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The Philippines' booming outsourcing industry now employs a million people after growing almost tenfold in just over a decade, the industry association said Wednesday. Widely considered as second only to India, Philippine outsourcing is expected to earn $18 billion this year, said the IT and Business Process Association Philippines.

<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>

Burgers via call center? Jack in the Box in Charlotte North Carolina testing process of outsourcing fast-food orders. That crackling voice taking your order at a fast-food drive-through may come from a lot farther away than the restaurant: Try Texas, or even overseas. San Diego-based Jack in the Box has tested outsourced drive-through order-taking since mid-2008 at seven of its 30 Charlotte-area restaurants. Spokeswoman Kathleen Anthony declined to specify the locations, though workers at the Cotswold restaurant in Charlotte recently said their restaurant uses the system. The technology is intended to improve speed, accuracy and service, freeing up restaurant employees...

Jonathan Alter at the Daily Beast has an idea that will infuse the president’s “economic patriotism” rhetoric with some bite: Compel companies to take “loyalty oaths” to prove their patriotism. You may find this suggestion a little creepy, maybe even a little fascistic; but Alter says that “it’s time for red-blooded Americans to take matters into our own hands.” And by taking the matter into “our” hands, Alter means that President Obama would unilaterally bar any company that practices “inversion” – corporate merging with foreign firms to save on U.S. tax bills – from doing business with the federal government....

30 years ago, the great outsourcing wave took millions of US low-skilled jobs and planted them right in the heart of China, which was about to undergo the fastest industrialization-commercialization-financialization experiment in history. $26 trillion in bank assets later, the world's biggest housing bubble, and a teetering financial system that every day depends on Beijing making the correct central-planning decision (of kicking the can one more day, of course) or else the biggest financial collapse in history will take place, all lubricated by years of inflation in everything and most certainly wages, and suddenly outsourcing jobs in China is...

Kelly Parker was thrilled when she landed her dream job in 2012 providing tech support for Harley-Davidson's Tomahawk, Wisconsin, plants. The divorced mother of three hoped it was the beginning of a new career with the motorcycle company. The dream didn't last long. Parker claims she was laid off one year later after she trained her replacement, a newly arrived worker from India. Now she has joined a federal lawsuit alleging the global staffing firm that ran Harley-Davidson's tech support discriminated against American workers — in part by replacing them with temporary workers from South Asia. The firm, India-based Infosys...

U.S. workers protested job losses to foreign workers by displaying American flags in their cubicles

New horizontal expansion includes government-funded Bachelors and Masters programs wherein students pay Digital Domain to work for Digital Domain Soon after my tweet I get an email from a new VFX blogger called OccupyVFX who was able to find audio of the presentation given by Digital Domain’s CEO John Textor. The whole 22 minute presentation is posted above but the surprising part starts around 15:40 when Mr. Textor talks about their new VFX school in Florida called Digital Domain Institute: Classes starting in the education space, what’s interesting is the relationship between the digital studio and the college. Not only...

With labor costs rising rapidly in China, American manufacturers of all sizes are looking south to Mexico with what economists describe as an eagerness not seen since the early years of the North American Free Trade Agreement in the 1990s. From border cities like Tijuana to the central plains where new factories are filling farmland, Mexican workers are increasingly in demand. American trade with Mexico has grown by nearly 30 percent since 2010, to $507 billion annually, and foreign direct investment in Mexico last year hit a record $35 billion. Over the past few years, manufactured goods from Mexico have...

You may not realize it, but the next time you run through your local fast food drive-thru, that sweet and helpful voice on the other end may not be coming from the register, but half-way around the world, and if left-wing activists have their way, it may become an industry standard. Democrats frustrated by the lack of enthusiasm for their election-year push to increase the federal minimum wage need only look to outsource destinations such as India, the Philippines and elsewhere to find vocal support, as well as the reasons for apprehension among American voters for their signature policy initiative....

Fixing the Obamacare website to get it ready to handle a second round of enrollments will cost the federal government $121 million, according to Accenture, the contractor hired to repair the glitchy website after the original contractor, CGI Federal, was fired in January. The deal, which Accenture announced on its website Tuesday, costs more than the $93.7 million it took CGI Federal to build HealthCare.gov in the first place. It’s also $30 million more than the government projected for fixes just a few months ago, when it called in Accenture on an emergency basis to try to keep President Obama’s...

The president of General Motors said Sunday that the company and local partners are boosting production capacity for GM-brand vehicles in China to 5 million. Speaking at the Beijing auto show, Dan Ammann said the company also expects sales of its Cadillac luxury cars to double to 100,000 next year. General Motors Co. and its Chinese partners are in the midst of what the company has said is a $12 billion investment program through 2017. …

OK it's not Walmart, but it's a serious issue nevertheless. America needs to keep, start, build and GROW global companies right here in America. Stop this nonsense.

A former Oracle sales manager is suing the vendor, alleging he was fired shortly after complaining of discriminatory actions by his superior and other company officials. Ian Spandow was a high-performing sales manager at Oracle in Europe and later California, according to his lawsuit filed last week in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. After coming aboard in 2005, he trained more than 1,000 new hires and gave skills coaching to hundreds of others, the suit states. Spandow was subsequently promoted in January 2008 to the position of coaching manager, and after continued success was promoted to...

The Obama administration has offshore outsourced Obamacare. They made Accenture the lead contractor for the website healthcare.gov. The contract is estimated to be worth $90 million and the original contractor, CGI Federal, is out. We pointed out earlier that the failed Obamacare website was poetic justice as CGI Federal is also an offshore outsourcer of U.S. jobs. But now the poster boy for labor arbitrage, offshore tax havens, and bloated, often failed government contracts is in charge, Accenture. Accenture is one of the biggest offshore outsourcers of American jobs. In 2012 they used 4,037 H-1B Visas alone and are ranked...

Productivity. Every employer loves it, and every employee is fascinated by it, especially if it comes in cute colors, a retina screen, and weighs under a pound... at least until such time as "productivity" results in the loss of the employee's job, which in turn makes the employer love it even more as it results in even higher profits, even if it means one more pink slip and a 91 million people outside the labor force. With a labor force already in turmoil as millions drop out every year never to be heard from again, made obscolete by the...

IT services major Infosys is expected to cough up nearly $35 million (Rs 215 crore) in penalties — said to be the biggest fine of its kind in American history — to settle visa fraud allegations with the US justice department. The settlement, reached with the East Texas Attorney's office, is to be announced on Wednesday, though the market has long had an inkling of the deal from Infosys' regulatory filing. Infosys acknowledged receiving a federal grand jury subpoena seeking records related to its sponsorships for B-1 business visas and its use of them, according to an October 11 filing,...

Rep. Henry Waxman (D., Calif.) blamed the private contractors retained by HHS to build and administer healthcare.gov for the website’s extensive glitches Tuesday on MSNBC. Waxman said Secretary of Health & Human Services Kathleen Sebelius was not aware of all of the “technicalities” pertaining to the Obamacare website and thus should not be held responsible for its failure. “She’s done a terrific job,” Waxman said, “I have a great deal of confidence in her.” The private sector, according to Waxman, failed to live up to their contractual obligations “even with all of the money they got.” The California congressman suggested...

CGI, the Canadian company whose U.S. subsidiary built the failed Obamacare website, was once contracted to build a federal gun registry for the Canadian government... CGI's contract was canceled in 2007 after a report by the Auditor General found that the Canadian Firearms Information System (CFIS) being built by CGI was "significantly over budget" and that it had been plagued by delays. The Conservative government that took power in 2006 canceled CGI's gun registry contract, and eventually repealed the Canadian gun registry entirely. ... The failed gun registry was only one of CGI's many Canadian failures, which included canceled contracts...

Company to pursue action against HHS for using copyrighted web script. Healthcare.gov, the federal government's Obamacare website, has been under heavy criticism from friend and foe alike during its first two weeks of open enrollment. Repeated errors and delays have prevented many users from even establishing an account, and outside web designers have roundly panned the structure and coding of the site as amateurish and sloppy. The latest indication of the haphazard way in which Healthcare.gov was developed is the uncredited use of a copyrighted web script for a data function used by the site, a violation of the licensing...