IBM gearing up to lay off over 100000 American employees?
By Darren Murph 
posted May 5th 2007 12:02AM
posted May 5th 2007 12:02AM
We'll admit, even we're a bit frightened that immensely intelligent humanoid bots may one day oust us from these seats, but according to whispers going around at IBM's HQ, something just as momentous could be going down as early as this year. Shortly after Lenovo told 1,400 of its US-based employees to politely hop off the payroll, IBM's LEAN plan could call for over 100,000 American workers to be canned in favor of (surprise, surprise) hiring overseas. Already, the firm has laid off 1,300 employees in 2007, but according to a recent report, an ongoing "planning meeting" for how to handle the company's Global Services could eventually axe "up to 150,000 US jobs" while hiring cheaper labor in China and India. Interestingly, this news could actually be sweet music to Wall Street, at least in the short term, but we can't imagine how this logistical nightmare will ever bode well for Big Blue's future.
That's a lot of workers... Say it isn't so.
this is what's going to happen when you sell your company to the Chinese.
Why don't they just fire everyone? Since laying off workers increases profits, the it follows that if you got rid of everyone not in executive management in the company (like the telephone sanitizers and other non-critical workers) then the company would theoretically have almost infinite profitability.
this rumor was proven false on digg.
apparently theres only 110,000 IBM employees in the US; how are they going to let go almost their entire workforce?
It makes sense to me. Guy X wants to do it for less, you give the work to him, your profits are up, everyone wins (except for Guy Y, who should learn to be more competitive). Hire people competitively, no matter what country they live in. Money!!
Wow, you really have swallowed that whole crap about capitalism being the savior of humanity. You unrestrained capitalists only see money not the nation or it's people. Why are you defending an entitity that would have no problem putting you and your family on the streets to save a few bucks? More competitive? Your ancestors fought for hundreds of years fighting for worker's rights and decent pay that is why we have such a standard of living. But nowadays companies, mostly because of globalization and loyalty only to profits, can circumvent this and hire peoples who would work for close to nothing. The only way to be 'competetive' is to demand severly less compensation or in other words go back to the working conditions of the 19th century. How is this benificial to the nation, or the world, in the long-run? But someone such as yourself with such a limited understanding of the issue and being a unthinking cheerleader of unrestrictive capitalism will never see this... that is until it is your job's turn to be shipped overseas...
The problem is when everyone in the biggest consumer nation in the world becomes too poor to buy the products anymore, after everyone gets laid off. So yeah, the stock goes up as earning reports increase, but then you've got 100,000 people out of work who wont be buying any IBM products anytime soon.
It is the responsibility of a business in this country to employ workers in this country, and not only that, it's generally in their best interests. Its frightening how this trend is ever increasing in this nation, and it's a problem that needs to be solved. If you want to operate a business in this country and you want to sell your product here, then you need to focus at least a good deal of your labor here. If we held these companies to a decision, either operate your business here and employ a decent number of American workers, or your products will be banned from the country, how many of these layoff stories would we be hearing about?
I'm sure this will have a pretty big impact on the economy, at least locally.
But as a ThinkPad fan, I'm also worried about the quality of the brand going down the toilet.
Rod,
The brand got flushed the nanosecond they sold it to Lenovo . Have you see the current models. If not go look...http://shop.lenovo.com/us/notebooks/ they turned on of the best, debatable of course, laptops in the industry into a bloated piece of shit. Everyone who let that deal go through at IBM should be taken out back, placed on their knees, blindfolded, and shot. The ThinkPad line is dead to me. I will hold my T41 tightly as I remember the glory days of the Thinkpad before Lenovo squat over it and took a nice big shat.
>apparently theres only 110,000 IBM employees in the US; how are they going to let go almost their entire workforce?
hmmm, by moving to company to China? YOu do know that IBM is owned by the Chinese right?
Indeed, it's not really possible for them to let go of that many people considering they'd have to hire that many very quickly due to it being almost their entire US work force.
I'm getting sick and tired of all these businesses abandoning us for their own greed, it's ironic so many left my city and only the Asian-owned stayed, if our military base had closed we'd be a ghost town. Thank God for protesting, am I right?
@2
actually i think Lenovo only bought the IBM thinkpad division.. IBM itself is not owned by Lenovo.
anyone can confirm this?
"actually i think Lenovo only bought the IBM thinkpad division.. IBM itself is not owned by Lenovo."
Actually, they bought the entire IBM PC division, which also includes the ThinkCentre line. Although obviously the ThinkPad brand was the most valuable asset in the PC division.
The company may profit in the short term, but in the end, outsourcing hurts everyone. When workers are laid off they can no longer buy things. Telling people to get more education and go out and find a better paying job is short-sighted. Not everyone is cut out to be a high-paid corporate executive, government official, or rocket scientist. This Jib-Jab video pretty tells it all regarding outsourcing and bringing in cheap goods from overseas:
http://www.jibjab.com/originals/originals/jibjab/movieid/122
Alex: Yes. IBM sold its PC division to Lenovo. IBM is a huge company, and the PC division was only a part of that and unprofitable to boot. IBM didn't actually sell "IBM" to Lenovo - just the Thinkpad and Thinkcentre brands.
Should be apparent to anyone able to use Google.
Sounds like FUD to me. I don't believe IBM will be laying off 100,000 workers - that's way too much. IBM is certainly smart enough to not fire everybody in hopes of hiring an equal number of Indians - most of what IBM does these days is consulting and services and most of those jobs can't be outsourced to anywhere. Maybe they'll move internal stuff like accounting to low cost countries.
Sorry, but that article is dead-on accurate with the exception of the actual number to be laid off. The YE07 figure will be closer to the 20,000-25,000 range.
It's impossible for U.S. workers to be competitive for jobs in a global workforce. According to the U.S. Census, in 2005, the median U.S. household in come was (US)$46.326 (per year). 98.2% of the world population earns less than $46326.0 per year. Goodbye jobs, America!
It's always amazing how many knee-jerk postings go up after sensationalist news like this.
When the actual news is cleared up, it would be no surprise, however, to find out that it goes something like, "Including retirements, IBM will be letting go of close to 100k people over the course of the next 10 years."
Still sound like a lot? Anyone that has ever worked for Intel knows that they regularly weed out under-performers as a matter of course. Doesn't mean those guys necessarily suck. Just means the bar is set high. Then if there is need to fill in the gap, they hire more.
Hello,
Wow is Lou Dobbs ever going to be steaming mad when he hears this!
His head might implode or something...
JA
http://www.supplychainnetwork.com/
As a research and consulting company, there's no need for employees that don't know how to think or do menial tasks when you can pay someone else a fifth of the wage...I highly doubt they're letting go of really useful people in R&D, and if they do, well that's a shame.
The Americans among us that have no creativity and have no skills are the ones that tend to go first. It's just a matter of what's good for business.
There should be a line on the bottom of Huffy bikes at walmart that says "Invented in America (now made in China)".
Laying off 100,000 employees is never a good thing...time to dump that tech and real estate stock. Who is going to buy all the crap if we loose our jobs?
As the world gets smaller, international trade of all kinds increases. This includes the trading of labor for wages. It is oceans and transportation costs that created divisions of wealth along national boundaries, not manifest destiny. In fact, one of the very things that *did* help to create great wealth in America was the preservation of relatively free trade. What we see now is only the same act on a larger stage. Levels of wealth around the planet will converge. It is bad for us, but very good for a lot of other people. Save a good portion of your wages, plan for the future, and consider that your wealth is in your loved ones, your health, your security and your freedom. Because it will not forever be in your international buying power. There are not, really, any mysteries in this process, nor are there any ways out of it.
What in the hell does IBM even make these days?
Services.
And shitty software. Lotus Notes. Much potential. Shitty implementation. I say this as someone who admins Lotus Notes. The only saving grace of the damn thing is that it saved our ass from the bagillion viruses that plagued Lookout over the years.
Err... how about some of the fastest blade servers/bladecenters on the market (HS20's/HS25's) 2 years before Dell, Gateway or HP could even try to compete. Fiber Backplanes etc..
Well said Tiffany! I was asking myself the same thing.
LOL.
How bout the chips in the PS3, XBOX, and Wii, not to mention a ton of mainframe servers. Anyone in the know will agree that the AS/400, RS/6000, and zSeries line of machines are workhorses.
IT IS A QUESTION OF LEADERSHIP and the leadership in this country stinks like four day old fish right now. And no just because of corruption, cronyism and the war either but a culture that favors big business, greed and short term profits. Case in point - Why would I give a company massive tax breaks as a reward for outsourcing jobs? Shouldn't it be the other way around? Now I'm no economist but it seems to me like simple math (1 worker in India = 15k US, 1 US work = 25k -6k in tax breaks and other incentives = 19k). That American worker at 4k difference sure looks better don't they. The 4k becomes negligible since you have employment and taxes on those wages and you've hired and American who is able to buy goods and service. Doesn't all of this help to drive the economy long term?
So please spare me the crap about "training the American worker for high tech jobs" as education funding is cut. Oh, and the Indians and Chinese aren't exactly picking lettuce in California so don't try and feed us the other BS line of "they do jobs that Americans wont do". They are doing the high tech jobs. Yea people, keep voting for the party of fake Patriots that rewards corporate greed at the expense of hard working Americans. MAN, HOW DID YOU LET THE FOOL YOU INTO THINKING THEY GAVE A RATZ AZZ ABOUT YOU THE AMERICAN WORKER? THEY DON'T LOVE YOU HO's!!
Notes is great product to use, is, in fact, as Outlook. If they weren't good products then they wouldn't be dominating the market the way they do. Anyone can always write something better but they haven't, because if they had, that's what everyone would be using, just as IE eventually toppled Netscape when it became better than Netscape, just as Google became the standard for search engines even though it started later.
Actually this is not fud and the numbers may actually be valid. Let me first say that I know what I know because my mother works as a subcontractor for IBM and she was one of the few kept by the first wave of let-gos which occured earlier this week.
So about the number...IBM may not have that many actual employees but if you count all the subcontractors they use, the numbers may add up. I know the majority of the people let go earlier this week were subcontractors (and there were a lot of them).
Everyone seems to be forgetting that the US market is dwarfed by the emerging middle class in China and India. These large corporations are drooling at the prospect of tapping into these large markets and could really care less if the US market is not that big and who they hurt with all of this outsourcing. As long as the share holders get their profits they don't care where the market is just as long as someone is buying their services and products. I don't see any of these companies halting or even slowing down the out sourcing; there is just too much money for the greedy bas**** to make by sending our jobs over seas.
Our ancestors fought long and hard for FREEDOM and EQUALITY! Let me put it this way, you are a hater of capitalism yet living standards constantly increase under the capitalist system. Europe has a socialist system whereby money is taken from the rich and given to the poor. The government acts as a robin hood in the name of equality and attempts to redistribute wealth according to what the government sees fit and not the market. And then what other systems do we have in place...hmm. Communism? You probably are one to promote that but if you want to maintain a living standard that the U.S. enjoys you probably wouldn't want that, assuming you're a sane individual. Anything else? No and YOU HAVE NO ALTERNATIVES! Why is it that people who promote socialist ideals claim justice and fairness of the working class while taking rights away from the business that do all the work and hire all the people? This is AMERICA where everyone should have the right to do what they please as long as the rights of others are not trampled upon. You act as if big business obtains its revenue through force and extortion. You're kind of thinking is not suited to the realities of today and so people with your thinking get held back and expect someone else, like the gov't, to protect you individually and provide for you. Well, guess what: the government that provides everything can take away everything. Government's job is to protect the system. Gov't is run by humans, not a god so it doesn't answer individual prayers. Gov'ts that have attempted to do so are call Soviets and North Koreans. Personally, I've been laid off from two jobs in my short time on this planet that went overseas but I don't whine and complain about my lot in life. Hell, even manufacturing jobs are starting to go from China to India! Should China then try to protect its workers by putting a stranglehold on its economy? When big government interferes and starts to meddle into the affairs of anyone, including businesses of all sizes, then that's when civil liberties are being trampled upon regardless of size in terms of employees or revenue. Fighting for workers rights is one thing, fighting to tell people how they should run their business is another. And I'll bet you have no empirical evidence that shows living conditions in the United States is declining because it's NOT! The economy keeps growing because the capitalist system makes sure that resources are not wasted and allocated to its most efficient use. We in America have the right to do whatever and if that means we all have a shot at even being another Google things are great here. The societies most free are the most SUCCESSFUL. And I have every empirical evidence that shows that. It is no accident that China grows when the gov't releases its hold on its people. What incentive does gov't have to make sure spending is not wasted? Are you kidding me! Gov't has no incentive WHATSOEVER in making sure spending is allocated appropriately. How could they??? They are literally gang-raping everyone from the working class man to big business. You work and the government takes money from you. And when business move over to other countries for lower tax rates it's because they're protecting what BELONGS to THEM. Who are you to say how businesses should be run? And if they lay people off then so what?? Americans are creatively smart and are tough people who can weather a storm like this "economic restructuring". I may have lost my job a few times but I sure as hell will not be loosing my freedoms.
Let's see...
a company named International Business Machines is repositioning it's work force to be more global.
I'm supposed to be shocked becaaaause...
I wrote a paper 10 years ago about how the American Stock Market and the voting shareholders would destroy America. Yeh, for me that I was right...Unfortunately, this is now the beginning of the. end for millions and millions of American jobs and the middle class as we know it. If my theories are right hundreds of stock brokers will be slaughtered as a huge backlash from the American population realizes there is no difference between greed and capitalism.
I believe alot of companies still think that downsizing is a great way to improve profitability. In this case the downsizing is done in favor of replacing workers with cheaper labor overseas. The problem is that these companies are neither effective nor efficient and use downsizing or outsourcing as an excuse to eliminate jobs. Becoming more effective and efficient is the solution so you don't have to downsize. You would think that CEOs and CFOs who make millions of dollars would want to save jobs but it seems like they take the easy way out every time.
jake
http://www.layoffspace.com
Americans made the choice to skate through school, avoid the merest hint of math or science and spend much of their day surfing while on the job. US industry has been warning about this for over 20 years, now watch what happens when you have no technically competent people in today's world.
Read the quality of the writing on these comment pages and ask yourself how many you would hire. And this is a somewhat technical forum.
It may be cheaper in the short term, that is until they start demanding more money over there.. then what will they do?
Jake, interesting but flies in the face of reality.
IBM already has 65% of its 400K employee workforce outside the US; I doubt that this is simply an "excuse" for anything, but instead simply a function of the realities of a new, truely global, marketplace
Saying that they just need to become more efficient is also disingenuous. First off this is, inherently, a first step in becoming more efficient; second, when other companies / industries take steps to become more efficient they get pushback from organizations like the SEIU that are more interested in retaining jobs than ensuring long-term competiveness.
Wake up, it's a new world. The only person responsible for you is you.
"apparently theres only 110,000 IBM employees in the US; how are they going to let go almost their entire workforce?"
It's called India and China. They're smarter and cheaper than you.
Next question?
It's not just the cost of employees' salaries that IBM is seeking to reduce, it's also their tax burden. Support the FairTax, if you're tired of American jobs going overseas. www.fairtax.org
With first hand knowledge of IBM's Global Services division and its use of Indian programmers, they are not smarter than Americans. They continually need hand holding by American IBM workers to get the job done. People from 3rd world economies have no capacity to know how "services" in 1st world countries are suppose to work. Sure they can be taught how to program, but that doesn't mean they can efficiently apply that knowledge to systems that ends up being used in businesses around the world. Also, as far as cost goes, when you break down the numbers, they are only marginally cheaper than American programmers. The biggest problem is retention in India. You end up spending alot of resources (= money) to recruit, train, and support an Indian programmer just to have them leave a couple of months later because another company is offering $1 more an hour.
I concur completely. Depending on the timing my my mom sometimes has to hand tickets off to the indians (or receives tickets from them). When this happens she's always guaranteed to have more work to do because they almost never do anything right. Plus she has to work harder to figure just what the hell they did/didn't do so she can take the next step.
From what I understand there have been some services groups that were switched over to LEAN earlier this year (late last year?). Essentially the idea is to drop remote/telecommuting and centralize such that every body works out of one of five(?) locations throughout the US. Obviously, along with this, they plan on dropping a tremendous number of the services workforce. My mom talked to a lady who's group was one of the early ones to go LEAN...and she said that, as a result, they've actually had to hire more people to support their existing clients than they originally had when decentralized.
Suffice to say, my mom's had a hell of a week wondering if she was going to get axed, but she's too smart and she works too hard while not giving herself enough credit (she's one of those go-the-extra-mile people). Unfortunately for her, before the others on her project got laid off for LEAN, IBM had already come down with a decree of "no overtime" so she was already getting f'd on her workload. Now that she's having to carry the load for several other related positions on the same projects that got axed, now she's super f'd.
Anyone looking for a top-notch backup/sys admin with 20 years of experience and a drive to do things right the first time, ever time? :)
Sure they can be taught how to program, but that doesn't mean they can efficiently apply that knowledge to systems that ends up being used in businesses around the world
--
So? The Programmers aren't the decision makers, they're the worker bees. They are the ones being outsourced. Not news.
And to a previous comment, are you going to wait 50 years for the wages in China to reach North American levels. What then? By then the Chinese and Indians will be outsourcing to South East Asia for cheaper labor (happening already, in pockets)
How does that help the US?
For the record, I've had plenty of ¢rap handed down by AMERICAN two-bit "programmers"(they're not as rare as many here tend to imagine).
My company makes VLSI designs, and we've outsourced some of our designing and development to this company Wipro in India. More often than ones, the guys there have solved problems for us that we've found extremely challenging.
Of course ¢rappy two-bits are also there in India. One tends to get what one pays for, over there too. If people think that this is a myth that Indian technicians are bad, well, I can only suggest them that they take a reality pill. Indian companies are evermore being sought after, and we all better wake up to this. For starters, we can begin with the cleaning up of our school system.
""Americans made the choice to skate through school, avoid the merest hint of math or science and spend much of their day surfing while on the job. US industry has been warning about this for over 20 years, now watch what happens when you have no technically competent people in today's world.
Read the quality of the writing on these comment pages and ask yourself how many you would hire. And this is a somewhat technical forum.""
Is this what they teach you in Anti-Americanism 101? I've worked with services people all over the world and the services provided by motivated (well paid) American programmers and support technicians is the best in the world. I repeatedly have to correct simple mistake made by Indian engineers, and as others have pointed out, they simply don't understand the way business works in the US or Europe and have no sense of urgency when working on a problem for a Fortune 5000 business. I am regularly spammed by IMs from them asking me how to do their job. Why should I help them when they are trying to learn enough to replace me.
I will gladly take anyone from the US with a CS or MIS degree over their Indian counterparts when it comes to doing technical work.
I hate supporting other people's code for just this reason. The consulting world is full of hack developers who's only job is to extend billable hours all the while creating steaming craploads of un-maintainable non-configurable code. There's a website called www.thedailywtf.com (think it's changed its name now) that has a post a day about some new WTF someone has experienced in development/architecture. It can get a bit java fan-boi-ish sometimes, but it's still usually an amusing read.
On the other hand, I've also dealt first hand with code coming out of India. It's not usually very good. It takes a very strong bi-lingual project manager on the client side to make things work.
Where do you guys get this kind of crap...?IBM is not laying off 100k people. It simply doesn't make sense given their current business model. Also, for the person saying that US salaries are too high, this may be superficially true, but unless the statistics have changed, the American worker remains among the most productive in the world...
I agree that we are focusing less on science and technology, but I think this is to a large portion due to a decline in traditional American values of hard work etc.. More kids these days want to bairly get out of high school and then try and sell a rap record to someone.
The Chinese have the capital. Looks like they are calling the shots now, without firing a single shot.
Not suprising though, when you think that most of u.s. nuclear technology and production is now owned by mitsubishi of Japan.
"Not suprising though, when you think that most of u.s. nuclear technology and production is now owned by mitsubishi of Japan."
Of course that's utterly false, but people will no doubt believe it.
*Sigh*
Why not just give the jobs to christian mexicans instead of communist chinese and vietnamese? It would keep from supporting an undemocratic totalitarian society and help fix our immigration problems.
Simple fact people: you can't legislate quality of life if you share anything like a free-trade economy with parts of the world that lie outside your sphere of legislative influence.
One of the reasons that employees are so expensive in the US is that companies are required to give them all kinds of benefits. People thought they were helping workers by passing such laws. Instead they were just destroying jobs. You cannot create wealth by fiat. We've made it illegal for cheap labor to exist in this country, but we haven't destroyed the demand for it and we can't control supply from other countries. So now instead of being home to the cheap labor, someone else will. Instead of those cheap laborers spending their money in our country, on products made by others like them in our country, they'll be spending it in another country. The world economy is only leaving us behind because we want no part of it.
I am sick and tired of being told that foreign workers are better educated and/or smarter than Americans. That is simply not true. In fact my experience has been the opposite. I have often found off-shore resources to be less knowledgeable than Americans with comparable resumes. I also find them especially lacking in areas of initiative and creative problem solving.
I work in GBS and we have what is known as an "Off-Shore Complexity Factor". This is attributed to the lessor ability of our Asian counterparts and the logistics in dealing with the time change. This factor is well known amongst the rank and file, yet IBM's management will not admit that such a factor exists.
In the end, it really doesn't matter who is smarter. Business is about low costs, and just because the Asians may not be as high quality as the Americans that they are replacing, they are in the eyes of management good enough. Unfortunately, it is not the cost of people that has run up the cost on the engagements that I have been on, rather it has been management's inability to get things done. That will not change with lower billing rates.
may be we can hire these cheep labor people from abroad and have them run our goverment bet they wouldn't subcontract their jobs out. why is our goverment letting this happen may be its because of all the( KICK BACKS FROM ABROAD AND IN HOUSE)
its time we take back our country and get ride of the losers STAND UP FOR YOUR JOBS AND BE HEARD NOW!!!
Wake up American workers --- US companies are banging on the doors of Congress to increase the number of H-1B Non Immigrant Temporary Workers entering the USA to take jobs from skilled, educated Americans. The leaders for this outrage include: Senator Edward Kennedy (D.); Senator John McCain (R); Congressman Flake (R) Arizona; etc. These elected officials have stated that Americans are under-educated and under-skilled. Amazing hostility against the very people who pay their salaries, isn't it?
Consider that prior to being laid off from the American jobs, created by American workers, that these American professionals are often forced to train the less skilled, less educated, and zero experienced alien coming in on the H-1B visa program. (Which by the way, the Government Accounting Office has reported to Congress for more than 15 years is corrupt and should be repealed because of the fraud that cannot be stopped. Applicants (ie the alien who holds the H-1B visa) lie about their education level, skill level, job experiences, and even the location in the US that they will be going to -- all found in several of the reports by GAO).
For more information on the upcoming Skil Bill (and about 4 others waiting for Congressional votes) to increase the H-1B visa numbers -- go to:
htt://www.jobdestruction.com
It is a web site by Rob Sanchez -- an unemployed American engineer who seeks to inform his fellow countrymen of why there are no careers and rarely jobs for American professionals.
Will IBM lay off 100,000 US workers? Who knows. What is disturbing is that a lot of folks after having seen massive job destruction in the USA aren't finding it irrational or impossible to think that an American company would abandon American for a Third World Nation.
What puzzles me is why aren't US elected officials seeking ways to reward loyal American corporations -- ie those that keep their operations in the USA, those that hire American professionals for career positions, etc
ann and scaremongers like you, as well as all these sad, sad (but undoubtedly high quality) engineers that are unemployed: please move the f_ck out of wherever you effing are and go to where there is LOADS of JOBS and NO people able to fill them. for example silicon valley.
i have interviewed loads of engineers for well paying positions and guess what? there's a parade of freaks, clowns, paranoids, completely uninterested people coming in the door. took months to find someone usable. this is in - write this down - SILICON VALLEY - ya know, south of San Francisco, north of San Jose, CA.
no wonder companies there want to hire more H1Bs. also know that H1Bs are a huge pain in the @ss to hire (legalese, lawyers, $$$) compared to americans an on top of that have to be paid AT LEAST median wage in the area even if they are fresh college graduates who never worked an honest job in their life. therefore no employer in their right mind would hire an H1B over an american. it would be stupid. so please get over your paranoia. and move out of Idaho or wherever the heck you are, for the sake of all our sanity, OK??
Nikster -- it is amazing that you would be able to interview anyone at all with the kind of abusive and crude language that you have posted.
The governor of several states swore that they would find high tech jobs for their state citizens. So they went off to Silicon Valley thinking they could bring back to their states some of the rumored high tech jobs that were going unfilled. Funny thing is that they all returned to their respective states -- hats in hand -- without any jobs from California. Seems that there are no jobs that are begging to be filled in Silicon Valley. Silcon Valley is the once great location of dot.com jobs where companies produced mythical work products.
Unfortunately, folks don't bother to educate themselves about the corruption within the H-1B Non Immigrant Temporary Worker Visa program and spout off with absurd and abusive comments like Nikster has done.
The FACTS -- put in professional and polite terms:
1) There is no shortage of highly educated American professionals;
2) Fact there has never been a shortage of high tech American workers (these rumors of a pending crisis have been around sinc 1953 which was a scare of a shortage of engineers, then scientists in general, and then in the 1990s it was "computer professionals / high tech workers") but any well informed American professional knows these basic facts;
3) The US produces per year enough American citizen college graduates to fill every new high tech job created in America -- couple that with the number of laid off American professionals that means that there are more American professionals available every year than there job openings;
4)According to the most objective federal investigative agency, General Accounting Office, the H-1B Non Immigrant Temporary Worker visa is so corrupted that it cannot be fixed. This corruption -- coming directly from the GAO reports over more than 15 years of reporting -- include: the alien reporting false educational histories; false work histories; false work location statements. It includes US employers grossly under-paying the alien worker rather than paying the prevailing wages to the alien. It includes having the alien pay the fees for all filings.
5) And, there have been several federal prosecutions of fraud regarding the H-1B visa program of aliens knowingly falsifying H-1B applications for other aliens to obtain H-1B visas in a paid criminal scheme in several states.
6) American high tech workers have been forced to train their H-1B visa holder replacements by large employers in the USA. If the American employee does not do so -- the company will not give the American worker (skilled, experienced and in the job) the severance package. This means that the alien taking the job from the American worker is clearly unfit for the job since the Americans have to train the alien to do the work held for years by the qualified American who not only can do the job but can also teach others to do their job.;
6) Nikster needs to listen to CSPAN and hear Congressional testimony of American workers who have testified under oath how they have have been abused by US employers who have replaced them with cheap, less skilled, less educated aliens who hold an H-1B Non Immigrant Temporary Worker visa. (Anyone who isn't aware of this testimony and has expressed an alleged knowledge of the H-1B visa program as Nikster has -- has been living under a rock for the past decade!);
6) The engineers, scientists, computer professionals that I know are professional, respectful, highly qualified, Americans. (I don't know if Nikster has actually been in an the capacity of interviewing high tech professionals but if he is and all he found are "clowns" to interview ...maybe Nikster should look in the mirror. He clearly appears to have interviewing techniques problems and some personality issues that would impede anyone seriously working for a company that would employ him. Clearly, the posting here was rude, offensive, and had crude language. A little hard for an American professional to take such an interiviewer seriously nor would any sane American want to work for a company whose interviewer is as unpleasant a first encounter as you seem to be. Maybe its time you took a Dale Carnegie course or two, Nikster).
By the way -- Idaho is a lovely state as is Washington, Arizona, Minnesota, Florida, Nebraska, Texas.
You know, Nister, if you really are in the higing business of high tech professionals -- it's no wonder you have problems getting high tech professionals to work for your employer. Maybe these companies should start looking at what goes on in the hiring interviews if they have such hostile folks such as yourself who hate "Idaho", claim that Americans are "clowns', etc.
This would have been an excellent opportunity for a professional interviewer to have taken the opportunity to post that the company that they worked for had a dire shortage of high tech workers. It would have been an excellent opportunity for a resourceful interviewer to have expressed a great interest in American professionals to connect with their company for employment. Any interviewer in short supply of workers should take every opportunity to avail themselves of finding workers be those workers are living in Silicon Valley (the home of the dot.com BUST); San Diego; Boise, Idaho; Washington State; Texas; Denver, Colorado; etc. Who in their right mind would want to work for a company where the interviewer is as unpleasant and rude as Nikster has been in his posting? Geez!
If you really have access to jobs that need to be filled, Nikster --how about posting those specific jobs, salaries, and locations where Americans from across the country can apply for them? If not, I assume you posted without having a single job that needs filling and you just wanted to be an unpleasant poster.
THE full link to the web site for Job Destruction by Rob Sanchez is:
http://www.jobdestruction.com
(The "p" in http was dropped in the original posting by Ann)
By the way -- if you too are disgusted with getting off shored call centers to your American home (call jobs once held by Americans!) and you can't get these off shored script readers to stop calling you to buy services / merchandize from once former American companies. I found a solution that worked in my home.
First, these off shored centers have been pushed as a great thing because these folks speak English. Well -- they have never correctly pronounced my name nor my husband's name. One has to GUESS who they want. I used to be polite and go along with it. Then I realized why should I have to guess and be polite when these jobs were once held by my fellow countrymen and these companies think they can turn back to America to get into our wallets. I asked them to stop calling us. It didn't work. I hung up on them. It didn't stop them. I set the phone receiver down and let them speak to no one. It didn't stop them. FINALLY -- I realized that these calls centers are functioning on the assumption that anyone they reach back into the USA speaks English. That is the key! When I knew I had an off shore sales call coming uninvited into my home and using my telephone line that I am paying for which means that MY name and MY telephone number sits in some data bank out of the USA --- I respond in an language other than English. Within two weeks of using this new self-defense tool against offshored American jobs -- these call centers no longer call our home. We have been offshore call center free for more than four peaceful months! (It did stun the off shore call worker who would restart reading from the top of their script call when one asks "who is this?" in Spanish; German; French; Italian; or Japanese. As the script is re-read from the beginning and one then states in a non-English language "I don't understand". The call center end goes silent and then disconnects.)
If these companies want AMERICANS to buy their services and merchandize ... maybe showing some LOYALTY to America would be a nice foundation for doing business with Americans.
Offshoring has been planned since at least the 1950s, when David Rockefeller promoted the wholesale dismantling of industry in the USA and reconstruction in Latin America, both privately as well as publically in editorials that were published in the New York Times.
The plan was that big money-center banks would make huge loans to various targeted countries, ostensibly to build infrastructure such as roads, dams, railroads, etc, that were thought to be condusive to industrialization. The targeted countries were to pay back the loans, with interest, with the procedes from the export sales of their new industries to the USA.
Things didn't happen according to plan. Instead of building industries, the happy foreign workers were raising their standards of living with subsidized electricity from the dams, new transportation networks, and the rest of the loans largely being used to pay for current consumption instead of capital investment.
This lead to dependence on MORE loans, chronic trade deficits, and inflation, and the IMF constantly demanding "austerity programs", which often backfired as the unhappy foreign workers would attempt political solutions.
The Chileans for one example of many, elected a socialist government (of Salvador Allende) that promptly nationalized the industries. I suspect Mr. Allende's assassination was a result of some bankers' unhappiness.
That's why when offshoring finally did happen, it didn't happen in Latin America and Africa as per original plan; it happened in Asia where the culture is more condusive to capital accumulation and industrialization.
How does one protect one's economic livelihood from the loss of not only industrial and information jobs, but also many service jobs? For example, health care is often assumed to be many X-rays are transmitted to India for analysis these days. Wendy's chain of hamburger restaurants has already tested a system for offshoring the taking of your order at the drive-through--your order will shortly be routed through the Philipines or India if it's not already.
Unfortunately I don't have a full answer because the problem exists largely at a national level, but one can't exactly go to a government that is party to the offshoring plan and ask them nicely to ignore the powerful people lobbying for this. Basically it is very difficult to defend your job if your counterpart can afford to eat out every night and have a full-time maid on one-fifth your salary. Nor can one compete with overseas companies that pay drastically lower taxes, and are regulated less.
One can, however, even up the odds a little. There is a report on this at www.mutuallyassuredsurvival.com, but unfortunately the download capabilities don't seem to be working at the moment (at least, I keep getting nearly empty files instead of PDFs). Contact the webmaster with questions.
Nikster:
There are always freaks, clowns, etc. when sifting thru job applicants. I have found that there are plenty of good people to choose from when looking. Perhaps the cost of living is too high in the area that you are hiring for the salary offered? Or perhaps your methodology is flawed. Instead of trying to find people who have memorized tons of specific technical information you should be looking for people who have general engineering experience, technical aptitude and the ability to think.
Simple economics state that if you cannot find what you are looking for at the price you are offering then it is time to up the price. Otherwise you should try to find an alternate source. H1B's are particularly attractive because you can low-ball their pay (a little gerrymandering of the statistics always helps.) and they do not have the ability to sell their services to a competitor.
Indentured servitude is what made this country great. H1Bs take it a step further cause once they are done,we can send them back to where they came from....
Well, I guess it doesn't matter what the numbers are; if it's perceived as a trend, it's likely that it will become more and more acceptable (and it's not like there's a stigma now either). There are just so many issues at play here, from social attitudes (whether correct or not, there's a perception of U.S. workers as overpaid, lazy, etc.) to the fact that there is no accountability in upper management in larger companies... But businesses don't see the value in paying more, especially given that many U.S. workers can be just as bad in things like creating bad, non-user-centric applications and code, etc. but they're given timelines to get something done, not to get it done well or get it done so that there's less maintenance or higher quality. People who have a strong work ethic will want to do it right, but that kind of ethic is waning. I say U.S. and not American, because American really encompasses more than the U.S., and I know several people here on those Visas from Canada, Chile, etc. who are more than happy to work hard in this country. While there are many people in the U.S. who would like to work, unfortunately the ones who don't feel like they need to make it harder for them. I know of organizations that fight to get people w/disabilities hired, and they are so grateful for the opportunity to earn a living, but then people try to milk the system for disability checks because they have a hangnail.
Actually, this is already happening and has been happening for a little over a month now. As someone that was affected by the Lean process and know others that have been affected by the Lean process it is disturbing. To date, 3500+ IBM employees and contractors from Global Services have been released. Some have been given 30 days notice, and others only hours notice. Even clients are going back to IBM and asking why they come in and only one person is maning a Support Center where just "yesterday" there were five. The clients are not being notified of the releases and this is bad business on IBM's side.
I am an IBMer and I don't believe this story at all and I am not scared either. This is my opinion, not IBM's but let's get some facts straight. IBM is not owned by the Chinese. We sold our PC business to Lenovo which is Chinese. Note that IBM still owns a minority part of Lenovo. Our business has strengthened since then and the PCs are still very good. Chinese does not mean bad. In this case it means very good for everyone. IBM still makes servers, such as blades, we are still the second largest software company in the world, we are one of the (if not the) largest services provider, we make mainframes, we file more patents than anyone else (and I am proud to be a contributor to that particular statistic), we make the cell processor that powers all the major video games. This is certainly not a company that's on its way out. This is also a company that generally does the right thing by its employees, customers and shareholders.
Can I ask what specifically you do for IBM?
Do you work in a services or support or software development position?
I see the writing on the wall, it has been in the making for as long as I have been at the company. We get reassurances from our direct managers that our product will not be affected, etc etc etc... yet I still don't see them shelling out any money in raises/promotions/education.
No, instead we are focusing on creating a bunch of online training and "self-help" items, while at the same time we are hiring more Chinese and Indian developers/support staff that we are having people fly over to Asia to train.
I have yet to see an intelligent decision come down from upper management, and each year it gets worse.
IBM is shooting themselves in the foot with American companies though, whether they can make more profits in India and China remains to be seen.
Here's hoping for a decent severance package and IBM stock to soar to new highs... at least for a year, then I can cash out those stock options and sell all acquired stock and ditch this company.
I have wanted to make a switch anyway to something that is more personally satisfying... like farming... shovelling literal bs is going to be so much more satisfying than eating the figurative stuff I've been handed by my employer.
Skippy, I work in Global Business Services. I don't share your pessimism. We control how we view the world. If we want to see doom and gloom we will. If we want to see the good we will. This is not a perfect world. You have to learn to take the bad, take the good and make the best of the situation. I still believe IBM is a great company.
I was given my notice. My last day is May 31st. Sam Palmisano, the CEO of *Indian Business Machine*, will make huge fortune by doing this. I have plenty of cash in the bank, as I saw this coming ten years ago. I feel for my co-workers, though, who have bigger expenses than me. One guy has three kids, another one on the way, and a $2600.00 per month mortgage. It is sad. In my father's day, he had one job, and retired after a long and rewarding career. Sam Palmisano has obliterated that opportunity for us. Thanks, Sam. Enjoy your billions!
Stop Blaming Chinese
We live in Global Economy, so at end bottom line is what matters most, not nationalistic pride
At least IBM will lay them off and hand out severance packages.
Look at Siemens' wireless division - "sold" to BenQ for negative 250 million. Closed as 'bankrupt' 1 year, 1 day later. How many severance packages do you think were paid out to the loyal workers?
Same day, the execs at Siemens gave themselves a 30% raise (no joke).
This outsourcing and closing things/relocating is nothing new - but at least IBM won't try to just dump them; they have some business integrity.
All of these people should look at themselves in the mirror, and then they will know who to really blame.
I am sickened by all of the loss of employment in this country in the name of globalism.
Now its WHEN will everyone start waking up that they have been screwed.
Looks like whitey is mad and jealous that Asians are going to run the show