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• Navhind Times (India): Tennessee first US state to enact anti-outsourcing law. Excerpt: The new law asks state procurement officials to prefer only US-based employees relating to data-entry and call-centre services. Lawmakers had overwhelmingly approved last month the legislation, which was signed into law last week. “It kind of rubbed people the wrong way that state tax dollars we are giving were going out of the country,” lawmaker, Mr Dough Overbey was quoted as saying.



• Business Week: Offshoring: You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet. The transfer of service jobs abroad will gather steam for generations. Excerpt: Forrester Research Inc., the most widely quoted company on offshoring statistics, estimates that 3 million to 5 million more jobs will be transferred in the next 5 to 10 years. But that projection and others like it may vastly underestimate the future challenge. The combination of rising productivity made possible by widespread use of information technology, plus the unrelenting pressure on U.S. companies to continue to cut labor costs, guarantees that more work will be done in America by fewer people. In addition, from China to the Czech Republic, there is virtually an unlimited supply of industrious and educated labor working at a fraction of U.S. wages. And these workers' skills will be enhanced by the expansion abroad of the research operations of companies such as IBM and Intel employing local talent. Moreover, as U.S.-based employers consider the cost of adding either one American or, say, one Indian to the payroll, the alternative of offshoring will put downward pressure on middle-class wages throughout the U.S. And in a broadband world that allows overseas work to be supervised in real time, the sheer speed at which large swaths of the service sector can be moved to another country will create far more disruption for workers and communities than we've seen so far in the slower-moving manufacturing sector. ... Long after the American occupation of Iraq, and years after the current upswing in the business cycle, the issues raised by offshoring will be a central American concern. In giving them short shrift, both George Bush and John Kerry are not only letting Americans down today but also ensuring bigger problems down the road.



• Common Dreams: Collective Strength: White-Collar Offshoring Spurs Union Growth. Excerpt: During his 15 years with The Boeing Co., Stephen Gentry never pictured himself wearing the union label. Then the computer programmer from Auburn, Wash., was laid off last summer after training his replacement, a high-tech worker in India. Now Gentry, who hasn't worked since, is among those convinced that America's white-collar workers have to band together to keep their futures from being exported to places where skilled labor comes cheap. "I don't see any other options," said Gentry, 52, who's joined a Seattle-based union trying to organize tech workers around the country. "There's no loyalty anymore. I feel my job was taken by corporate greed."



• New York Law Journal: Law Firms Offered Outsourced Support Staffs. Excerpt: The outsourcing of U.S. jobs to India and China has emerged as one of the most hotly debated issues on the presidential campaign trail. And Hildebrandt International wants to make sure that debate takes place among law firm managing partners as well: The well-known law firm consulting group announced today a joint venture to offer American law firms a means of outsourcing their support staffs to India. ... Short said the case for outsourcing is compelling. Given an estimated 30 percent to 60 percent cost savings in support tasks, he said, outsourcing could potentially free funds for firms to hire more lawyers. But law firms might just as likely use the savings to increase partners' compensation. Though corporations can point to shareholder benefit or increased research and development spending in justifying outsourcing, law firms are vulnerable to charges that such moves are motivated only by greed. Ganesh Natarajan, a former partner at McGuireWoods and the founder of Mindcrest, a Chicago-based legal outsourcing company, said the political side of the issue is influencing a number of law firms. "We have been told very clearly by some law firms that they are going to wait until after the election," he said. Vita acknowledged that outsourcing is a controversial subject at the moment, but he said he expects the rhetoric to die down now that the presidential race is past the primary phase.



• Computerworld: Microsoft plans expansion in India. Excerpt: Microsoft Corp. is planning a number of moves to increase and potentially consolidate its development activities in India, according to company officials and sources. Microsoft is increasing the number of employees at its software development center in Hyderabad in the South India state of Andhra Pradesh from 200 to about 500 by 2005, according to a company spokeswoman. ... The news that Microsoft is moving into its own large facility in Hyderabad sparked protest from the Seattle-based Washington Alliance of Technology Workers (WashTech). "Microsoft expanding in India means that workers in Redmond will face direct competition from workers that make a fraction of their wages," said Marcus Courtney, president of WashTech. "This will only lower wages and benefits for Microsoft U.S.-based employees. The work that Microsoft is getting done in R&D in India can be done in this country."



• Computerworld: Offshore Threat Debated at Hearing on Network Security. Vendors put on defensive before House. Excerpt: Offshore software development is one factor behind the escalation of exploitable network vulnerabilities, according to testimony at a hearing on network security before a U.S. House subcommittee last week. Software companies must add more controls to the development process for software produced outside the U.S., said Steve Solomon, CEO of Citadel Security Software Inc. in Dallas. "Software development organizations should be required to have all overseas-developed software examined for malicious capabilities embedded in the code," Solomon told the House Government Reform Committee's Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations and the Census. "Industry and government must work together to develop some form of standard or review process to address this growing threat."



• Computerworld: Study: India's outsourcing industry continues to boom. The U.S. and U.K. markets accounted for about 85% of revenue. Despite protests in Europe and the U.S. against outsourcing and the moving of jobs to India, the country's software services and business process outsourcing (BPO) services business is booming, according to data released today by the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) in Delhi. India's software and services exports business recorded revenue of $12.5 billion in the fiscal year that ended March 31, up by 30.5% over revenue of $9.6 billion in the previous year, according to NASSCOM. The revenue figures include billings by Indian outsourcers and wholly owned software development and BPO operations in India of multinational companies.



• Computerworld: Alcoa to ship 70 IT jobs to India. Most of the positions had already been outsourced. Excerpt: A "vast majority" of the affected jobs are already outsourced and are currently being performed by a U.S.-based services provider, said Kevin Lowrey, a spokesman for the company. The only difference under the new arrangement is that the jobs will be handled by an offshore contractor instead of a domestic one, Lowrey said. He declined to name the U.S.-based services provider. ... News of Alcoa's plans comes at a time when U.S. companies are increasingly reluctant to talk about their offshore moves because of the strong sentiment against the trend. The growing lack of transparency is making it difficult to get a true handle on the level of offshore outsourcing that's taking place, said Marcus Courtney, president of the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers in Seattle. WashTech operates a Web site that tracks companies that have outsourced jobs to overseas locations. So far, the organization has compiled a list of 250 companies culled from media reports and insider tips. "Corporations are doing everything they can to keep their activities and the number of jobs being moved overseas from being publicized," Courtney said.



• Jim Hightower: India Rebels Against High-Tech Plutocracy. Excerpt: Endless articles have been written about the sudden economic boom in the gleaming, new high-tech centers of Southern India. As the CEOs of Dell, Microsoft, Intel and the rest fattened their bottom lines by replacing American programmers and engineers with much cheaper ones in India, we were told that such self-serving outsourcing was really a morally responsible move, for it was generating a newly-affluent, upper-middle-class over there––a golden example of the boundless glories of corporate globalization. But what they didn't tell us is that the so-called "boom" went only an inch deep, not touching the vast majority of this nation's one billion people, much less lifting them out of grinding poverty and drudgery. While the government launched a PR campaign it called "India Shining" to tout the new high-tech economy, two-thirds of the people still depend on agriculture to eke out a living, 300 million Indians still live on less than a dollar a day, and thousands of villages have no schools, hospitals, or clean water. Indeed, the lives of the majority have worsened, for the government slashed public services, privatized agencies, cut wages, and eliminated millions of jobs in an effort to attract foreign capital and offer subsidies to high-tech moguls.



• WashTech News: Visa bills stalled until ‘05. Congress likely to pass on H-1B and L-1 visa bill decisions. Excerpt: “If industry insists that it does need people with graduate degrees, then they should hire the tens of thousands of American programmers and engineers who have graduate degrees but are unemployed.” Matloff was blunt in his analysis of companies hiring foreign graduate students with H-1b visas. “The reason the industry hires H-1Bs, in the vast majority of cases, is that the H-1Bs are cheap. The fact that industry is hiring so many H-1Bs and that we've hit the cap is due to the fact that industry wants to hire cheap labor, not because it can't find Americans to fill the jobs.”



• Washington Post: What Outsourcing Problem? Excerpt: The gist of a new layoff study by the Labor Department is that very few U.S. job losses can be blamed on "offshoring" -- a finding that is already being slammed by critics who say the government dramatically undercounted the number of jobs heading overseas to cheaper labor markets. At the same time, the findings are expected to buttress the arguments of various industry groups and economists who say sending technology, manufacturing and other jobs to India and China and other cheaper labor markets is in the long-term best interests of the economy at large. As the Knight Ridder news service put it, "While certain industries, manufacturing and software among them, were found to have been hit harder than others, the report implies that public anxiety about jobs moving overseas, called offshoring, may be overblown."



• Wall Street Journal: Big Three's Outsourcing Plan: Make Parts Suppliers Do It. Using Chinese Prices as Base, Car Makers Set Targets That Force Firms Offshore. Excerpt: According to a recent study of parts suppliers by Roland Berger, 133,000 jobs, or 16% of the labor pool, in the American parts industry have disappeared over the past four years as parts suppliers cut costs by improving productivity or shifting jobs to lower-cost countries such as China and Mexico. By 2010, the same study predicts a further 127,000 jobs, or 18% of the 707,000 remaining, will disappear or move overseas, says Andreas Mai, the author of the Roland Berger study.



• New York Times: High-End Technology Work Not Immune to Outsourcing. Excerpt: In the debate over high-technology work migrating abroad, there has been widespread agreement on at least one thing: the jobs requiring higher levels of skill are the least at risk. Routine software programming and testing jobs, analysts agree, are the ones most susceptible to being grabbed by fast-growing Indian outsourcing companies. By contrast, the people who devise the early blueprints for projects - the software architects - have been regarded as far less likely to see their jobs farmed out. But Microsoft contract documents show that as far back as 2001 the big company had agreed to pay two Indian outsourcing companies, Infosys and Satyam, to provide skilled "software architects" for Microsoft projects. The documents were obtained this month by WashTech, an organization of technology workers based in Seattle, which gave copies to The New York Times.



• CNET News: Consulting group: Send more jobs offshore. Excerpt: In the latest salvo in a debate over sending tech work overseas, a report sponsored by an industry group concludes that the practice is good for the U.S. economy and its workers. Offshore outsourcing of software and information technology services tasks not only is boosting the U.S. gross domestic product but also helping to generate U.S. jobs, including positions in the IT sector, according to the report. Released Tuesday, it was prepared by research firm Global Insight and sponsored by the Information Technology Association of America trade group. ITAA's members include tech giants IBM, Electronic Data Systems and Accenture. These companies are among those that are locating operations in lower-wage countries such as India.

• Non-Union workers LOSE their Weingarten Rights—NLRB Holds That Employees in a Nonunionized Workplace Are Not Entitled to Representation at a Disciplinary Interview. Excerpt: The National Labor Relations Board has ruled by a 3-2 vote that employees who work in a nonunionized workplace are not entitled under Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act to have a coworker accompany them to an interview with their employer, even if the affected employee reasonably believes that the interview might result in discipline. ... In this case, IBM, whose employees are not represented by a union, denied three employees' requests to have a coworker present during investigatory interviews about a former employee's allegations that they had engaged in harassment. An NLRB administrative law judge, applying Epilepsy Foundation, found that IBM violated Section 8(a)(1) of the Act by denying the employees' requests for the presence of a co-worker. Upon review, a Board majority reversed Epilepsy and therefore reversed the judge.



• Hill Urged To Review SBC-Communications Workers Contract. Excerpt: Conservative business leaders are urging Congressional Republicans to look into the pending contract worked out by SBC Communications and the Communications Workers of America. Led by the National Legal and Policy Center, the opponents of the deal suggest that it will cost Americans in higher bills, lock in SBC's market domination, and give more power to the CWA, which is anti-Bush.



• 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


• United States Cited as Violator of Workers’ Freedom to Form Unions. Excerpt: Global competition is destroying workers’ rights worldwide, and the United States is noted for its violations of workers’ fundamental right to form unions, according to the annual survey of trade union rights by the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). The report finds employers in the United States increasingly hire union-busting consultants to prevent workers from gaining a voice at work. In addition, two of every five U.S. public-sector workers are denied basic collective bargaining rights.



• Arizona Republic: Workers not happy about offshoring. Excerpt: "This issue is really resonating out there," said Rick Cohen, a partner at Phoenix's Lewis and Roca law firm, the Arizona representative for the ELA network. "This is much greater reaction than with layoffs in general. There is a sense out there we shouldn't be trading jobs for profits." While only 6 percent said they have lost a job because of offshoring, 30 percent said they know someone who had lost a job because of offshoring. Eight percent said they feel personally at risk of a losing a job because of offshoring.



• Detroit Free Press: Organizing could get harder for UAW, others. Excerpt: In what could be a blow to the United Auto Workers and other unions, the Republican-majority National Labor Relations Board said it would decide whether to curtail a union's ability to organize workers through a simplified process known as card-check agreements. The case probably won't be decided until sometime in 2005, and the outcome of this November's presidential election will likely decide the issue. The party that occupies the White House gets to control three of the five seats on the board, which regulates union-management relations in the United States. The current 3-to-2 GOP majority would swing back to more union-friendly Democratic control if U.S. Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the presumptive Democratic nominee, wins the presidency. All sides agree that the case represents a turning point in the question of how easily unions should be allowed to organize workers.



• Arizona Republic: Over 50? Keep foot in door. Excerpt: I had never felt so lonely and helpless. I had been working since I was 16 years old. After college I had gone to work for IBM, where it took me 15 years to make the executive ranks and 21 years to break $100,000 a year. I left IBM to become a director of communications for ROLM, an IBM and Siemens joint venture. And then I became a vice president, first at Digital Equipment Corp. and then at Nortel Networks before heading back to IBM in early 1999. I was lured here to Phoenix in late 2000 to work for ON Semiconductor. ... If you are over 50 and job hunting, take 10 years off your resume. You won't even get in the door if the recruiter or hiring HR manager finds out you are over 50. If you do get in the door, you will at least get a chance to let them see just how good you really are and why they should hire you. If your hair is gray, color it.