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| Home Front: Politix |
| Workers asked to train foreign replacements |
| 2004-04-06 |
| Technology - USA TODAY Tue Apr 6, 6:51 AM ET By Stephanie Armour, USA TODAY When computer programmer Stephen Gentry learned last year that Boeing was laying him off and shipping his job overseas, he wasn’t too surprised. Many of his friends had suffered the same experience. What really stunned him was his last assignment: Managers had him train the worker from India who’d be taking his job. "It was very callous," says Gentry, 51, of Auburn, Wash., a father of three who is still unemployed. "They asked us to make them feel at home while we trained them to take our jobs." More cost-cutting companies are hiring workers in other countries to do jobs formerly held by U.S. employees. But in a painful twist, some employers are asking the workers they’re laying off to train their foreign replacements - having them dig their own unemployment graves. Almost one in five information technology workers has lost a job or knows someone who lost a job after training a foreign worker, according to a new survey by the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers. The study is the first to quantify how widespread the practice is. Here’s what typically happens: U.S. workers getting pink slips are told they can get another paycheck or beefed-up severance if they’re willing to teach workers from India, China and other countries how to do their jobs. The foreign workers typically arrive for a few weeks or months of training. When they leave, they take U.S. jobs with them. The U.S. employees who trained them are then laid off. There’s limits and this is one of them. I don’t care if I have to eat saltines for a month, ain’t no way I’d hand off all of my training skills so a company that’s outsourcing my job can have a "seamless transition." Companies that expect (or blackmail) this out of their workers need to be blacklisted for stock purchases by Americans. |
| Posted by:Zenster |
| #8 A bite, Super Hose? You'll get applause. I especially like that Nucor does it without a bloodsucking layer of union management. A skilled worker is someone that every honorable company protects from on the job injury and promotes whenever merit is shown. Next item; As a devout capitalist, I consider capitalism to be the only existing socioeconomic system that adequately telescopes in between the individual and society plus vice versa. Free enterprise is a specific principle that makes America great, right down to the possession of unmatched technical superiority. Our open and pluralistic society has justifiably drained the world of its most brilliant minds, be they scientists, engineers or artists. There is no reason we shouldn't continue to do so unless fundamental aspects of our constitution are tampered with. The less restrained trade that we enjoy in the United States is a large reason for our advanced quality of life. As part of that trade model, American companies are entitled to legally transact their business in whatever way makes them the most profit. However much Wall Street unrealistically overemphasizes such profitability versus healthy expansion is another matter entirely. Just as important is how consumers of those products are equally entitled to determine who exactly gets their business. If a company based in the United States maximizes its profit by eliminating American careers, their stock just might be a bad buy for our country's citizens. Financing the economic dismemberment of our nation is one of those niggling issues that takes the gleam off of profitability. I'd like to see multinational companies obliged to publish their proportion of American operating costs versus national profits. No bottom line figures, just percentage numbers reflecting the ratio. I wish it was also on all retail product packaging or price tags. Buying American can be a big help if you support domestic producers of quality. We face a potential loss of skills that could affect the very fabric of our nation. This talent hemorrhage goes right down to the performance of America's military. One very good example is Silicon Valley. Major semiconductor capital equipment manufacturers are beginning to outsource research and development of the very process technology used to fabricate high speed electronics. Preliminary investigation reveals it's a mixed bag regarding who's to blame. Of two dozen widely spread politicians mentioned by OutsourceCongress.com, almost two-thirds are republican. Due to statistical noise, I'll assume a 50/50 split between democrats and republicans. Here's their list for reference: Representative John Mica (R-FL 7th) 6th-term Republican from Florida. Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL) 1st-term Democrat from Florida. Senator Bob Graham (D-FL) 3rd-term Democrat from Florida. Representative Philip Crane (R-IL 8th) 18th-term Republican from Illinois. Representative Jeff Flake (R-AZ 6th) 2nd-term Republican from Arizona. Representative Anna Eshoo (D-CA 14th) 6th-term Democrat from California. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) 2nd-term Democrat from California. Senator John Edwards (D-NC) 1st-term Democrat from North Carolina. Representative Joseph Crowley (D-NY 7th) 3rd-term Democrat from New York. Representative Steven LaTourette (R-OH 14th) 5th-term Republican from Ohio. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) 3rd-term Democrat from California. Representative Mark Kirk (R-IL 10th) 2nd-term Republican from Illinois. Representative Judy Biggert (R-IL 13th) 3rd-term Republican from Illinois. Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) 2nd-term Democrat from Illinois. Senator Peter Fitzgerald (R-IL) 1st-term Republican from Illinois. Senator Peter Fitzgerald (R-IL) 1st-term Republican from Illinois. Representative J. Dennis Hastert (R-IL 14th) 9th-term Republican from Illinois. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) 3rd-term Republican from Texas. Representative Joseph Knollenberg (R-MI 9th) 6th-term Republican from Michigan. Representative J.D. Hayworth (R-AZ 5th) 5th-term Republican from Arizona. Representative Heather Wilson (R-NM 1st) 4th-term Republican from New Mexico. Senator Larry Craig (R-ID) 3rd-term Republican from Idaho. Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID) 1st-term Republican from Idaho. Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) 5th-term Republican from Utah. Representative Bob Sump (R) 4-th term Republican from the 7th District Washington Representative Cliff Stearns (R-FL 6th) 8th-term Republican from Florida. Representative Jay Inslee (D-WA 1st) 4th-term Democrat from Washington. Frank Gaffney paints a very different picture of this from his conservative take. Assigning blame in this matter is difficult due to the fact that job exportation has been going on for decades. I've been unsuccessful at locating links about the early OAS (Organization of American States) legislation that financially encouraged US firms to relocate jobs within the Western Hemisphere. Mexico, Puerto Rico, Central and South America were all original destinations for this industrial displacement. If someone has factual information on this, I'd appreciate it. Here's a short list of high technology job exporters: Adobe Systems Agilent Technologies AMD Amazon.com Analog Devices Applied Materials Asyst Technologies Bank of America Cisco Systems Cypress Semiconductor Hewlett-Packard IBM Intel JDS Uniphase Juniper Networks KLA-Tencor Levi Strauss Lockheed Martin Lucent National Semiconductor Raytheon Silicon Graphics Sun Microsystems Vishay Xerox Yahoo! That's almost thirty of the biggest names in semiconductor R&D, Internet LAN/WAN network development, optics and online commerce. They represent the blue chip financial index of Silicon Valley. There aren't going to be much better jobs than the ones they have coming down the pipeline for quite some time. These are the big jobs of the 21st century and expertise in them is also mission critic for our military. A spectacular example of this is found in the semiconductor industry. Operating a silicon wafer processing line (called a fab - as in "fabrication line"), involves some of the most exacting scientific skills and practices. They can be acquired nowhere else but in a commercial R&D or production fab environment. Few major universities maintain anything but minor solid state device production facilities for the assembly of sensors and detectors. Due to intensive automation, the front end workload of IC design has decreased immensely. Photographically accurate artwork of each circuit's individual layers is no longer composed by hand. Instead, the often repetitive graphic design files are downloaded directly to photo-imaging systems used for patterning the silicon. This simplified development cycle has unhitched the design and fabrication phases of integrated circuit manufacturing for the very first time. A new breed of animal is on the horizon. Known as a "fabless" circuit house, they sell ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) to private clients. Fabless houses produce the automated design work and submit it on a production contract basis to independent silicon foundries. A foundry has the real processing skills needed to fabricate silicon based circuitry. The knowledge gap separating simple design and actual multilayer wafer processing is profound. It is the difference between folding paper airplanes and building an A-10 Warthog. There is talk that even the largest wafer processing houses (Intel, AMD, IBM) outsourcing some production overseas and moving to a predominantly fabless operation. This is one prime example of industrial suicide. It is on a par with abandoning the construction of high performance military aircraft. America cannot afford to lose these "core competency" job skills. We must retain them, and retain them in large numbers. Politicians blather on about making "the transition to new jobs." There remains one haunting question; WHAT NEW JOBS? This is the biggest question of all. There are few other well paid "new jobs" than those in high technology. If America wants to avoid becoming a land of burger flippers and tour guides we had better drop partisan differences like a live grenade and stop this outflow of technology jobs. Our country's health depends upon us "building things." We cannot survive as a nation of paper pushers and ski lift operators. There is a certain amount of basic industrial activity that cannot be lost. To do so will threaten our ability to respond in time of war. It also can sap any responsiveness to economic cycles, especially recovery from recession. It takes 30 minutes to fire someone and three years to train them. If we close down a sufficient number industrial sites, we will lose the ability to transmit this sort of on-the-job training that manufacturing requires of its workers. What sort of job do you want in the future? How we address the outflow of good paying technical careers in the next few years will radically affect national competitiveness and the character of our domestic job market for decades to come. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2004-04-07 5:36:11 PM |
| #7 .com I do. |
| Posted by: B 2004-04-07 10:29:34 AM |
| #6 Cyprus mining tried the same thing with my couisn,he straight-up told them to get f%^ked. |
| Posted by: Raptor 2004-04-07 10:24:23 AM |
| #5 my roommate had to train some guy in india so the guy could take his job, turns out my roommate can be a really bad teacher when he feels like |
| Posted by: Dcreeper 2004-04-07 12:30:23 AM |
| #4 My old employer Nucor Steel did a good deed in keeping jobs in the US. All they did was locate mini-mills in rural areas where people have maintained a standard of work ethic. Oh and they don't run any union shops. I think they’re the largest steel producer in the states and were buddies with Clinton because they owned a bunch of mills in Arkansas. .com, think I'll get a bite? |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2004-04-06 11:00:03 PM |
| #3 Anyone else smell it? |
| Posted by: .com 2004-04-06 10:51:30 PM |
| #2 Time to bring back the "Made in USA" label. Easy solution to a hard problem. Patriotism wins. |
| Posted by: NonnyNonnerNoonerNee 2004-04-06 10:49:37 PM |
| #1 What world have you been living in? This is about as unusual and new as, well, a pink slip. I had to help some Indian programmers come up to speed on a piece of software I worked on; I rotated off that project and my employer -- sinking quickly anyway, BTW -- laid me off the next week. I picked myself up, had a new job in less than two months. It's not fun, but, hell, it's part of the job. |
| Posted by: Robert Crawford 2004-04-06 9:25:52 PM |