Exporting workers overseas :: U4Prez, Social Networking For Politics

So, not only are corporations sending jobs overseas; but they want to send their worker, too?

IBM Offers to Move Laid-off Workers to India
By Susie Madrak Tuesday Feb 03, 2009 2:30pm

See, I'm a little confused. Because for years, big companies like IBM have insisted there were so few talented IT workers in the U.S., they had to import them from India. And yet now we have so many, we can send them to India! Isn't that funny?

If I were a suspicious sort (and God knows, I'm not), I'd wonder if this isn't really a way to keep experienced American workers while artificially suppressing their wages. And of course, I'd also have to wonder: If you're offered one of these jobs and you decline, are you then ineligible to collect unemployment compensation? Because that already happens with big companies in the U.S.

Isn't this new personal responsibility thing fun? Who knew we'd get to see the world at company expense?

The climate is warm, there's no shortage of exotic food, and the cost of living is rock bottom. That's IBM (NYSE: IBM)'s pitch to the laid-off American workers it's offering to place in India. The catch: Wages in the country are pennies-on-the-dollar compared to U.S. salaries.

Under a program called Project Match, IBM will help workers laid off from domestic sites obtain travel and visa assistance for countries in which Big Blue has openings. Mostly that's developing markets like India, China, and Brazil.

"IBM has established Project Match to help you locate potential job opportunities in growth markets where your skills are in demand," IBM says in an internal notice on the initiative. "Should you accept a position in one of these countries, IBM offers financial assistance to offset moving costs, provides immigration support, such as visa assistance, and other support to help ease the transition of an international move."

The document states that the program is limited to "satisfactory performers who have been notified of separation from IBM U.S. or Canada and are willing to work on local terms and conditions." The latter indicates that workers will be paid according to prevailing norms in the countries to which they relocate. In many cases, that could be substantially less than what they earned in North America.

IBM has laid off more than 4,000 workers in the United States since the beginning of January, according to an employee group. The company has confirmed layoffs but won't comment on specific numbers.

Comments

Thirty pieces of silver, baby.

These big business guys are willing to sell their souls for a profit, but worse, they're willing to sell ours.

It's obvious that profits currently trump patriotism or allegiance to any given nation-state. Those businesses who move their offices offshore to avoid taxation, build their plants in third-world countries to take advantage of cheap labor, and companies outsourcing jobs to India, should be deemed foreign competitors, and we return to the ethics that helped grow American enterprise, including the return of tariffs on imports. That's basically what such a business is doing, isn't it? They go overseas to make the product cheap, then bring the thing to the US, still the largest consumer base in the world, to make a larger profit. Time was, a company would move its operations to Mexico to save on labor costs. Nobody stopped them, but when they tried to sell their products back in the US, they had tariffs slapped on them equivalent to the labor costs they saved. In other words, it did not profit such a company to do this, and they stayed in the States. A business is always going to stay within the law for fear of losing its license to do business, but it's also going to see what it can get away with within the law. The problem, therefore, is not the businesses. The problem is thirty years of legislation which tore down regulations that protected American business from unfair competition and made it possible for businesses to go overseas and then sell their products back (THAT'S the key!) in the US. And this is not bagging on Republicans, Clinton oversaw NAFTA.

What we need to do is end tax subsidies for businesses that out source, raise tariffs on imports, and add what we could call an "monthly outsorucing tax" which would tax American companies that operate overseas and seel their products back to America. Oooh. I'm goin to propose a bill.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Exporting workers overseas?

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