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In addition, the Audit Committee selected PricewaterhouseCoopers ("PWC") as the Company's independent auditor for the year 2004, despite the fact that the firm purchased PWC's consulting business.

• USA Today: Workers take on foreign outsourcing. Excerpt: The Communications Workers of America (CWA) Pension Fund is asking Sprint to look at its foreign outsourcing to see if it may hurt the company's brand name and reputation. A resolution to that effect will be considered at the company's shareholder meeting today in Overland Park, Kan. Sprint spokesman Mark Bonavia says determining the impact on reputation "could require us to speculate on something that might never occur." Alliance at IBM, a group of several thousand current and former employees formed after IBM changed its pension program, is changing its priority to offshoring. A rally is planned for April 27 after the IBM shareholders meeting in Providence.



• Kansas City Star: Union plans action against Sprint policies. Excerpt: The Communications Workers of America said Monday it will initiate a campaign to force Sprint Corp. to change policies it said “abuse” employees. Representatives of the union, who are expected to demonstrate outside Sprint's annual shareholder meeting this morning, held a planning session Sunday and Monday in Overland Park. A union official said the union's concerns involve cuts to employees' health-care benefits and Sprint's decision to outsource certain jobs overseas.



• Network World: Sprint CEO Gary Foresee addresses outsourcing. Excerpt: Sprint Chairman and CEO Gary Foresee Tuesday defended the company's need to find the best suppliers and partners -- sometimes though outsourcing -- as he addressed concerns raised by some disgruntled employees and shareholders worried about potential job losses.



• Washington Post: Putting a Human Face on Outsourcing. Excerpt: "Outsourcing" is one of those impersonal buzzwords that politicians and corporate muckity-mucks love to bandy about, but the word itself seems to downplay how personal an issue this is to the technology workers whose jobs are moving to India, Eastern Europe and other cheaper labor markets. Enter Fast Company. The technology magazine's latest issue puts a microscope on outsourcing's human fallout, as editor John Byrne makes clear in his introduction to the package: "It may be that competitive organizations have no choice but to play the labor arbitrage game to survive. It may be that a new wave of innovation and creativity will lead to new industries and new jobs. But in the meantime, millions of smart, talented, diligent people are losing something, and that will change them and their families forever. Their loss should never be discounted, dismissed, or ignored."



• Computerworld: ITAA's Job Dream. Excerpt: Here's a comforting bedtime story: Offshoring won't just save companies money. It will also create jobs. And reduce inflation. And grow the economy. Those are the top-line conclusions of a new report from the Information Technology Association of America, the IT vendors' lobbying group. Just don't read very far past that top line -- at least, not if you want to get any sleep tonight. See, the report says those new jobs won't be IT jobs. And that reduced inflation will come in part from lower pay -- "wage compression," as it's charmingly dubbed by the report's principal author, Global Insight Inc. chief economist Nariman Behravesh. And that economic growth depends on the willingness of the foreign employees who get our offshored jobs to spend their paychecks on U.S.-made exports. Don't take my word for it. It's all in the report, brought to you by the people who, just a few years ago, were saying that the U.S. desperately needed to increase its IT workforce. Yes, really. Since early 2000, the ITAA has predicted the creation of more than 4 million new U.S. IT jobs -- 1.8 million of which would go begging because there just wouldn't be enough IT people to fill them.



• Computerworld: Lost Your Job Yet? Excerpts: Frank Hayes' fears about techies bailing out of a declining American IT workforce are already being realized ["ITAA's Job Dream"]. I've done it. I concluded that IT is largely a dead-end career for Americans and opted out so that my wife could pursue advanced degrees in education and move up in a field that can't be so readily outsourced or filled by guest workers. I rebelled at my former employer's "wage compression," outsourcing and use of H-1B and L-1 visa holders. ... Though people like Miller and Fiorina deny it, America's displaced IT workers don't lack for skills or education. There is no urgent need for guest workers and no internal shortage of technically trained workers. Technology hasn't made American IT workers outmoded. Access to cheaper, more submissive and more manageable non-American labor has just made American IT workers undesirable and frequently unemployable. ...
  
  Free-trade and outsourcing proponents publicly hold out the option of retraining into other professions, but these other professions are mostly unidentified. The reality, as I told Bob Herbert, is that there aren't any new middle-class postindustrial jobs for displaced Information Age workers. There are no opportunities to leverage our experience into higher-value-added jobs. Instead, there are persistent credible accounts of software engineers taking low-wage unskilled jobs just to survive. ... There is no employment rebound for IT workers. Recent college grads or new entrants into IT can't even get jobs on help desks, which are now increasingly moving offshore. The reports from companies such as Challenger, Forrester and Gartner all point to increased IT outsourcing and use of IT guest workers. "Global competitiveness" sounds good in corporate boardrooms and political speeches, but the reality is that increasing numbers of American IT workers are suffering and losing confidence in our political and business leaders. We are locked in a merciless, unrestricted competition with low-wage workers of the developing world. This is ultimately an unwinnable competition. American IT workers, like many in the middle class, are learning that education, skill and hard work are no longer indicators of success. It's all about cheap labor -- a fact not lost on Harris Miller, Carly Fiorina, Mark Hurd and Sam Palmisano. (Editor's note: This is a must read article. It thoroughly debunks the ITAA's and corporate America's argument that "outsourcing is good for the country.") If link is broken, view Adobe Acrobat version [PDF--74 KB].



• BusinessWeek: Job Exports: Europe's Turn. It's following the offshoring trend -- and much of it is white-collar. Excerpt: Norwich Union is as British as fish and chips. A unit of Aviva PLC, a London financial-services group, it's the country's No. 1 insurer, boasting a workforce of 30,000 spread across Britain. But hundreds of those people will lose their jobs in the next few months, and other vacant positions will go unfilled, as Norwich Union shifts 3,700 customer service and back-office jobs to India. "There's a big cost advantage,"says Simon Machell, Norwich Union's customer-service director. Indeed, the company's costs per employee in India average less than half the figure in Britain. And while many British university graduates shun call-center jobs, in India Norwich Union has been swamped with résumés from highly qualified Indian graduates.



• BusinessWeek: Dell's Hiring Binge -- Abroad. Of 7,000 jobs it added in 2003, only 1,000 were in the U.S. The PC giant now employees more workers overseas than at home. Excerpt: Dell, which is always looking for more efficient means for building, distributing, and servicing its growing product line, has been one of the more active outsourcers around. It manufactures all of its notebook PCs in Penang, Malaysia. And it runs call centers in Panama and India that respond to tech-support questions from customers around the world, including the U.S. Dell even created a minor stir when complaints from some corporate customers about the quality of support they got from the Indian locale led it to reroute their calls to the U.S.



• Newsweek Business, care of MS-NBC: Should I Stay or Should I Go? Sending jobs offshore to countries like India seemed like a sure bet. Now, some firms are having second thoughts. Excerpt: Wesley Bertch admits he fell for offshore outsourcing "hook, line and sinker." So when Bertch, chief techie for Minneapolis-based Life Time Fitness, a health club chain, needed software to evaluate potential new locations for gyms late last year, he looked overseas where he could pay $6 an hour instead of $60 for programmers. He hired a large, reputable Indian outsourcing firm a few months ago, then sat back and watched his troubles mount. Not only did the offshore team produce code that was full of bugs, they ran up big bills working overtime to fix their mistakes. Bertch finally canned the offshore contractors, hired several local programmers and started preaching to industry colleagues that managing such projects across oceans is doomed to failure. His biggest surprise? "I've since talked to scores of my peers, and we are all singing from the same hymn book," Bertch says.



• Computerworld: Effort afoot to exempt 20k from H-1B cap. The bill would allow hiring of more foreign grads with advanced degrees. Excerpt: The bill, introduced earlier this month by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), is supported by Compete America, a coalition of manufacturers, academic groups and IT vendors such as Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp., Oracle Corp., and Sun Microsystems Inc. This year's H-1B cap of 65,000 was reached in mid-February, less than five months after the Oct. 1 start of the federal fiscal year. Smith's bill, the American Workforce Improvement and Jobs Protection Act, wouldn't raise the cap, but it would exempt from that limit up to 20,000 graduates with a master's degree or higher from a U.S. university.



• New York Times editorial by Thomas L. Friedman: Losing Our Edge? Excerpt: I was just out in Silicon Valley, checking in with high-tech entrepreneurs about the state of their business. I wouldn't say they were universally gloomy, but I did detect something I hadn't detected before: a real undertow of concern that America is losing its competitive edge vis-à-vis China, India, Japan and other Asian tigers, and that the Bush team is deaf, dumb and blind to this situation. ... The bottom line: we are actually in the middle of two struggles right now. One is against the Islamist terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere, and the other is a competitiveness-and-innovation struggle against India, China, Japan and their neighbors. And while we are all fixated on the former (I've been no exception), we are completely ignoring the latter. We have got to get our focus back in balance, not to mention our budget. We can't wage war on income taxes and terrorism and a war for innovation at the same time.

Call to Action: Major Anti-Offshoring Rally. Join Us at the IBM Shareholders' Meeting Lend your voice to protect American High Tech Jobs The Alliance@IBM/CWA Local 1701 will join Jobs with Justice, the Programmers Guild, TORAW and other organizations to hold a major rally against offshoring of American jobs by U.S. high tech companies.

When: April 27, 2004

Where: Rhode Island Convention Center, Providence RI. The rally will be held in the plaza outside the rotunda entrance to the Convention Center.

Time: Immediately following the IBM Shareholders' Meeting, about 11:30 am.

Demonstrators who wish to join us are welcome. Please contact Ralph Montefusco for more information, (802) 598-5613 or email at Rmontefu@Sover.Net

Press: All press reporters are welcome. We are available for interviews the day before the event, the morning of the event, and during the event. Please contact the Alliance Office at (607) 658-9285 or email us at endicottalliance@stny.rr.com.

Transportation: Directions to the Center are here. The Train station is about 6-7 blocks away for those who prefer public transportation.