White-Collar Exodus

ABC News ^ | July 29, 2003 | Betsy Stark

[RockyMtnMan]

Michael Emmons thought he knew how to keep a job as a software programmer.

"You have to continue to keep yourself up to speed," he said. "If you don't, you'll get washed out."

Up to speed or not, Emmons wound up being "washed out" anyway. Last summer, he moved his family from California to Florida for the Siemens Co., makers of electronics and equipment for industries. Not long after, Emmons and 19 other programmers were replaced by cheaper foreign workers.

Adding insult to injury, Emmons and the others had to train their replacements.

"It was the most demoralizing thing I've ever been through," he told ABCNEWS. "After spending all this time in this industry and working to keep my skills up-to-date, I had to now teach foreign workers how to do my job so they could lay me off."

Just as millions of American manufacturing jobs were lost in the 1980s and 1990s, today white-collar American jobs are disappearing. Foreign nationals on special work visas are filling some positions but most jobs are simply contracted out overseas.

"The train has left the station, the cows have left the barn, the toothpaste is out of the tube," said John McCarthy, director of research at Forrester Research, who has studied the exodus of white-collar jobs overseas. "However you want to talk about it, you're not going to turn the tide on this in the same way we couldn't turn the tide on the manufacturing shift."

India Calling

Almost 500,000 white-collar American jobs have already found their way offshore, to the Philippines, Malaysia and China. Russia and Eastern Europe are expected to be next. But no country has captured more American jobs than India.

In Bangalore, India, reservation agents are booking flights for Delta; Indian accountants are preparing tax returns for Ernst & Young; and Indian software engineers are developing new products for Oracle.

They are all working at a fraction of the cost these companies would pay American workers.

For example, American computer programmers earn about $60,000, while their Indian counterparts only make $6,000.

"It's about cost savings," said Atul Vashistha, CEO of NeoIT, a California-based consulting company that advises American firms interested in "offshoring" jobs previously held by Americans. "They need to significantly reduce their cost of doing business and that's why they're coming to us right now."

Vivek Pal, an Indian contractor for technology consulting group Wipro, whose clients include Microsoft, GE, JP Morgan Chase, and Best Buy, is hiring 2,000 Indian workers quarterly to keep up with demand. Pal knows American workers resent the "offshoring" trend but says all Americans will benefit in the long run.

"Globalization — whether it's for products or services — may feel like it hurts, but at the end of the day, it creates economic value all around," said Pal.

At the end of the day, Emmons has a different view: "If you sit at a desk, beware," he said. "Your job is going overseas."

[RLK]

Bush 1 made the politically fatal mistake of presuming that he would be voted in for a second term, and had a tin ear regarding the economy. Unfortunately, I find this scenario not entirely improble this time around.

-----------------------

The Bush believe all they need to do to be president is bomb some ragheads and thump their chests while everything else goes down the drain.

[mamelukesabre]

ah, very clever. I like it. I would think it wouldn't be long before every grocery store in the country has systems similar to this

[Lazamataz]

Well guys, it's been fun blowing the day on FR, but I cannot do this all the time. Still, it's been fun. Talk t' y'all soon.

[Lazamataz]

I am caughing and sputtering so much Mrs. Jackson is calling the ambulance for me. Agamemnon is right. You are a bitter and dried up old soul.

Lol! What, what? Hobbit hole threads are big so I'm a bad guy? ;^)

[MightyMouseToSaveThe Day]

Thank you, harpseal, for beating me to the punch on that line. Absolutely correct. There is no nursing shortage, despite the near-daily news stories to that effect. There is a shortage of nurses who are willing to work under the current deplorable working conditions and low pay! I got my nursing license 30yrs ago and have watched the steady exodus of trained nurses over the years. I'm one of them. I have no interest in going back to work those awful hours, for low pay, terrible bureaucracies, and the expectation that minimum standards are perfection (I kid you not on that one). Try taking care of 10 very sick people who need your attention all at the same time, while their family threatens to sue you because you're not answering the call light fast enough, while you're trying to make sure that someone doesn't go into cardiac arrest while you're answering the doctor about why the labwork isn't ready and while you're trying to give medicines, you have to listen to verbal assaults on everything from lousy hospital food to uncomfortable beds to sloppy housekeeping. Oh, and did I mention mandatory overtime and shift work and holidays? And nary a word of thanks--mostly complaints--from everyone: patients, families, administration. Any wonder why nurses are leaving active practice in droves?

Hospitals have LONG ignored the real adverse conditions nurses have labored under. Rather than spend the money to address those concerns, they've found it cheaper to hire foreign nurses (especially filipinos)who are willing to work under these conditions for low pay. The trade off for these nurses is that they get to enter the country legally and then send for their family.

There are thousands and thousands of nurses licensed but not practicing currently. So, I repeat: not a nursing shortage, but a shortage of nurses willing to put up with the abuse. Sad, but true. Oh, and to add insult to injury (you got me started), hospitals won't even rehire nurses like me who've been out of practice for several years. Yes! Sometimes people ask me why I don't go back in to nursing, and even if i were fool enough to want to go back to those working conditions, I'm not hirable as a nurse. I can only be hired if i've nursed within the last 2 yrs. Otherwise, i'd be required to go back to school for a full 1-2 yrs at a cost of thousands of dollars out of my pocket.

Now, if the hospitals were REALLY interested in rehiring nurses who've left the profession, do you think they'd put such onerous requirements on hiring them? Nope. As i said, it's all a sham (which the media are buying)in an effort to legitimize and justify the hiring of cheap foreigners.

[scripter]

You're asking why a politician either is misinformed, uninformed, or lies?

Well, not really! I'm sure there's money behind his factually incorrect position. If I received a letter from my congressman stating there was a shortage of IT workers in the U.S., I'd take that letter and post excerpts in the major publications that covered the congressmans constituent, pointing out his ignorance.

[Concentrate]

This issue will be hung around Dubya's neck.

Of course it will. That's what I've been telling y'all since the year 2000. An economic downturn has little to do with who is president at any given time, but he receives full blame, nonetheless.

In a way, it would nave been better to be saying good-bye to Gore, instead.

[dfwgator]

I just saw where rapper Sean "P Diddy" Combs is spending his time these days cruising around the Mediterranean aboard his 181-foot luxury yacht at a cost of $40,000 a day.

I guess crime DOES pay, afterall.

[PatrioticAmerican]

"I'll bet he still pays 30% of his income in taxes."

Pure numbers say that the average American pays 25% of their income just in federal taxes as the feds have $2T in spending and the GPD is $8T. The states and locals take even more, far more.

[arete]

"The trend appears to be an unstoppable force, and that not just infuriates jobless workers but also worries some economists who say it may ultimately hinder the US economic recovery."

It's unstoppable: High tech jobs ditching US

Richard W.

[Southack]

" I just don't see how the markets, especially the real real estate market can avoid a downturn with so many having their income reduced."

Well, for one thing, salaries are UP year on year as well as over the last five years...not down.

For another, 6.5% unemployment and below is trivial in the grand scheme of things, especially considering that our economy has weathered having women fully enter the workforce over the past 3 decades.

And as for real-estate prices, you've got the highest real-estate prices in crappy salaried places such as Tehran, Hong Kong, and Moscow.

People will simply live 3 and 4 families to a house before they'll change cities or "downsize" or live in an "undesireable" neighborhood. In fact, the same people who diss trailor homes, houseboats, and Q-huts will inevitably be the people who complain that the homes they are looking at are unaffordable. Go figure. There's a whole crew of baby-boomers who won't be caught dead outside of a hip neighborhood or a McMansion, but such decisions are lifestyle **choices** rather than accurate reflections of the housing market at large (more than 60% of all homes in America have no debt or mortgage on them, for instance, so people who try to link "debt" to housing prices are missing the majority of the housing pie).

[Southack]

"So your statement that income taxes are trivial is not reasonable. I and you are in no wise paying 'trivial' income taxes, in that we can rest assured."

America is a bit bigger than just you and I, Laz. The average salary in the U.S. is about $36,000 per year.

I was pointing out that a family of four with a household earning of $40k/yr is now only paying $45 per year in total federal income taxes, which **is** trivial (i.e. less than $4 per month).

[MarkL]

Welcome to Capitalism 101.

I guess I wonder about the accountants who don't seem to look at "the big picture." They don't look past the next reporting period... I wonder what happened to "enlightened capitalism," like what Henry Ford proposed... (please, no NAZI jokes here). Being sure that he paid he workers enough to afford his products.

Mark

[Final Authority]

Demoula's?

[Myrddin]

Laz, look into the managed C++ that is also available to work in the VisualStudio.Net environment. I work with win32, managed C++ and C# every day. I've been migrating the win32 stuff towards managed C++. Better exception handling and garbage collection are 2 major reasons. Another good reason is that you can ditch expensive tools such as NuMega BoundsChecker. You have full access to all the .Net libraries that C# offers under managed C++. I try to write most of my new code in C# to take advantage of the full set of data types AND the ability to move GUI code off to a compact .Net frameword implementation on a PocketPC 2003 platform.

[Myrddin]

What keeps the cusomers from putting some items in grocery bags without ringing them up? It seems to me that people would start cheating and, oh say, not ring up about every third item in their shopping cart.

The Fred Meyer store in Pocatello has a 4 station self-scanner. There are tags on nearly everything. You scan, run the item over a pad to deactivate the tag, then place the item in the bag. Each scanned item contributes weight to the bag that matches the expected weight. The supervising checker assists as necessary. If you try to sneek something through, the still active ID tag will catch you. Fresh produce is about the only thing you might sneek through.

[superloser]

In your example, machinery was purchased and installed in this country thereby contributing something to the local economy making the displaced workers able to find new jobs "somewhere" in it.

When the job, income, and contribution to the local economy is shipped overseas, well....its a whole different story altogether. The money that would have gone back into the local economy is now gone and cannot create new opportunity.

[HitmanLV]

Adding insult to injury, Emmons and the others had to train their replacements.

We really are raising a legion of gutless wonders. I would have walked out before doing this. You get no points for being nice on the way out. Of course, every job I ever quit has been a scene, so what do I know?

Chicks did it, though!

[raybbr]

I don't think a lot of successful businesspeople act like he does.

Actually, the guy across the street from me is a lot like him. He's done very well for himself and he projects the demanding attitude towards his acquiantences all the time. I take him down a peg, he acts recalcitrant and then goes back to doing it. They can't help it. They are so used to being catered to and treated like kings from their clients they begin to expect it from everybody.

[raybbr]

Well, for one thing, salaries are UP year on year as well as over the last five years...not down.

That's an old trick. There are less people working so naturally the average goes up. Couple that with the fact that you have many low wage workers now and the compounds the disparity.

If wages are so much higher now why is it the entry level workers now make $8/hr where I work. When I started in 1978 I was making $7.80/hr at entry level.