Posted on 02/15/2004 3:12:37 PM PST by A. Pole
Five years ago, a college degree in computer science or electronic engineering seemed to bestow upon the holder an inside track toward the American dream. But a study released Wednesday shows that for a large percentage of technology workers, that dream has either dimmed or has vanished altogether.
The study, released at a WashTech news conference Wednesday at Carpenter's Hall in Seattle, shows that tech workers are clearly worried about the future of the industry in the United States. Chief concerns are declining wages, disappearing benefits and the threat of offshore outsourcing,
Some of the findings: about 25 percent of respondents said their company had moved work offshore, and one in five said they had either been forced to train a foreign replacement worker or knew someone who had.
More than half of respondents — 56 percent — said globalization and the offshoring of jobs have resulted in job cuts and a decline in wages and benefits.
Nearly three-quarters of respondents did not believe there is a need for the H1-B visa program, and 81 percent said they would support legislation to restrict the program.
The Web-based study, commissioned by WashTech, was conducted by the Evans/McDonough Co. in coordination with Harris International. One of the foremost concerns of the 410 respondents appeared to be about offshore outsourcing, with 93 percent saying they worry about its impact.
Former information technology workers Myra Bronstein and Dan DiLeva stood before the Seattle media to recount their own stories, putting human faces to the survey's findings.
DiLeva, who has a degree in computer science from the University of Washington, developed software for 18 years until he was laid off in late 2001. Just over two years and hundreds of resumes later, he said he garnered only one interview. He is convinced he would have a job if not for offshore outsourcing.
Bronstein, a veteran software tester of 14 years with an electronic engineering degree, said her experience with offshore outsourcing was one of the toughest of her life.
"I can assure you that this is one of the most stressful, demeaning, dehumanizing, humiliating experiences of my life," she said. "No one should have to deal with the issues of being a newly laid-off person, both practical and emotional, while at the same time being forced to train their replacements in order to receive their unemployment benefits."
As Bronstein spoke, her story simultaneously echoed on the U.S. Senate floor. After obtaining the WashTech study on Tuesday, Democratic Sen. Tom Daschle set out to refute the Bush Administration's pronouncement earlier this week that offshore outsourcing is good for the U.S. economy. Daschle's intent appears to be to turn the Bush Administration's stance into a campaign issue.
"They want to turn a jobless economy into a hopeless economy," said Daschle. "People who think that shipping American jobs overseas is good for the economy need to talk to people like Myra Bronstein. She’s not a statistic or an abstract concept on a computer model."
Last April, Bronstein and 16 other software testers at Bellevue-based Watchmark Corp., now WatchMark-Comnitel, were called into a Friday afternoon meeting. They were told they were being replaced by workers in India whom the testers would be required to train before being laid off. If Bronstein and the others refused, they were told they would be ineligible for severance pay, unemployment insurance and health insurance through COBRA.
The Indian replacement workers flew in over the weekend and reported for training on Monday.
Bronstein, who has been unemployed for 10 months disputes statements made by WatchMark spokeswoman Sherry Toly to The Seattle Times. On Wednesday, the newspaper quoted Toly saying that 14 of the 17 employees whose jobs were outsourced have already found jobs.
"That issue is irrelevant," said Bronstein, "but those numbers are bogus. I called four of those people and all continue to be unemployed, or have taken temp jobs for a short time. Some are about to lose unemployment benefits."
"The statements they are issuing now don't bear any resemblance to those they made at time of our termination," said Bronstein. "Verbally, they made it very clear that our package was contingent on keeping our 'head in the game' and completing the training (of the foreign replacements) successfully."
She also said Toly mischaracterized the conditions under which the severance packages were offered.
"The way those options were presented to us left us little choice," said Bronstein.
Other Survey Findings
Evans/McDonough Co. officials said the survey sample obtained from Harris International included programmers, database designers, managers, systems and software developers, data processors and technical writers.
The survey also shows that tech workers are coalescing into a political force. The vast majority respondents — 91 percent — said they are registered to vote and 87 percent said they vote in most elections or in every election. An overwhelming majority — 86 percent — said they would support legislation that required government IT contracts to be filled with U.S. workers.
One remarkable finding in the survey shows that the political ideologies of the IT workers are distributed fairly evenly across the spectrum. About 41 percent are Republicans, 26 percent are Democrats, and 32 percent described themselves as Independents.
Numbers Hard to Come By
Over a year ago, a pivotal study on offshore outsourcing by Massachusetts-based Forrester Research predicted 3.3 million white-collar service jobs would be outsourced offshore by 2015. Last summer, Congressman Adam Smith, D-Wash., asked the General Accounting Office to investigate the impact offshore outsourcing on U.S. high-tech workers, aerospace engineers, and state and federal government workers at various levels whose jobs have been sent offshore. Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., co-signed the request. The GAO report is due to be released later this year.
Marcus Courtney, president of WashTech, has estimated the number of U.S. jobs sent offshore at around 600,000. Courtney predicts that when more accurate figures become available, the number will be much higher than initial estimates.
David Beckman is a freelance journalist who covers tech labor issues for WashTech News. You can send him your comments at dbeckman@davidbeckman.com
Exactly right.
If the government didn't swipe a minimum of 16% of every payroll dollar, didn't require everyone to be under the thumb of federal taxes, state taxes, local taxes, school taxes, fee-based taxes, sales taxes, mandated insurance payments, phone taxes, tire taxes, tire disposal taxes, government service fees (garbage, water and sewage)...
I could probably live just as well on much, much less.
Actually there is a cheaper labor. It is a disposable "free" labor in pure "free" market conditions enforced by the state.
Owner of the slaves needs to make sure that his property gets well fed, housed, rested etc and do it for the whole slave's life.
Disposable "free" worker can work excessive hours, go into debts, sleep under bridge, not able to have family, etc. The employer does not have to give a hoot - after all it is a "free" contract and worker can leave if he does not like it. When the disposable worker is burned out he can be fired and be out on the street to die out of the sight.
This is the ideal free marketeers dream about, but are afraid to admit openly. Dickens was too soft on them.
Capitalism with human face is better than socialism, but socialism with human face is much better than capitalism without human face.
Y2K wasn’t the IT Gold Rush that I referenced. Y2K was more like a wild fire in the middle of it, a small segment of the overall phenomena.
Unlike the 1840s gold rush, the IT rush was building for decades. From mainframe to the networked PC era it was brutally competitive, but rarely out of control until it was supercharged with the internet. It surprised incompetent investors with unimagined “real-estate”, opportunities in another dimension that seemed immune to traditional operation costs. But they knew enough to recognize that just like the claim stakers of gold rush real-estate, the winners here would be the first. They had to set the standards and cement alliances. The result was predictable. Endless capital duped onto anything IT that glittered. Jobs exploded.
Many of these jobs and much of that money (hundreds of billions) was wasted on ridiculous mergers like AOL-Time Warner, ill-conceived notions like name your own price for groceries and gasoline or shaved off by barely legal ponzi schemes like Global Crossing. Everyone wanted in on the next Microsoft, Yahoo or Ebay, and anyone who could speak the jargon without notes or drag a few VB components onto forms was working. As you mentioned, the last 3-4 years of the bubble was exacerbated with Y2K sucking in more IT workers to either fix or replace systems.
The market kept going up, past reasonable levels. Everyone with a dream, a little experience and a business plan had access to capital they wanted and was competing for IT workers. And the result was predictable. Ventures spawned from such abundance and promise often amount to little more than blindly digging for gold in a new territory.
By 1850 most gold rush mines closed, and minors when to work elsewhere for “half their previous salaries”. And just like today I bet many didn’t blame themselves for not foreseeing it. They probably blamed greedy un-American corporations or the government for letting in the hundreds of thousands of eastern immigrants. Same today.
The same technology that enabled some business functions to be moved out of expensive metropolises to places like Boise allows others to go to India. And Just as limited business movement to the suburbs and middle America didn’t result in the stagnation of cities, movement of some IT to the third world won’t cripple American industry. Sure there’ll be jobs lost, but markets and jobs created. Sure there’ll be some software pirated, but it’s not as if they’d be buying it without this new industry. Sure there’ll be some data crimes, but that’s manageable. Sure trade secrets will be lost, but their value has a half life. Just like cheating on a test, one’s ability to develop is reduced by the amount copied. We can focus on the negative or temper it with the understanding that we’re setting ourselves up at the apex of a world economy of new markets, that we’re reducing the need for US charity, the world’s susceptibility to fascism and the need for our military around the world. This is in all our interests!
Change brings fear of the unknown. Fear of the unknown’s managed either by regressing or by knowledge. We can focus on explaining economic changes to people like I’m doing now, trying to conceal it from them with election year BS and hope we get away with it, or become a Willie Green and really seek to return to a “safe” place. One method is Reganeque, one’s Nixonian and another is Leftist and un-American. I think one is far more brave and honorable than the other two, but this is your life. Your decision.
Go vote Democrat. They're the party that believes this.
I find it disgusting."
Same, But I think that some threads are just magnets for these personalities.
The demise of many mainframe careers was certain in the early 90s. Mainframes are efficient, but not too flexible. And efficiently of course does not equal effectiveness.
Actually, the dotcoms in aggregate only employed about 100,000 people. And many were in marketing, advertising, and sales, not IT. The dotcom boom propelled the stock market bubble -- but not a jobs bubble. For all the noise they made, most dotcoms only had 20 - 100 employees, and the larger ones were not that many. Most had a few hundred IT types. If all that happened was that the dot-bombs imploded, IT would have merely hiccuped.
They are not very stable, that is why they qualify for our tax $$ through OPIC, the EX-IM Bank and other foreign aid.
Our tax $$ is being used to underwrite the risks of doing business in these 3rd world countries. Even Communist China qualifies. When India and Pakistan were testing nuclear bombs, we withdrew all such funding. They quickly stopped testing and funding was reinstated. Only certain corporations qualify for this $$. It is our tax money being spent to subsidized bloated corporations who want the cheapest labor they can find. Already, a Pakistani has black-mailed 4 people with their medical records. And 2 days ago, an article was on fr about the Indian call center people being bribed for credit card account #s by all kinds of people.
All of these security issues, and many more, were pointed-out here on FR a year and more ago. The free traitors never had an answer (besides name calling). Lou Dobbs on CNN is the only media source dealing with this issue head on. And, according to this article, most of the engineers are Republicans. Something I learned 35 years ago; almost all engineering majors were Conservative.
November of 2000 was a very close election. if you do the math (3 million Americans newly unemployed since 2000, 9 million under-employed; and among the engineers, the majority are/were Republicans who probably won't be voting Republican in 2004). It isn't difficult to figure-out who will lose in November.
They don't call it the Stupid Party for nothing.
If only Democrats did not promote abortion and "alternative" sexual orientations. Sigh. Where is the party of Reagan and Buchanan?
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