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.
I know you are employed but hey we could do worse than Senator Lazamataz. hey we have done far far worse in many cases.
Great. Now prove that .DLL came from overseas and not by some L1s here - the miracle of the internet. How about 85% of the module made in the states and bugfixes and additions made overseas? Reverse the process. Better yet what kind of tariff would be placed on a Linux module developed overseas? Shareware? Freeware? What happens when a process or an algorithm is developed overseas and coded here? Reverse the process. How about the DLLs are applications are written here, but are tested there? Or are written there, and fixed and modified for this market here?
Counting widgets is easy, counting lines of code isn't.
Its a question I face everyday. My department (a branch of engineering) has had Ph.D. graduates go begging for work, ending up working as security guards for car dealerships or driving trucks. They did everything they were told to do to be successful: be honest, work hard, study, go to school, get good grades, and then are told they aren't wanted or needed. There's a perception that the field is "hard", which discourages students from studying it, and then they see that even if they succeed in their studies they'll be thrown away and have no use for it.
There are those who will say, "Good. Tough luck for you. The free market has told you the choices you made were wrong. Get a job, any job, and quit whining. Get retrained or re-educated." But how much more training can you give a person with 30 years experience and is thrown out the door with nothing to move on to? How much more education can you give a Ph.D.? How can a person with a technical career and an advanced degree even hope to get on at WalMart or ride the garbage truck when the personnel officer sees they are highly trained and educated in another field and will jump ship as soon as they can land a job they're trained to do (I know, its happened to me)? How can you ask everyone who is thrown out of their career to start a new business on their own when they need every cent to support their families in a modest lifestyle?
This country is in real long-term danger of becoming a technological also-ran. We're not only losing the current generation of technologically literate workers, we're losing the future generations. No one will want to go into those fields. We won't have the infrastructure anymore. We won't have the human and intellectual capital. Knowledge will be lost, never to return.
My fear is that the future economy will depend on imported technology. Domestically, what we'll be producung is lawsuits, insurance policies to mitigate the effects of those lawsuits, and fried burgers and tacos.
Maybe a tax/tariff based on # of bits in a program/module would help eliminate bloatware.
(But then all the MicroSoft programers would need to be retrained)...
And this would be different from the current Microsoft OS products in what way, exactly?
Ummm, the documentation would be in Hindi/Russian? Could we tell?
What could have saved these Sprint jobs would have been a tariff on overseas production of Software. Now if you want to discuss specifics of Traiff policy please tell me why you defend Harley davidson not being able to sell motorcycles in China. why is the Rupee subject to currency controls. why do you defend the subsidization of foreign businesses at the expense of american taxpayers. Now if you wish to make a case for tariffs of foreign telecom providers operating in the uSA I will be glad to listen. IOf you are not going to discuss specific trade policies then I will dismiss you as another nut who only wishes harm to the USA and its citizens abnd legal residents.
The politicians you name have unclean hands. Unions, although they stand to be big losers now that offshoring has become a tidal wave, have plenty to do with how our industry originally became so uncompetitive, inviting competition the way a tethered goat invites wolves.
We just want America back, it is being stolen from us just as sure as our technology is being stolen by Red China.
I just hope the right number of voters will know the answer when some not-too-scummy politician presents it. I'd hate for the issue to become the sole property of somebody like Howard Dean or Hillary Clinton.
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