Free Republic

A key issue raised by labor unions in their weeklong strike against Verizon is the offshoring of work. The unions say Verizon has plans to send more jobs overseas. Verizon isn't saying what it is doing in this respect, but there is a paper trail of documents filed by its employees that point to offshoring. The union contends that Verizon wants, in a labor contract, to shift more jobs to contractors. Nearly 40,000 Verizon workers are on strike. "They want the ability to contract work -- as much as 50% -- the great majority of that is offshore," said Marilyn...

A group of news media outlets published articles on Sunday based on what they said were 11.5 million leaked documents from a Panama law firm that helped some of the world’s wealthiest people — including politicians, athletes and business moguls — establish offshore bank accounts. The German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung said its reporters had obtained the documents from a confidential source. The newspaper then shared the files with other media organizations, like The Guardian and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. In an article, the investigative journalism organization said the documents revealed the offshore accounts of 140 politicians and public...

Jobs to be bundled on a plane and flown to lower labour cost countries ... He highlighted a $1bn Japanese tax gain Big Blue has received, and pointed out that in the past the company had matched the proceeds from dispositions or IP sales with workforce restructuring expense.

Abbott Labs, a global healthcare company, is laying off about 180 IT employees after signing an agreement with Wipro, a major India-based IT services firm, to take over some IT services. The employees were told about the planned cuts on Feb. 22; their last day will be April 22.

-- snip -- If his appeal was based on his language and bluster, America would have elevated someone like Howard Stern or Ann Coulter long ago. If his appeal was based on foreign policy concerns, why isn't a military general leading the charge? It's the economy, stupid! And the fact is that real, median household income peaked at nearly $58,000 back in 1999 and has been sliding ever since, standing now at just $53,657. This can all be summarized in two charts: The relationship between corporate profitability and labor's share of income shown above. Cheap laborers (both undocumented unskilled and...

Every major presidential candidate, even those most beholden to Wall Street, says he or she opposes the offshoring of American jobs. Like vows to "defeat ISIS" and "repair our crumbling infrastructure," the nationalist cri de couer against "shipping jobs overseas" has become a bipartisan catchphrase of the 2016 race. But political rhetoric is one thing and economic reality is another. Offshoring has become an effective way for U.S. companies to build and manage their products and services. Look at Apple Computer. Except for the Mac Pro personal computer, possibly the best company in the history of American business doesn't produce...

If anyone deserves to pay more to shore up the federal safety net, either through higher taxes or lower benefits, it’s boomers — the generation that was born into some of the strongest job growth in the history of America, gobbled up the best parts, and left its children and grandchildren with some bones to pick through and a big bill to pay. Politicians shouldn’t be talking about holding that generation harmless. They should be asking how future workers can claw back some of the spoils that the “Me Generation” hoarded for itself.

On January 6, 2004, Senator Charles Schumer and I challenged the erroneous idea that jobs offshoring was free trade in a New York Times op-ed. Our article so astounded economists that within a few days Schumer and I were summoned to a Brookings Institution conference in Washington, DC, to explain our heresy. In the nationally televised conference, I declared that the consequence of jobs offshoring would be that the US would be a Third World country in 20 years. That was 11 years ago, and the US is on course to descend to Third World status before the remaining nine...

One of Hillary Clinton’s biggest supporters attempted to spin the Democratic frontrunner’s long history of supporting outsourcing ahead of the first Democratic primary debate.Former Michigan Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm, a top executive at pro-Clinton Super PAC Correct the Record, told MSNBC that Clinton opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), President Obama’s trade deal with a dozen Asian countries, because of her opposition to outsourcing.“She doesn’t want to be party to the continual offshoring of American jobs,” Granholm said. “She has seen that. That’s what she saw when she was representing New York up in Buffalo when they lost jobs.”However, as a...

Regulation: You can bet all the contenders at Tuesday's Democratic presidential debate will say they're the toughest on big business. What they won't say is their own policies favor big business, big time.

Back in June we covered the story of General Electric throwing a fit of pique over the demise of the Export-Import Bank and threatening to ship their jobs overseas if the cookie jar wasn’t opened back up. The amount of sympathy which GE received from our readers and the conservative community in general was… muted to say the least. It seemed like a cheap, tawdry move which was designed to try to hold American workers hostage in exchange for getting what they wanted from the feds.That story took a rather odd twist this week when some new information came...

<p>Short columns must be excerpted to 50% at all times.</p>

An important U.S. high-tech manufacturer is shutting down its American operations, laying off hundreds of workers and moving sophisticated equipment now being used to make critical parts for smart bombs to the People's Republic of China (PRC), Insight has learned. Indianapolis-based Magnequench Inc. has not yet publically announced the closing of its Valparaiso, Ind., factory, but Insight has confirmed that the company will shut down this year and relocate at least some of its high-tech machine tools to Tianjin, China. Word of the shutdown comes as the company is producing critical parts for the U.S. Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM)...

NEW DELHI: Immigration and visa issues, which have long plagued the information technology sector, could come back to hurt Indian IT services companies this year as the US heads towards Presidential elections in 2016. In the US, the biggest market for the Indian IT services sector, "this will be a bloody, contentious election and immigration reform is right up there for discussion," said Phil Fersht, founder and chief executive of HfS Research. "The displacement of US IT and back-office jobs will be a significant issue leading up to 2016." India's $146 billion IT outsourcing industry has been a beneficiary of...

Disney is firing tech employees and replacing them with (legal) foreigners. [A]bout 250 Disney employees were told in late October that they would be laid off. Many of their jobs were transferred to immigrants on temporary visas for highly skilled technical workers, who were brought in by an outsourcing firm based in India. Over the next three months, some Disney employees were required to train their replacements to do the jobs they had lost. But the layoffs at Disney and at other companies, including the Southern California Edison power utility, are raising new questions about how businesses and outsourcing companies are using the...

The Robopocalypse for workers may be inevitable. In this vision of the future, super-smart machines will best humans in pretty much every task. A few of us will own the machines, a few will work a bit — perhaps providing "Made by Man" artisanal goods — while the rest will live off a government-provided income. Silicon-based superintelligence and robots will dramatically alter labor markets — to name but one example, the most common job in most U.S. states probably will no longer be truck driver. But what about right now? If you're unemployed or working part-time instead of full-time, or...

The great conundrum of the U.S. economy today is that we have record numbers of working age people out of the labor ‎force at the same time we have businesses desperately trying to find workers. As an example, the American Transportation Research Institute estimates there are 30,000 – 35,000 trucker jobs that could be filled tomorrow if workers would take these jobs–a shortage that could rise to 240,000 by 2022. While the jobs market overall remains weak, demand is high for in certain sectors. For skilled and reliable mechanics, welders, engineers, electricians, plumbers, computer technicians, and nurses, jobs are plentiful;...

Cognizant Technology Solutions (CTSH) is one of the largest providers of technology, consulting and business process outsourcing services. The company was founded in 1994 as a captive arm of Dun & Bradstreet and started trading on the NASDAQ in 1998. The stock just hit an all-time high after reporting 4Q earnings and revenues that exceeded analyst estimates. One of the key drivers this quarter was a 26% surge in revenue from the health care division, its second biggest division behind financial services.Cognizant expanded its health-care offering to take advantage of the industry-wide overhaul of the healthcare system spurred by the...

During his trip to India, President Obama declared America’s commitment to “help design smart cities” and “bullet trains” in the country. The main selling point for “smart cities” is that they are “sustainable,” a vague but applauded term that often used in context of combating what this author strongly believes is a non-existent problem: man-made climate change. During a speech at the Siri Fort Auditorium in India, Obama, who met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the tour, declared: We are ready to join you in building new infrastructure…roads and airports, the ports and bullet trains to propel India into...

<p>Every now and then I see an article that is so reality deficient that it commits what amounts to sexual assault against common sense. Actually I see them all the time, but one in particular had me shaking my head.</p>