Join your fellow employees who are fighting for your benefits - Join the Alliance!

Retirees, Vendors, Contractors, Temps, and Active Employees are all eligible to become members of the Alliance.

• Washington Post: Actor, Governor, President, Icon. Excerpt: Even Reagan's critics acknowledge that he was a masterful political performer. Theodore Roosevelt termed the presidency a "bully pulpit," and Franklin D. Roosevelt gave this pulpit a new dimension in the radio age with folksy "fireside chats." Reagan, a former Democrat who had voted three times for FDR and admired him, adapted the bully pulpit to television. He sometimes borrowed directly from FDR. A refrain that became a frequent punch line of Reagan's 1980 campaign speeches -- "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?" -- was a variant of an FDR comment in a 1934 fireside chat.Reagan gave weekly Saturday radio speeches to the American people, a practice continued by his successors. He was particularly effective in prepared television speeches delivered from the Oval Office. Drawing upon skills forged in his earlier careers in radio, films and television, Reagan set the standard in using television to promote his presidency.Reagan was nearly 78 when he completed his second term, eight years older than the next-oldest president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was when he left office in 1961. But until he was stricken by Alzheimer's, Reagan's trim, athletic build made him appear younger than his years, and his amiability and self-deprecating humor softened the hard edge of his ideological advocacies. Reagan poked fun at his age, his work habits and his supposed simple-mindedness. He once said that he knew that hard work never killed anyone, "but I figure, why take the chance?" Much of his humor was spontaneous. Asked while visiting astronauts in Houston before the successful launch of the space shuttle Discovery in 1988 whether he would like to go into space, Reagan quipped, "I've been in space for several years."

• The Newspaper Guild: 'In-sourcing' no cure for losses. Excerpt: With the growing loss of jobs to overseas markets producing a political backlash, “free trade” advocates have started responding with claims that offshoring losses must be balanced against the gains caused by “in-sourcing.” In this view, foreign investment in the U.S. creates jobs which offset the jobs shipped to other countries paying lower wages. But such claims, while superficially plausible, don't appear substantiated by actual job numbers. According to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, U.S. companies owned by foreign multinationals in 1991 employed 4.74 million workers. Over the next decade, the foreign multinationals acquired additional U.S. companies employing 4.1 million workers. They also established U.S.-based companies employing another 274,000 workers. If no jobs had been lost, the number of U.S. jobs in foreign-owned companies in 2001 would have been 9.15 million. Instead, 2001 employment at foreign-owned companies was 6.37 million, indicating a net loss of 2.78 million U.S, jobs through import displacement, sales losses, productivity increases or divestiture. “Foreign-owned companies are indeed employing millions of Americans,” the EPI analysis observes, “but the evidence suggests that they have destroyed more jobs than they created in recent years.”



• British Columbia Government and Service Employees' Union (BCEU): Pending inquiry, government should halt its plan to give private information to U.S. firms. Excerpt: The provincial government should immediately halt plans that would put private information on every British Columbians into the hands of U.S. firms, pending a full inquiry by B.C.’s privacy commissioner, the B.C. Government and Service Employees’ Union said today. “I welcome the announcement that B.C.’s Privacy Commissioner, David Loukidelis, will conduct an inquiry into whether our private information will be secure in the hands of American companies,” said George Heyman, President of the BCGEU. “The government is proceeding with outsourcing plans despite warnings that the privacy of British Columbians could be compromised,” he said. ... The union has already initiated a court challenge on the privatization of the Medical Services Plan, and called on the privacy commissioner to look at four additional contracts: ... A proposed contract with IBM or Electronic Data Systems (EDS) for helpdesk services that would give the company complete access to all private data held by the provincial government, as well as all access codes held by government staff.



• RescueAmericanJobs is taking a survey that you can participate in. The Rescue American Jobs website was started one year ago, and our online community quickly evolved into a rallying point for activists working to save America's middle class. Since then, they have worked to build an organization to support and coordinate efforts across 46 states and more than 100 cities. Coming up on their first year anniversary, they are reflecting on the last year's activities, and they'd like to hear from you. They want to know where you see the progress of the movement, what they can do to better support your efforts, and how you envision the future direction of the organization over the next year. Please take a moment to fill out the survey, and tell them your concerns, your vision, and your needs: http://www.rescueamericanjobs.org/surveys. Please feel free to forward this to your friends, e-mail groups, websites, family, etc. They would like to get input from as many concerned citizens as possible.



• Wall Street Journal: India to Increase Software Exports Via Outsourcing. Excerpt: The software-outsourcing sector in India is poised for a year of robust exports, as savings for U.S. companies outweigh a political backlash there against shipping jobs overseas, an industry body said Thursday. ... The U.S. remains the biggest market for Indian software companies, generating 70% of their revenue. The U.K. is second, with a 15% share of India's software exports. To maintain the headstart India has over its rivals like the Philippines, South Africa and Ireland, Nasscom urged the government to set the agenda for services trading in negotiations at the World Trade Organization. "India has a natural advantage in services and we need to press that home. India will be a disproportionate beneficiary of WTO negotiations if we are able to set the agenda," Mr. Rao said, referring to guidelines on crossborder trade in services. In the past, Western companies have questioned India's record on data safety and its legal protections on intellectual-property rights. But Nasscom member companies now are moving to put in place stricter regulations on data transference to keep their Western customers plugged into India's outsourcing boom. More than one million Indians are expected to be employed in call-center, back-office and software jobs by 2008, making the sector the country's biggest foreign-exchange earner, with expected annual revenue of $50 billion.



• Axis of Logic: Economic Miasma. Excerpt: In various articles and letters (mainly to Businessweek International) I have endeavoured to focus the US mindset on certain inescapable realities: without much success. Presently, to those with a more open mind in the United Kingdom, your economy mimics the worst aspects of the British economy, set, during the appalling Thatcher years. A core focus on financial services, has taken effort, reward, vision, purpose and understanding away from the simple tenets of Wealth Creation. Worse, it has confused personal wealth gathering, with wealth creation, per se. Like Great Britain, the USA was founded, economically, upon the central premise of simplistic self-improvement: if one took labour, added raw material plus a certain level of skill and/or innovation, one became successful. Originally, in both countries such success was agronomic: as engineering superseded an agrarian basis, however, parts of the core dynamic underwent a paradigm shift. ... Today, the tail wags the dog and all too often industry leaders decide their corporate strategy and day-to-day policies purely on the market reaction. The true stakeholders – the investors and equally important, the workforce – are very much the poor relation in these cynical dynamics. Consider this: General Electric now achieves more revenue and profit from Financial Services, than it does from making things and selling them! Frightening? You bet! More and more Americans are working either part-time or on short contracts, with little or no compensation when their job is lost. Not the same for the boys at the top, with their greedy pension schemes, Golden Parachutes and director’s contracts, however! Year-on-year, the relationship between pay scales of Joe Average and Directors of corporations widens, inexorably. As more and more jobs are lost to outsourcing, as the level of imports (of consumer durables and semi-durables) increases, as more and more “McJobs” are hailed as the economic answer, how will the USA sustain its society?



• Janet Krueger comments on the future of jobs in the United States given the reality of off-shoring. Full excerpt: It is important to note that there are literally *NO* industries that aren't seeing middle class jobs moved off shore. In the biosciences, more and more work is being done overseas -- it is not uncommon, if you take the time to ask, to find that your medical tests are being done overseas. Radiologists are being laid off as HMOs discover they can ship X-rays and scans overseas for interpretation. Wall Street firms are looking overseas for more and more financial analysis. Westlaw just moved the jobs of 200 lawyers who were interpreting court cases and building head notes overseas. As fast as someone with a masters or a doctorate can get retrained, that same job can be moved off shore.

  It isn't just manufacturing jobs. It isn't just call center jobs. It isn't just the hourly programming jobs. More and more, it is jobs that require masters degrees and doctorates. If you're not scared about whether your children and grandchildren will ever be able to hold down middle class jobs with full benefits, you should be!

  And by the way, I'm not asserting the solution is to become a social welfare state... We need middle class workers who are able to pay taxes. What we need is a complete overhaul in US government and tax policies with respect to American and foreign corporations. And one place we need to start is with an analysis of the unjust trade policies the current administration has been pushing through...

• Think Twice for June/July 2004 [PDF]. Feature articles in this issue include:
  • IBM Stockholders Meeting Report
  • Speech to IBM Stockholders’ Meeting by Jimmy Leas
  • Tally of Alliance shareholder resolutions
  • Life of a SSR Gets Tougher Every Quarter
  • IBM Offshoring Hits Australia
  • Contractors face new pay cuts and lack of respect