Posted on 08/07/2003 5:25:07 AM PDT by Non-Sequitur
Hundreds of Sprint Corp. employees may lose their jobs as the Overland Park-based telecommunications giant moves forward with a plan to send certain technology jobs overseas.
Sprint chairman and chief executive Gary Forsee on Wednesday said competitive pressures had forced the company toward "offshoring" -- the growing trend of U.S. companies relying on lower-paid computer programmers as far away as India and China.
Sprint put out a request for proposals from outsourcing companies earlier this year and has since narrowed the list to two offshore vendors. Forsee said Sprint is conducting site surveys and is in "serious discussions" with the two companies.
"At the end of the day, it's several hundred jobs that could be impacted," Forsee said. "But we don't know what the ultimate result is."
A final decision on how to handle sending the jobs overseas is likely within 60 days.
Layoffs would not be immediate, Forsee said, because moving work to the outsourcing companies could take six to 12 months.
Forsee also said the company hopes to ease the impact of sending jobs overseas by moving some displaced workers to other information technology projects within Sprint and replacing existing contractors with Sprint employees.
Sprint already was considering moving jobs overseas when Forsee replaced William T. Esrey as the company's top executive earlier this year. But Forsee said he made the final decision to go ahead with the request for proposals.
Sprint already uses an offshore company for some customer service jobs. The company has outsourced information technology jobs to U.S. firms for years. But it has resisted sending information technology jobs overseas.
That has changed as Sprint, like other telecommunications companies, struggles with weak sales in what continues to be a difficult economy.
For almost two years, Sprint has been on a campaign to lower costs to compensate for soft sales. Since October 2001, more than 18,000 jobs have been eliminated. Hundreds of contractors also have lost work at Sprint.
Computer programmers and other skilled technology workers have been among the hardest hit, and there remains a severe shortage of available technology jobs in Kansas City and elsewhere.
Sprint's move toward sending jobs overseas will make a bad situation worse, said Rick Kumar, a former Sprint contractor who last year founded a support group for laid off information technology workers.
"The market is where it was a year and a half ago," Kumar said.
Many people still are out of work or have abandoned their information technology careers for other work, Kumar said. But unlike many of his information technology colleagues, Kumar said he does not blame Sprint and the many other companies that have turned to cheaper labor overseas.
"They have to follow the model or go out of business," Kumar said.
That is precisely how Sprint explains its move toward an offshore vendor. When competitors began cutting information technology costs by turning to offshore programmers, company officials said, Sprint was forced to look at following suit.
"We've got to stay on top of our competitive position," Forsee said. Offshoring "has become a significant trend that we hadn't participated in, so we looked at that as a strategy that was important...because of the competitive aspects."
IBM, Microsoft and HP are among the U.S. companies that are sending information technology jobs overseas or reportedly plan to start. Sprint must lower its cost to keep pace, Forsee said. But he knows careers are at stake.
"When you take actions like that, you're doing that hoping to keep the company as a whole strong," realizing that there are "people and careers and jobs at stake," Forsee said. "We try to do that part very carefully. It's not without significant consideration."
Shares of FON closed Wednesday at $14.05, up 1 cent. PCS closed at $5.41, down 36 cents.
In the not too distance past, a phone call to Australia was billed at $12 per minute for the first 3 minutes. India is a greater distance. That would level the playing field.
But how?
Phreaking?
Let me put it this way. You go on vacation to Finland and buy a Nokia cell phone with you own hard earned dollars.
Standing in line to re-enter the US a custom's agent snatches it out of your hand and refuses to return it until you make a donation to the Federal Government.
This is an up close and personal version of tarrifs. Essentially you place your citizens in a trading cage and dictate to them the terms of their private transactions.
If we were at war with China, they would send ships to blockade our ports. Today, if you try to import sugar into America, we send our OWN ships to blockade our ports.
We do to ourselves what our enemies would do to us in a time of War.
If you haven't noticed many of our candy manufacturers have laid off their American workers and left the country thanks to our sugar subsidies. According to the WSJ the special privileges Bush has granted the Steel companies have cost more non-steel manufacturing jobs than they have saved steel related jobs.
I have no desire to destroy telecommunications. Further offshoring of other than IT is really not affected.
A tariff provides the marginal stimuluis to assure a healthy American IT industry which we need.
In the not too distance past, a phone call to Australia was billed at $12 per minute for the first 3 minutes. India is a greater distance. That would level the playing field. I have no desire to see the telecommunications links so regulated as the cure in this case woulkd be worse than teh cause. However as I stated the idea s to maintain IT as a strategic industry. Let us at least try removal of government subsidies and a reasonable tariff and we should achieve our goal. needless to say there should be no guest workers in the USA while we as a natyion do not have fuull employment.
Why? AdamSelene235 could be sincere. Remember that free traders love the cheap labor, the cheaper the better. Slavery is the best in their mindset. It was the South which was against the tariffs! Unpaid slaves were picking the cotton
Actually, I was thinking of Bastiat's prediction of the Civil War some 10 years before it occurred. You can read The Law in one sitting, its in my profile, check it out.
Perverted Law Causes Conflict
As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose — that it may violate property instead of protecting it — then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder. Political questions will always be prejudicial, dominant, and all-absorbing. There will be fighting at the door of the Legislative Palace, and the struggle within will be no less furious. To know this, it is hardly necessary to examine what transpires in the French and English legislatures; merely to understand the issue is to know the answer.
Is there any need to offer proof that this odious perversion of the law is a perpetual source of hatred and discord; that it tends to destroy society itself? If such proof is needed, look at the United States [in 1850]. There is no country in the world where the law is kept more within its proper domain: the protection of every person's liberty and property. As a consequence of this, there appears to be no country in the world where the social order rests on a firmer foundation. But even in the United States, there are two issues — and only two — that have always endangered the public peace.
Slavery and Tariffs Are Plunder
What are these two issues? They are slavery and tariffs. These are the only two issues where, contrary to the general spirit of the republic of the United States, law has assumed the character of a plunderer.
Slavery is a violation, by law, of liberty. The protective tariff is a violation, by law, of property.
It is a most remarkable fact that this double legal crime — a sorrowful inheritance from the Old World — should be the only issue which can, and perhaps will, lead to the ruin of the Union. It is indeed impossible to imagine, at the very heart of a society, a more astounding fact than this: The law has come to be an instrument of injustice. And if this fact brings terrible consequences to the United States — where the proper purpose of the law has been perverted only in the instances of slavery and tariffs — what must be the consequences in Europe, where the perversion of the law is a principle; a system?
Not bad for a guy dying of TB.
Let me work you through this: tariffs are a net cost to the domestic economy as domestic users are forced to cough-up the extra cash extracted by the tariff, as the "protected" industry itself raises its domestic prices by the percentage amount of the tariff. So the question remains: how many domestic jobs are worth the Sprint jobs you intend to save?
There's got to be a way to do this.
That is but the first stage.
Why don't we let the government "calibrate" the price of everything. Our labor, energy prices, etc. If only the government could control the allocation of resources we would truly have Social Justice at last, Comrade.
Unfortunately it looks like this issue has legs. These dim witted Central Planners are going run the country into the ground before they admit they are bigger Socialists than the Red Chinese.
Imagine you had a machine into which placed things it was easy for you to make, like antibiotics, and out popped things that were difficult for you to make, like sugar.
Now the Pat Buchanans and Naders of the world, take the lid off the machine and scream "Its a port.....Aaaiieieee...things are leaving America...And why, things are being made elsewhere."
Then, of course, they cry out for Big Daddy Government to save them from the terrifying coastline by gorging itself on the private transactions of it citizens.
As Bastiat says, protectionism, socialism and communism are the same plant in different stages of growth.
Well, according to some of us here, you need to start paying more of your hard-earned money for telecom in order to make certain that some jobs are reserved for them.
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