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• BusinessWeek: A Double Standard on Trade. Corporations that offshore jobs need to play fair. That means abandoning protectionist stances when it comes to their products. Excerpt: "I am a software developer who is about to be 'Bangalored.' Fine. I am not going to pout about it. The media writes that we are in a 'global economy,' so deal with it. O.K., I will. But we should take the global economy one step further. If U.S. corporations can offshore their labor, allow U.S. consumers to offshore their consumption. For example, if Pfizer (PFE ) can offshore its IT staff to save money, then I should be able to purchase my drugs from Canada or Mexico to save money. I would like to see how IBM would react if I could buy Thinkpad laptop from Singapore for $300. "U.S. corporations are lobbying for the right to offshore, yet also lobby for protection for their products. I say make it fair. If you want free trade, you should feel the sting of free trade... It's a global economy. Deal with it."



• Computerworld: Outsourcing Grandma to Mumbai. Excerpt: Outsourcing has decimated the programming field, but it won't stop there. Consider this scenario, which you might at first think is ridiculous: It's possible that in a matter of years we might see outsourced thoracic and other types of expensive surgery. Think about it. Heart operations can cost well over $250,000. A thoracic surgeon in the U.S. can make as much as $496,000, and hospital beds can cost over $1,500 per day. But the scene is different in India. A surgeon there makes much less than his U.S. counterpart, and hospital rooms are far cheaper. For health insurance companies, this could mean colossal cost savings. Putting a heart patient on an Air India flight might even be cheaper than sending him across town by ambulette service. Should this scenario come to pass and you find yourself in this situation, you could try to fight the insurance company. But heart patients need surgery without delay. They don't have time to appeal what the health insurance company considers a normal and customary charge. This is my prediction: After the outsourcing cabal is done with the programmers and systems analysts, it will go after the doctors. The cost savings to the insurance companies are far too compelling.



• The Financial Express: Outsourcing Is Less About Economics And More About Politics.



• Washington Post: The Tech Jobs Gap. Excerpt: The Labor Department's announcement last week that U.S. employers added 513,000 jobs to their payrolls the first quarter of 2004 and 308,000 jobs in March alone is good news for the economy overall, but the employment picture is less rosy for the technology sector. Outsourcing of U.S. jobs and broad-based efficiency gains, The Miami Herald pointed out, are part of the problem. "In an economic irony, the tepid job creation nationally has occurred against a backdrop of strong growth, low interest rates and mild inflation -- often leaving analysts befuddled as to why companies haven't been hiring. Experts say one factor has been sharp rises in productivity, which means companies are hiking output without adding workers. Second, many jobs being created by the American economic recovery are actually in other countries -- like China and India -- where positions in manufacturing and technology have been outsourced," The Herald said.



• Computerworld: Outsourcing sparks concerns over IT controls to meet Sarbanes-Oxley. IT auditors worry that outsourcers may not provide the documentation needed to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley.



• Kansas City Star: Offshoring jobs could drain public coffers, critics warn. Excerpt: As U.S. companies shift jobs to low-paid workers in developing nations, a growing number of economists and politicians worry that offshore outsourcing could damage the nation's fiscal health by draining tax coffers. Although proponents of offshoring dismiss such concerns as far-fetched or naive, some tax experts say the migration of lucrative technology jobs to India and China is shrinking U.S. employee tax contributions and could exacerbate state budget shortfalls. Others say offshoring could erode already-strapped Social Security, Medicare, workers compensation and other payroll-deduction funds more quickly than anticipated. ... "We're going back to the 1930s, when we had multiple families living together because times were so tight," said the resident of Lawrenceville, Ga. "I'm not sure these corporate executives understand the true costs of outsourcing -- no one's thinking about that, just the bottom line."



• Communications of the ACM: Outsourced and Out of Control, by Lauren Weinstein. Excerpt: Large-scale outsourcing is growing at a frenetic pace around the globe. Many outsourced jobs involve countries where significant privacy laws do not exist; even if those laws are improved under pressure of potential lost business, effective enforcement would still appear to be highly problematic. Customer service outsourcing can give risky access to data such as names, addresses, Social Security numbers, telephone call records, and medical information. Recently, a Pakistani subcontract worker threatened to post U.S. patients' medical data on the Web if claimed back pay was not forthcoming. Software, sometimes of a critical nature, is now routinely subcontracted to foreign outsourced environments, bringing risks of development miscommunication or worse. The U.S. General Accounting Office noted the possibility of malicious changes to code since significant U.S. air traffic control system Y2K work had been subcontracted outside the U.S. without mandated background checks. There are even moves to outsource computer system administration to foreign centers, often in countries with poor (if any) computer security laws, creating the possibility of massive abuse of domestic systems by distant persons who could be difficult or impossible to effectively prosecute. Thanks to subcontracting, you might not even know that the company managing your system is using such facilities and personnel.



• Washington Post editorial by Senator Ernest F. Hollings: Excerpt: When it comes to trade, however, multinational corporations contend that we do not need to protect, but to educate and to improve skills; productivity is the problem, they say. But the United States is the most productive industrial nation in the world, with skills galore. BMW is producing better-quality cars in South Carolina than in Munich. There are other obstacles that need addressing. For 50 years we have tried to penetrate the Japanese market, but have barely done so. To sell textiles in Korea, U.S. firms must first obtain permission from the private Korean textile industry. If you want to sell in China, it's a lot easier if you produce in China. "But we will start a trade war," is the cry. Wake up! We have been in a trade war for more than 200 years. And it's the United States that started it! Just after the colonies won their freedom, the mother country suggested that the United States trade what we produced best and, in exchange, Britain would trade back with what it produced best -- as economist David Ricardo later described in his theory of "comparative advantage." Alexander Hamilton, in his famous "Report on Manufactures," told the Brits, in so many words, to bug off. He said, we are not going to remain your colony shipping you our natural resources -- rice, cotton, indigo, timber, iron ore -- and importing your manufactured products. We are going to build our own manufacturing capacity. ...
  
  We need to organize government to produce and protect jobs, rather than export them. The Commerce Department recently co-sponsored a New York seminar, part of which advised companies on how to move jobs offshore. This aid for exporting jobs must stop. The Department of Commerce should be reconstituted as a Department of Trade and Commerce, with the secretary as czar over the U.S. trade representative. The department's International Trade Administration should determine not only whether goods have been dumped on the U.S. market, but how big the "injury" is to U.S. industry. The International Trade Commission should be eliminated.
  
  A culture of free trade has developed. The big banks that make most of their money outside the country, as well as the Business Roundtable, the Conference Board, the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Retail Federation (whose members make bigger profits on imported articles) and the editorial writers of newspapers that make most of their profits from retail ads -- all these descend on Washington promoting "free trade" to members of Congress. Members looking for contributions shout the loudest. Not just jobs, but also the middle class and the strength of our very democracy are in jeopardy. As Lincoln said, "The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. . . . As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country." Today's dogma is the belief that protectionism will mean trade war and economic stagnation. But we are already in a trade war, one from which the president and the Congress are AWOL.

• SSR's to lose double time on Sundays.
• Call to Action! Join the Rally to protest Offshoring at the IBM Shareholders' Meeting - April 27 in Providence, RI.

• The March Jobs Report: Quantity — not Quality. Excerpt: Research analyst and author Alan Tonelson said the number of jobs generated last month was a pleasant surprise, but the quality of the new jobs was not. "Most of them are lousy jobs," said Tonelson, a research fellow at the U.S. Business and Industry Educational Foundation in Washington D.C. and author of "The Race to the Bottom: Why a Worldwide Worker Surplus and Uncontrolled Free Trade are Sinking American Living Standards (Westview Press). "Most of the new jobs don't measure up, in terms of wages, to those that were lost." In contrast, the nation's higher-wages industries continue to lag in job creation. The number of manufacturing jobs remained level after 43 months of steady declines. Information systems job numbers fell by 1,000. While the rate of job loss in that industry has slowed, tech firms still show a reluctance to begin hiring again.



• Show Us the Jobs Travel Journal. Excerpt: WashTech members Charlie Seaman and Myra Bronstein traveled on the AFL-CIO-sponsored "Show Us the Jobs" bus tour March 24-31, and wrote personal journals along the way. Two large chartered buses left St. Louis with 51 riders on board, one from each state and Washington D.C. You may have watched the tour on television news reports or read accounts of it on the Web, but what follows are the personal accounts of two riders, each of whom say the journey affected them in profound ways they will never forget. That certainly comes through in their journals. We think you will find them affecting, too.



• Filmmaker Documents Effects of American Job Losses. Excerpt: Last May, television producer Greg Spotts puzzled over a question he couldn't get out of his mind. With the U.S. economy supposedly on the rebound, why were so many of his friends out of work? So Spotts, 36, began to look into it. An hour of research before work one day turned into several hours over as many days. Spotts could see that something big, something on a global scale was happening. He learned that hundreds of thousands of the jobs that had been lost in the United States were showing up in places such as Mexico, China and India.