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Folks, there is exactly one way you're going to put a stop to this sort of nonsense: At the end of October, IT employees at Walt Disney Parks and Resorts were called, one-by-one, into conference rooms to receive notice of their layoffs. Multiple conference rooms had been set aside for this purpose, and in each room an executive read from a script informing the worker that their last day would be Jan. 30, 2015. Some workers left the rooms crying; others appeared shocked. This went on all day. As each employee received a call to go to a conference room,...

AT&T settles with FCC over customer data that was stolen from data centers overseas and used to unlock stolen mobile phones. AT&T has reached a $25 million settlement with the Federal Communications Commission over stolen customer data from three international call centers. The data breaches took place at contracted call centers in Mexico, Colombia and the Philippines, and involved the unauthorized disclosure of almost 280,000 U.S. customers' names, full or partial Social Security numbers and unauthorized access to protected account-related data. The FCC said the information obtained from these breaches was used to unlock codes for stolen phones. Workers at...

Information technology workers at Southern California Edison (SCE) are being laid off and replaced by workers from India. Some employees are training their H-1B visa holding replacements, and many have already lost their jobs...The H-1B program "was supposed to be for projects and jobs that American workers could not fill," this worker said. "But we're doing our job. It's not like they are bringing in these guys for new positions that nobody can fill. "Not one of these jobs being filled by India was a job that an Edison employee wasn't already performing," he said...SCE employees said that since August,...

Like the good people of Arizona, I despise speed cameras. But not because I want reckless driving. Instead, my disdain is based on the fact that governments set up cameras where speed limits are preposterously low in order to generate revenue. And I speak from personal experience.Like the good people of Houston, I also despise red-light cameras.But once again, this isn’t because I want jerks racing through red lights and endangering innocent people. Instead, my opposition is based on the fact that greedy governments – operating recklessly – use such cameras as tools to fleece drivers.Holman Jenkins has a column...

As we have reported, contrary to current wisdom, studies consistently show that there are more science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) majors than there are STEM jobs. Nevertheless, those with a vested interest in perpetuating the legend not only still claim that there is a STEM major shortage but declare that women are uniquely qualified to fill it. Recently, here in Washington, D.C., at George Washington University, Linda Rosen, CEO of Change the Equation (an organization geared toward more STEM education at the pre-K12 level and above), said, “Employers…are having difficulty finding the STEM talent they need.” For example, she...

American information technology and business process management (IT-BPM) companies should take a serious look at the Philippines, which continues to be an “ideal location for customer service and technical support outsourcing,” the Philippine ambassador to the US advised. Ambassador Jose L. Cuisia, Jr. made this pitch to business executives and decision makers from Wall Street and Fortune 500 firms who attended a networking event hosted recently by the Philippine Consulate General in New York and the Seven Seven Corporate Group. “The IT-BPM industry has been the fastest growing industry in the Philippines in the last 10 years,” Cuisia said as...

One of the few bits of bad news for Republicans over the last couple of months was the Georgia Senate race, where the Democrat, Michelle Nunn, pulled into a tie with the Republican, David Perdue, after a 2005 deposition was revealed in which Mr. Perdue said that he was proud of his record of outsourcing. But most polls over the last week or so show Mr. Perdue retaking a lead, with Ms. Nunn now trailing by about two or three percentage points. Mr. Perdue’s gains come from white voters. He now leads Ms. Nunn by about 40 percentage points among...

When I fretted to my friend and colleague Jay Nordlinger that the Republicans may learn the wrong lessons from success in 2014, he noted sagely that he prefers to wait until the results are in before drawing any lessons. While that ought to have stayed my hand, I think some contours are discernible, and so I plunge in! The 2012 election was essentially a protracted exercise in character assassination. Democrats painted Romney and Republicans generally as extremist cretins who held rigid views on abortion, were hostile to the point of combat towards women, engineered the financial crisis to benefit their...

A Silicon Valley tech company that reportedly made $200 million last quarter was importing foreign workers from India and paying them $1.21 an hour. According to the Labor Department, "about eight employees of Fremont-based Electronics For Imaging [EFI] were flown in from India and worked 120-hour weeks to help with the installation of computers at the company's headquarters." NBC Bay Area noted that "the employees were paid their regular hourly wage in Indian rupees, which translated to $1.21." EFI claimed it "unintentionally overlooked laws that require even foreign employees to be paid based on local US standards." The company reportedly...

Delaware’s Democrat U.S. Senator Chris Coons has outsourced over 2,170 high-paying Delaware jobs to China, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland from his family’s business W.L. Gore and Associates. Yet in a bold act of chutzpah, Coons is also running for re-election by promising voters he will bring manufacturing jobs to ‘the First State.’ Nationwide, Republicans have been hammered for many years with the false and unfair accusation that American jobs are going overseas because of Republican plans. Whereas Democrat Party policies harm the nation's business environment and drive employers out of the U.S.A., liberals come close to accusing Republicans...

AN IRAQI scientist-turned-author says the most significant pieces of his country’s dormant nuclear programme were buried under a lotus tree in his backyard, untouched for more than a decade before the US-led invasion in 2003.But their existence, Dr Mahdi Obeidi writes in a new book, is evidence that the international community should remain vigilant as other countries try to replicate Iraq’s successes before the 1991 Gulf war to develop components necessary for a nuclear weapon. In The Bomb in my Garden, Dr Obeidi details Saddam’s quest for a nuclear bomb: "Although Saddam never had nuclear weapons at his disposal, the...

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...