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• Jim Hightower: Who Needs American Workers? Excerpts: Maybe you're one of the two million Americans who've recently had their jobs offshored to India, Pakistan, and elsewhere, or one of the millions more expected to have your jobs shipped abroad in the next few years. If so, don't worry, Bucko, for a new growth industry has arisen that offers exciting job opportunities for you discarded Americans. You, too, could become an "American accent and culture trainer." It seems that while such corporations as Citibank, Dell, GE, and Microsoft are eager to abandon the U.S. and move their telephone service jobs to low-wage workers abroad, these English-speaking foreign workers are...well, foreign, so their accents and cultural references can be jarring to U.S. customers placing orders or seeking help. Thus, offshoring companies are hiring Americans to teach foreign replacement workers to sound and behave like Americans. Yes, this means you could end up teaching the Indian or Pakistani or Russian who was given your job how to sound like you! ... Of course, it won't be long before the corporations train low-paid foreigners to teach American accents and culture to foreign workers––then there'll be no need for American workers at all.



• ZDNet Australia: Offshoring: Don't shoot the messenger. Excerpts: India's image as a paragon of outsourcing took a severe beating last week after revelations of offshoring jobs gone awry shook the entire medical fraternity in the United Kingdom. Facing an acute shortage of medical transcribers, eight hospitals in London decided to outsource transcription services. Instructions and letters were dictated into digital voice recorders and the files forwarded to a company called Omnimedical, which would then send the recordings to a team of transcribers in India. In theory, it's a straightforward process but reality proved otherwise. The mistakes in the transcriptions were so serious, it prompted the Association of Medical Secretaries to go public with spokesman Michael Fiennes citing several horrific examples in the Daily Mail: below knee amputation became "baloney amputation" and phlebitis (vein inflammation) left leg was changed to "flea bite his left leg". ... They say the prime motivation behind outsourcing the workload is to provide better service to patients but they fail to address the ramifications of such a move. The root cause behind the dearth of medical secretaries--a combination of low wages and dim career growth--has been skirted in favor of offshoring, the magic short-term solution. The monthly wage of medical secretaries in India is reportedly one-third that of their British counterparts. The hospitals will argue that cost wasn't the only factor in deciding to outsource. In fact, any suggestion that hospitals willfully put patients' lives at risk would surely be met with furious rebuttals.

• ThinkTwice for August/September 2004 [PDF]. Articles this month include:
  • Organizing IBM — Rev it up!
  • The Employee Free Choice Act
  • Take Action! Help us Strengthen Workers’ Right to Form Unions!
  • New IBM Program to Help Employees Whose Jobs are Offshored
  • The Value of a Union Contract
  • Offshore Contractors Target State Government Work


• AFL-CIO: Union Members Come to the Aid of Hurricane Charley Victims.



• Boston Magazine: The Man Who Knew Too Much. A BU professor fights to publicize his report claiming there's a link between cancer deaths and IBM plants. But Big Blue is doing all it can to stop him. Excerpt: Dick Clapp knows cancer. "This is my bible," he says, holding up a purple book thicker than an actual Bible. The title Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention is printed on the spine. A plaque on the wall in Clapp's tiny office at Boston University's School of Public Health recognizes his work studying the prevalence of breast cancer on Cape Cod. Among the journals lining his shelves is one he edited on sewage sludge. Not the most glamorous topic perhaps, but sewage sludge can contain dioxins, which when spread on agricultural fields can attach to vegetables and cause -- that's right -- cancer. Clapp has spent many years trying to pinpoint the environmental factors that cause this disease. He acted as an expert for the Woburn residents who sued W. R. Grace and Beatrice Foods, claiming those firms were poisoning the residents' well water with chemicals -- a legal battle that served as the basis for the book and film A Civil Action , starring John Travolta. So Clapp was a natural person to call when workers at an IBM semiconductor plant in San Jose, California, sued, alleging they were contracting cancer from chemicals they worked with. After he was hired by the plaintiffs to analyze data turned over by IBM, Clapp concluded that the plant workers, compared to the national average, were four times as likely to get brain cancer, twice as likely to get breast cancer, and six times as likely to contract multiple myeloma, a rare cancer of the plasma cells. But Clapp and co-analyst Rebecca Johnson never got a chance to present these conclusions. In the first related case against IBM, brought by a woman who had breast cancer and a man with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, the judge ruled Clapp's analysis inadmissible on grounds of irrelevance. When Clapp tried to publish the study in a scientific journal, IBM threatened to sue. Though it denies that its plants have caused cancer in its workers, IBM settled with about 50 former employees in a second suit, demanding that the settlement amounts be kept secret. (More than 100 similar suits are pending in New York.) If IBM has its way, Clapp's analysis -- which suggests, he says, that the company should have known its employees were dying of cancer at high rates -- will never see the light of day.