reluctant to hire people when times are good. Not only does that reduce the number of available jobs, but it puts companies at a competitive disadvantage.
Re:Message sent, but will it be received? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Message sent, but will it be received? (Score:4, Insightful)
Bullshit. In this dystopia you've described, who do you think these corporations are selling their products to? After all, everyone is out of work except for the Ethiopians, who don't make enough to buy the products.
Hmmm, perhaps your argument is not logical?
Re:Message sent, but will it be received? (Score:5, Insightful)
First - while we have 5 weeks of vacation we do not have statuatory sick leave if a member of the family is sick. US has up to 2 of those. So if you have two kids under 14 in the family and both parents are working the numbers roughly add up to the same - 3 weeks of effective holiday.
Second - You clearly have no idea of Bureaucracy. If the problem was bureaucracy nobody would have invested in China. Or India for that matter.
Third - Unions. India has them too. Expect to hear more about them.
Culture - While I understand your bile I have to disagree with it. The highest productivity in Europe in the high tech industry is in the country that works least per day. Spain. The lowest productivity is in the country that works most - UK. This is actually reasonable if you think about it. If you work with your brain it does not help working yourself out flat and burning it.
The reasons why idiot PHBs are moving high tech jobs to India is that they like the idea of making people work flat and they count work by the hour, not by the product produced. In 2-3 years once the dust has settled it will become evident that there are no savings and whatever is gained in lower labour costs is lost in productivity (see the Culture note above).
There is also the reason why smart PHBs are moving high tech jobs to India. There are fewer and fewer native high tech graduates in Europe (both East and West) and the US. That is not the case in India and China. So if a company wants to establish a long term operation it is reasonable for it to move there.
Re:Message sent, but will it be received? (Score:3, Insightful)
But one thing I've noticed is that Scandinavians in general are averse to working long hours, or go that extra mile to make things happen. Even more importantly, they expect several paid days off and are lacking in a spirit of capitalism that I've noticed in the US.
For instance, bang in the middle of last week, we were told that it
Re:Message sent, but will it be received? (Score:3, Interesting)
"I've noticed that there is a general lethargy, or laid-back attitude while doing business in Europe."
Laid-back attitude is NOT lethargy. I don't live to work, I only work as much as I need to in order to live as comfortably and securely as I need. I don't work to make YOU rich, and I certainly have no loyalty to you (my dear corporatist employer, not you the poster) since you're showing no loyalty to me.
Laid-back attitude is healthy for human beings, you know? Maybe Europeans get fewer u
Re:Message sent, but will it be received? (Score:4, Insightful)
I worked for a European company during the 90s and I spent a lot of time working in Paris and London. I haven't noticed anything like this. The company was a startup, and a typical day for everyone was from 08h00 until around 19h00. Nobody was slacking or demanding 5 weeks vacation.
When you find others who are willing to do the same thing cheaper, and willing to be flexible, you would quite obviously go with them. That is the problem.
You have to be careful what you mean by "the same thing". If it is sitting in the office for more hours, then sure.
However, productivity of a programmer (or any "idea" worker) cannot be measured by the number of hours spent in the office.
For example, whose more productive: programmer A, spends a week from morning to night writing 10,000 lines of code; whereas programmer B slacks on Monday, on Tuesdays realizes that the problem can be solved much nicer using code generation; on Wednesday he completes the generator in Python and is done with the 10,000 lines of code right then and there. Maybe "worked" for solid 8 hours.
Which one would you like to work in your startup?
Re:Message sent, but will it be received? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it's been received loud and clear (Score:5, Insightful)
One of my old bosses had a great expression - "Trees don't grow to the sky." It was in relation to commodity trading, but it's applicable in many areas of life. Growth can not be infinite - it's simply not sustainable. At some point you need to be satisfied that you're running a profitable business, creating valued products.
Causing unemployment in Europe and the U.S. to save a couple sheckles on the front end will ultimately result in less wealth and less growth in the long run. You need someone to buy your products, and as others have already pointed out, the unemployed and minimum wage workers of the world aren't going to be able to do so. All the arm chair "free marketers" need to dig a little deeper with their analysis than parroting "corporations are in business to make money" and thereby whatever they do in that line makes sense - that may be a primary goal, but it certainly doesn't valildate or justify every decision corporations make.
Greed is good only works up to a point - after which you start eating your own young.
Re:Message sent, but will it be received? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Message sent, but will it be received? (Score:3)
IBM is a company that requires a workforce that can be slave driven and work every weekend 24x7. European companies have a history of limiting work hours with tea time and high number of vacation days. It's not fair to U.S and Indian counterparts in the same company, who work just as hard but lack the benefits.
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:4, Insightful)
Just so long as they understand they're going to be selling their services and products at the lowest cost as well.
This whole thing is just the money sloshing around the planet to reach economic equilibrium. Soon enough wages will rise in India and the dollar and Euro will drop, and the pressures will relent somewhat.
I do wonder about the canonical science fiction question. It's already far more productive to have cheap computers do the work rather than expensive humans for a range of services. What happens over the next few hundred years as the collection of services done by computers grows ever-larger?
What good is capitalism for workers when there's absolutely no scarcity of labor? Money is just a measurement of scarcity, after all, and if there's no scarcity in labor, there's no money.
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:3, Informative)
You can do this 1 of 2 ways, either increase revenue or decrease costs.
So the cost saving is *never* passed on to the consumer, it's passed on to the shareholder, via a larger reported profit and an increase in the share price.
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:3, Insightful)
Well fuck shareholders. It's not their livelihood that's at stake. You know, if you're running a small shop and employ local workers, you'll at least have to look them in the face when you fire them. You will realize exactly how your business decisions impact the society you live in. Shareholders don't care, don't know and don't see the results of their wants. They share profits but they do not share responsi
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:3, Insightful)
If I remember correctly, that would be the European monarchies. Corporations came into being for the purpose of colonizing (or eliminating) and exploiting "inferior" cultures. Merchantilism was one of the things the U.S. was fighting during the Revolutionary War, since the British Crown used the joint-stock companies to dump goods on the colonies, along with a bunch of other annoying nastiness.
Basic capitalism is fine f
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:3, Insightful)
Only at the IPO. After that, shareholders play among themselves and generate no investment, no value whatsoever. And as they sell and buy shares (influenced by media and analysts whoe serve their own interests), shareholders make and break companies in ways that are in no way related to the companies' actual viability, financial standing, product quality and so on.
I have only one thing to say about shareholders: fuck the
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:3, Funny)
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:3, Insightful)
Those 16000 jobs still exist, they'll just be held by different people. Presumably those in India need to feed their families as much as those in the EU - seems morally neutral to me.
The problem is that the 16000 workers (wherever) helped build the company to what it is. A "company" used to encompass the workers who built the company as well as the investors and executives. In this brave new world, it seems the "company" only includes the executives and investors, while the workers who built the busine
Re:Ok (Score:3, Insightful)
Capitalism does not have to be like this, and wasn't all like this between the 50s and 70s.
Re:Ok (Score:3, Insightful)
Companies are in business for one thing only: To yield the highest amount of profit to its investors. That is the _only_ thing companies do and should do. People who think companies have a moral duty to anything are misguided.
Hardly. If that were the case, then slavery would be the ultimate corporate goal (although in some corps I imagine that might actually BE the goal).
Companies don't exist in a vacuum and they don't exist independently either. Corporations depend on the infrastructure around them
Re:Message sent, but will it be received? (Score:3, Insightful)
My next notebook isn't going to be IBM anyway
it will be Fujitsu-Siemens.
and if it's not made in Germany it will be something else..!
Yes this is flamebait or what -
make your choice.
oops (Score:3, Funny)
Union (Score:3, Informative)
That's the free market at work. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That's the free market at work. (Score:4, Insightful)
Can you give some tangible examples? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Can you give some tangible examples? (Score:5, Interesting)
The biggest difference I've ever noticed is mostly cultural.
It seems that Americans are more used to questioning and saying things like "are you sure you really want to do it this way??", whereas Indian programmers just seem to do what they're told, regardless of whether it makes sense.
For example, my wife works at a large financial firm as a project manager. They had to stop giving new development to an Indian company they were working with because the work turned out to be barely functional. This was mostly due to the specs not being complete. She said she almost never got questions about the requirements and just received a bad product at the end. This same company was exceptional at porting older applications to newer technologies and they still do that today. They just don't get new work.
Granted, the root cause of the issue was bad requirements, but American designers/developers would have balked at it and questioned it more, resulting in a better product.
(NOTE: Some of this hesitation is probably due to fixed-price negotiations and time limits along with time zone differences and the difficulty of back-and-forth requirements gathering with people in a different part of the world. YMMV)
That's also a symptom of poor pay or poor managemn (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Can you give some tangible examples? (Score:5, Interesting)
That is shit.
And here is an example of what happens if you outsource to there: Lucent spectacular VOIP failure. It was the market leader, it outsourced all of its software development on it to India around 1998 and it was no more in 6 months.
There is also the expensive ones. The ones which cost about as much Europeans and Americans. You once again get what you have bargained for. Worked with some of these and I have been about as happy as with any American or European subcontractor.
You should not really put all of them under the same label
Re:Can you give some tangible examples? (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't believe programmers in India are "worse" than programmers here. It's mostly a difference in communication and coding style.
I know a couple people from different companies that have had to work with contractors in India; sending pieces of a project back-and-forth electronically. The common theme I hear them talk about is the different in coding style and the like. That alone makes it a real p.i.t.a.
However, some have worked with firms that were just horrible (which could have easily happened if they went with a US firm).
One friend's company handed off a project they were working on in-house to a group in India because they were getting swamped with work. The contract stated that they'd own the code and what-not, which was a biggie since this was a project that was going to evolve in the coming years. While the product worked, the actual source was useless to them; they didn't follow the company's IT section's normal routine of documentation and there was a lot of spagetti code.
However, this sounds like an issue with a specific companies/contractors/etc and not with the country. The idea that some IT have that India is "sub-par" comes from stories of the occasional bad firm along with people's experience with the culture/language/algorithm barrier.
Re:Can you give some tangible examples? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:That's the free market at work. (Score:4, Interesting)
Agreed. And, at some point in the future, the cost of doing IT in India will become expensive relative to doing IT in China or Kenya, then the same thing will happen to India that is happening here in the US.
Of course, since India has a population of over 1 billion, I wouldn't hold my breath, waiting for that day....
I'm screwed? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I'm screwed? (Score:4, Informative)
Maybe you need to learn to be culturally literate. "Indian" isn't a language. Likewise, "programming" isn't a major. It's a skill. Computer science is a major. That's like saying "typing" is your major rather than, say, English.
Re:I'm screwed? (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't worry, most of the IBM employees in India speak excellent English. Besides "Indian" isn't a language.
Re:I'm screwed? (Score:3, Funny)
ugh. me wantum job. me needum job.
Re:I'm screwed? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'm screwed? (Score:5, Informative)
The problem ... (Score:5, Insightful)
So, gradually, the corporations will pick random underdeveloped countries and beef them up to a point where the workers are too expensive, then they'll move on - until there are no underdeveloped countries left, just bloated overdeveloped cesspools full of unemployed engineers and white collars.
Re:The problem ... (Score:3, Insightful)
IBM is only doing what makes sense (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably not. For someone like IBM, labour is undoubtedly their biggest cost. If they can get equally good work from Indian programmers for a third of the cost, then I see every reason for them to do that.
Of course it is hard on the staff, but this is only going to happen more and more as time goes on, and increased union activity is only going to encourage large firms to outsource work.
The only way for IT workers in western countries to survive is to gain additional skills which workers in other countries lack.
Off-Shoring (Score:4, Insightful)
[I am not saying anything either way.]
Re:Off-Shoring (Score:3, Insightful)
Why should people worry about the global economy when it's not in their bes
Morality of Offshoring (Score:4, Insightful)
IBM was founded, built, financed, and supported by Western countries, principally the US, UK, Japan, and Germany. The US, especially, protects IBM's intellectual property, provides a secure environment for business, and enormous amounts of government contracts. The great bulk of IBM's customers are in the West.
I honestly believe that IBM - and all of the firms so happily laying off their employees in order to find cheaper labour - are acting in an immoral manner. Outsourcing is destroying lives, destroying economies, for the sole point of increasing corporate profits - profits that go, essentially, to a very small percentage of the population. For goodness sake, having a 401k growing at 4% doesn't really matter that much when you're laid off.
IBM is not trying to help Indian workers - IBM is simply trying to cut it's labor costs. Globalization has accomplished the dream of so many capitalists - labor is now a commodity, and labor is powerless.
The American - and Western European - middle class is evaporating before our eyes. When the middle class jobs are sent overseas, the entire structure of our society is in danger. We'll became lands where the few with massive wealth dominate the increasingly poor masses. Democracy depends on a healthy middle class. Destroying that democracy is indeed immoral.
Re:Morality of Offshoring (Score:3, Interesting)
Partial excerpt:
1. There is no such thing as a "free market."
2. The "middle class" is the creation of government intervention in the marketplace, and won't exist without it (as millions of Americans and Europeans are discovering).
The conservative belief in "free markets" is a bit like the Catholic Church's insistence that the Earth was at the center of the Solar System in
Re:Morality of Offshoring (Score:3, Informative)
IBM is not an entity that can be moral or not. The company's main responsibility is to make money for the shareholders (i.e. the owners).
As long as IBM employees do not break laws, all that matters is the bottom line...
Re:Morality of Offshoring (Score:3, Informative)
No one is protected from that fate, regardless of their position within a company. Carly Fiorina is a prime example of what can happen when the shareholders are unhappy. It doesn't matter if she was trying to do the "right" thing for HP's future. Even
Haha (Score:4, Funny)
Way to straddle the fence at the end there. Did you put that there because you actually have no opinion or were you afraid of the random Slashdot mods?
You probably would have gotten -1 Heartless Capitalist if you'd said that the Indians should have the jobs.
And you probably would have gotten -1 Economics 101 if you'd said the jobs should stay in the US.
I salute your ability to attain a +4 Insightful (as of the time of this writing) without actually saying anything at all.
We're still playing the game the same *old* way (Score:3, Insightful)
It is easy to have lofty principles such as helping the developing world until such time as it actually starts to cost us something.
Outsourcing is a sign. It is a sign that we're not doing the right things in the (more fully) developed world. If a programmer in India can do my job for half the wage and still look good (relative to his cost of living), then I'd better either learn Gujurati, Hindi, or one of the many other tongues and move to compete with him, or else I'd better be thinking
Obligatory South Park Quote (Score:3, Funny)
2) ?
3) Profit!
Its the Chinese Wall Manuever (Score:5, Insightful)
A risk to the security of the US and Europe? (Score:3, Interesting)
How else are they gonna make game console chips? (Score:3, Interesting)
While I don't agree with off-shoring, consider that many of the jobs that get off-shored are jobs that Americans either want too much pay/benefits for, or are jobs that are "below" them due to the scheduled_hours/tasks.
Foreign nationals in developing countries can easily snatch these jobs up for much less pay/benefits and are actually happy/proud to have the job.
It's an Open Source donation to themselves! (Score:3, Funny)
Fake Free Trade (Score:5, Interesting)
Similar arguments apply to illegal aliens from Mexico. Under the aegis of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), illegal aliens flood into the USA and have essentially destroyed the wages in the market for unskilled labor. The normal market forces in the USA are now influenced/destroyed by Mexican government policies that have obliterated the economic opportunities and standard of living in Mexico. Without illegal aliens, the Americans working as unskilled labor would enjoy a sudden and dramatic boost in their wages, enabling them to actually buy medical insurance.
When American politicians tout free trade and claim that the American market remains a free market, they completely ignore the non-free market which is interacting with our free market and which is destroying the normal market forces in a (our) free market. The rub is that no one seems to care.
Free trade advances free markets in only one scenario: (relatively) free markets like the USA interact with other (relatively) free markets like Eastern/Western Europe, Canada, and Japan. To maintain genuine free trade, we should close our markets (including the market for services like labor) to India, China, and their ilk until those nations establish free markets. We lose nothing by championing genuine free trade.
Re:Fake Free Trade (Score:3, Interesting)
Let me enlighten you just a bit: Investigate the total construction materials of commonplace items such as shoes. Specifically, leather. The US requires very exact amount of it, from US markets alone. This, in the persp
Re:Fake Free Trade (Score:4, Insightful)
40 years ago the U.S. was truly free market, and China and India were truly Socialist, and economicly "we" were kicking "their" ass.
What you are seeing now, is China and India becoming how the U.S. used to be, while the U.S. becomes like China and India used to be. 40 years ago, when the United States was the number one industrial producer, when we had the highest paid workers on the planet, and we were the best educated and had the highest standard of living, there was no such thing as outsourcing. Outsourcing is a product of the post-capitalist "welfare" state.
Companies aren't moving to India to get cheaper labor (that is a side benifit). They are going to India because the market is MORE free than in the U.S., the taxes are lower, and the people work harder and are better educated. "We" got fat and lazy, and we want all our cheap consumer goods and government benifits, and 30 hour work weeks, and we forgot that those goods and services we enjoy are actually produced through capital and labor... not lawsuits, advertisment, and government edicts.
The West is no longer producing anything except government. So, we are now spending our accumulated capital for imported consumer goods and government services. This can last for about 10-15 years, then the economies of the U.S., Western Europe, will have spent all their accumulated captial and will colapse.
Union too late... (Score:3, Interesting)
I understand why sometimes the labour and capital components of business have to have an adversarial relationship, but I also know that they need to have a co-operative relationship as well.
It's as if the union had these great ideas for saving IBM money, but kept them quiet until IBM started to cut jobs, and they said, "Wait wait wait...".
In the original black-and-blue article, the union made the point that IBM's "first quarter profit for 2005 was $1.4 billion, and $9 billion for the whole of 2004". Unfortunately, a corporation has a legal imperitive to make as much money as possible for the shareholders. The problem is not IBM, but rather corporations in general.
Some of the more interesting books on the subject are,
Myth of the Good Corporate Citizen [indigo.ca]
The Corporation (the book that the documentary was based on) [indigo.ca]
Confessions Of an Economic Hit Man [indigo.ca]
But Is IBM Reading the Latest Garner Study? (Score:4, Informative)
You Need a PhD in Economics (Score:5, Insightful)
(1) Look for ways to reduce costs
(2) Move jobs overseas to exploit cheap 3rd-world labor
(3) Profit!
but 'Economics 102' adds:
(1) Cheap 3rd-world workers spend new pay on basics like decent food, shelter, and medical care, thus greatly improving their lives, but have nothing left over to purchase still relatively expensive luxury goods and services provided by their American or European employer
(2) Unemployed or now-underemployed former American or European employees now can't afford expensive luxury goods and services provided by former employer, either
(3) Profits evaporate as sales plummet
Henry Ford understood this basic economic principle, and made sure his employees could afford to purchase the Model T's they built.
'Econ 103' goes on to explain how companies that move their labor and infrastructure costs overseas still get to deduct those expenses when it comes time to pay their US taxes, but none of that money stays here to generate income tax, sales tax, and other tax revenue, so government services must shrink. And every dollar moved offshore also costs many, many more dollars lost in other goods and services that lost employees can no longer purchase, resulting in additional jobs and tax revenues lost, etc.
It's never as simple as it first seems.
Re:You Need a PhD in Economics (Score:4, Insightful)
it's not the cheap labour that matters... it's the fact that they have very poor health & safety laws and their environmental protection laws also lack teeth... this means that you can ruthlessly exploit the workforce by having them work in hazardous conditions whilst also leaving a stinking mess behind... when the mess gets to messy, just shift to somewhere else... look at the ship dismantling industry... it's all but vanished in western nations as the ship owners merely send the defunct ships to the beaches of India to be dismantled. They don't have to protect the workers or worry about disposing of any asbestos... cos the laws are non-existent for protecting the workers or the environment.
Big corporations do not care about their workers or the countries they've abandoned... they blackmail western nations into providing massive subsidies in order to keep their plant there or build one there... I mean, look at the current stink over the tax kickbacks that Dell are getting for having a plant in Orlando...
Shortsighted (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I.B.M == ??? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I.B.M == Solutions for a Small Planet. (Score:3, Insightful)
New Hire: "$4 a square foot is why I dragged you out here."
Suit: "Sure, it's $4 a square foot, we're in the middle of nowhere."
New Hire: "We're not in the middle of nowhere. How'd you get here?"
Suit: "Airport."
New Hire: "Yeah, airport, highway, telephone."
Suit: "Internet."
New Hire: "Internet."
Suit: "Genius. $4 a square foot, and $4 an hour. You're fired!"
IBM. Solutions for a small planet. :)
Even the tinies offshore (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:welcome to the real world (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't know what you're talking about (dog)dude - I have a lot of friends in the auto industry, from muffler rats to import auto mechanics, and the entire industry's going into a slump. I recently had a friend quit his day job to do part time work out of his fathers garage because there's a bigger opportunity for income there than there is at an established, corporately owned auto shop!
Add to that the
Not quite so.... (Score:3, Insightful)
But at the same time, those tasks rely on someone using their hands and doing work that they might not otherwise prefer to do.
The "knowledge" fields require exactly that.... detailed and complex knowledge of the area, in order to perform the work satisfactorily.
If I'm an intelligent person with no major physical disabilities, I can fix my own house - even if
Re:Adapt or Die (Score:3, Interesting)
We're approaching the point where the time a skill is economically viable is going to be less than the time it takes to learn it. How will we survive with less than a 50% working-to-education duty cycle?
Re:ASK FOR SOMEONE IN AMERICA! (Score:3, Insightful)