Posted on 05/26/2003 3:51:30 PM PDT by Lessismore
WASHINGTON: On a recent April afternoon in Silicon Valley, moments after he was told he had been laid off from his computer programming job at a Bank of America training centre, Kevin Flanagan stepped into the parking lot and shot himself dead.
Some of America's technology workers, who like Flanagan have also had to collect pink slips over the last several months, think they know why Flanagan took his life: Bank of America not only outsourced his job to India, but forced him to train Indian workers to do the job he had to give up.
In the weeks since his death, the techies have used the incident as fuel to fire a campaign against outsourcing to India, an issue that now seems poised to become a major sticking point between the two countries. Several US states are already considering legislation to ban or limit outsourcing.
Bank of America is one of several major US corporations – General Electric, Microsoft, Intel are among others - under scrutiny for outsourcing jobs to India. The Bank created what is called a "Global Delivery centre" in 2000 to identify projects that could be sent offshore.
Since then it has signed agreements with Infosys and Tata Consulting Services (TCS) to provide solutions and services.
In an e-mail exchange with this correspondent, Kevin's father Tom Flanagan said "a significant reason for which my son took his life was indeed as a result of his job being outsourced."
"Did he blame India for his job loss? No. He blamed the "system." He couldn't understand why Americans are losing jobs. Rather I should say he understood it economically, but not emotionally," Flanagan said.
Bank officials, who did not return calls relating to Flanagan's death, have said in the past that the deal with Indian companies would effect no more than 5 per cent of the bank's 21,000 employees, or about 1,100 jobs, in its technology and operations division.
According to some surveys, the US has lost at least 800,000 jobs in the past year and some 3.3 million jobs will move overseas over the next few years because of outsourcing, mostly to India.
The Bank has also acknowledged that it had asked local workers to train foreigners because such knowledge transfer was essential. According to Tom Flanagan, his son was "totally disgusted" with the fact that he and his fellow-workers had to train foreigners to do his job so they could take over. "That sir is a travesty," he said in one e-mail.
US tech workers are challenging the corporate world's claim that it is outsourcing work to improve bottomlines and efficiency. Some analysts have also pointed out that US corporations were being forced to tighten up by the same people who are moaning about outsourcing, and who, heavily invested in the stock market, demand better performance.
But on one website that discussed the Flanagan case, a tech worker pointed out that data processing consumed only a small per cent of revenues and was hardly a drain on the Bank's profit.
"(It is) a prosperous bank which has let greed trump any sense of patriotism or social responsibility," he fumed.
Yeah! Let the eat cake!
In the sixties and seventies the Japanese targeted auto manufacturing. They became the best in the world at it and remain so to this day. Tens of thousands of American jobs went overseas during this period. At the time you could read stories just like this one only it concerned the trevails of auto workers.
But what happened after that? Americans developed from scratch the personal computer industry and the internet. None of the jobs currently going to India even existed when the Cassandras in the auto industry held sway.
Now India is targeting IT services. They will probably succeed in owning this global niche. But this does not spell doom for America. The strength of our economy has always been innovation. We develop whole industries from scratch. We reap the monopoly profits attendent to invention. Then as these industries mature, the rest of the world lives on the commodity production of these goods and services.
America will survive the loss of mature tech jobs. It will be painful for those affected directly. But the economy and the country will continue to grow in ways unimagined today.
P.S.
None of this excuses the criminal greed of many of our top CEOs. The millions of dollars stolen from shareholders and employees by these thieves is a real crime. The directors of these companies should be thrown in prison along with the executives. Come to think of it. That would not change very much. Members of these so-called independent boards are already grabbing their ankles and playing Betty to these executives.
Dude. You just described my situation. 100%
I wanna know when will the trend to outsource CEO's start.
Hey, I'm doing something similar and I'm in my 40s, but I have a lot of support from family or it would be impossible. The biggest handicap I find is that when employers see my past work history they figure I'll "leave when the economy turns around". It's a weird feeling.
I agree. This negativity and leftist brand of victimology is just sad.
Whatever happened to the American spirit that stands up to challenges and takes people through adversity and hard times?
We really don't need these doom and gloomers ruining the moral of everybody else.
Your cops out there in Suffolk county are also the higest paid in the country, most making near six figures. OTOH property taxes are like a second mortgage payment on a modest house. But all that is the subject for another thread.
Its not even that. Who'll be able to afford their product at current prices if we outsource all the jobs?
You think it isn't here? Even at a private school, tuition doesn't pay all of the cost. At a public school, it typically and historically pays only about 1/3 of the cost. Although at first blush, subsidizing some fields more than others, in the sense of charging lower tuition or providing other stipends to the students, might seem like a good idea, do you really think the government is any better at knowing what educational backgrounds will be required more than others, 4 or 10 years hence, than students and/or their parents? If you do, there's a nice bridge in Brooklyn you might be interested in purchasing.
Government used to support engineering, math and hard sciences more than they do now, but that was mostly at the graduate level, and was predominately in the form of buying services from the grad students and their proffessors. That was mostly military, although NASA got in the act too. Now of course we spend most the federal budget on transfer payments, for which the taxpayers, as a group, get nothing in return.
It was that or shoot myself < /sarcasm >
We see that already at the state level, Connecticut for example has been hit hard by loss of income tax revenue. I think that's a more accurate indicator of economic health than the unemployment figures, which don't take a lot of factors into account.
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