Free Republic

Mumbai: Two weeks ago, AGL Resources Inc., an Atlanta, US-based natural gas distribution company, decided to shift its call centre operations from India to the US. The centre was operated by India’s third largest information technology (IT) services company, Wipro Ltd. Along with similar instances of Delta Airlines Inc., United Airlines Inc. and Chrysler Group Llc reported earlier in the year, this could raise a flag for Indian business process outsourcing (BPO) firms which earned nearly $15 billion (Rs69,450 crore today) from such back-office work in the year to March AGL said that were no consumer satisfaction issues. “Wipro employees...

As part of a voluntary program that ended on October 15, some 7,500 Americans with hidden offshore bank accounts ended the game of hide and seek with the IRS. They finally decided to tell the government where to find their assets. Some of these hidden accounts were pretty hard to lose track of --- one had more than $100 million in it.

GEORGE TOWN, Cayman Islands — What happens to a tax haven when it has to raise taxes? The Cayman Islands may soon find out. Caught in a vise of shrinking revenue and stubbornly high public spending, the Caymans averted a fiscal crisis this week by securing a $60 million overseas loan. But the Foreign and Commonwealth office in Britain, which oversees the Caymans and can veto foreign lending requests, has delivered an ultimatum: The rest of the $284 million the Cayman government says it needs will not be forthcoming until this offshore financial center imposes spending cuts and considers some...

Fear of offshoring may force its way back onto policy agendas soon. This column uses a survey of individual workers to measure the offshorability of particular jobs and says that about 25% of US jobs are offshorable. Surprisingly, routine tasks are not more offshorable but those held by more educated workers are. Although overshadowed by the financial crisis and the world recession right now, the debate over offshoring – that is, outsourcing work to foreign (often poorer) countries – seems poised to stage a comeback as a public policy concern in the not-too-distant future. Indeed, with so much protectionist talk...

Barack Obama said the Waxman-Markey carbon tax would help create "green energy" jobs in the U.S. He is now using taxpayer dollars to fund jobs in Spain.Barack Obama sold the Waxman-Markey "American Clean Energy and Security Act" to Congress and the American people by saying that investment in so-called "green energy" would create millions of high-wage American manufacturing jobs. We received an E-mail from the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (nonpartisan professional organization) that exposed Barack Obama as a blatant prevaricator who is shamelessly using our tax dollars to create jobs not in the United States but in foreign countries. We...

U.S. IT providers continue to push jobs offshore, while Indian firms work to refine the amount of work they complete overseas. Although Congress may force the Indian firms to hire more Americans -- and Indian companies have been telling investors that they may have to indeed do that -- the change won't likely affect the overall trend and the shift in jobs outside the U.S. Okay, so where are U.S. jobs going? What's the data show? Data prepared by Everest Group Inc., a research and outsourcing consulting firm, shows in broad brush fashion the shift of jobs overseas by some...

It takes an incredibly powerful company to threaten the U.S. government in hopes of impacting a significant decision, but that's precisely what Microsoft is doing. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made headlines when he publicly attacked President Barack Obama's plan to cut tax breaks on U.S. companies' foreign profits, a plan which is currently awaiting Congressional approval.

Microsoft Corp. chief executive Steven Ballmer said the world's largest software company would move some employees offshore if Congress enacts President Barack Obama's plans to impose higher taxes on U.S. companies' foreign profits. "It makes U.S. jobs more expensive," Mr. Ballmer said in an interview. "We're better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the U.S. as opposed to keeping them inside the U.S."

Volcanoes that erupted in India about 65 million years ago were instrumental in the extinction of dinosaurs, according to new research. For the last thirty years scientists have believed a giant meteorite that struck Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula was responsible for the mass extinction of dinosaurs, the Daily Telegraph reported on Wednesday. But now Gerta Keller, a geologist at Princeton University, New Jersey, says fossilised traces of plants and animals dug out of low lying hills at El Penon in northeast Mexico show this event happened 300,000 years after the dinosaurs disappeared. Keller suggests that the massive volcanic eruptions at the...

The world's largest IT services company is attempting to boost its creative cost-cutting techniques with a patent application -- number 20090083107 at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office -- for a "method and system for strategic global resource sourcing." (Yes, "resource sourcing.") In short, IBM wants to patent its math for deciding where to offshore staff. A patented methodology for deciding where to send jobs overseas to cut costs would be a valuable tool that IBM could sell to its corporate clients. But IBM has plenty of opportunity to eat its own dog food: The company continues to slash its...

ZUG, Switzerland, March 12 (Reuters) - The tidy towns and mountain vistas of Switzerland are an unlikely setting for an oil boom. Yet a wave of energy companies has in the last few months announced plans to move to Switzerland -- mainly for its appeal as a low-tax corporate domicile that looks relatively likely to stay out of reach of Barack Obama's tax-seeking administration.

It's protectionism, say Indian critics, that Congress has banned companies receiving bailout money from hiring foreigners on H-1B visas With the economies in the U.S. and India both struggling and with unemployment rising,the outsourcing of American jobs to Indian workers has become an even more explosive issue. That's leading business leaders,politicians,and ordinary citizens in both countries to focus on a controversial visa program,the H-1B, that allows a limited number of foreigners to work at U.S. companies for up to six years. Critics have long claimed the program allows high-paying software-writing and engineering jobs at companies and state governments to go...

Executives in U.S. banks are believed to be fielding approaches from European banks following the announcement of the Obama administration's salary cap for the sector. Bonuses and salaries of executives at American banks that have needed, or will need, government financial aid, are now restricted at $500,000 per executive per year. Josef Ackermann, chief executive of Deutsche Bank, told The Financial Times that the Obama cap could help it recruit their most talented people. 'If you are only going to be able to pay a $500,000 bonus, I think talent will be happy to work for us. At the end...

Think that class warfare and mindless anti-business hatred don’t have real-life consequences? Think again: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Much political hay has been made in Congress about “unpatriotic” corporations that move operations abroad. Weatherford International is the latest, taking its headquarters from Houston to Switzerland. The oil services company said that it wants to be closer to its markets. But what it really meant was that it no longer saw the future in the U.S. In a political atmosphere of blaming corporations, it’s no wonder. Halliburton fled to Dubai in 2007. Tyco International, Foster Wheeler and Transocean International all went to Switzerland. As...

Over the past year, US citizens have become increasingly aware of the substandard consumer-level goods flowing out of China, but new reports indicate that the counterfeit products and dubious quality controls are not confined to the consumer sector. An increasingly large number of supposedly military-grade electronic components are turning out to be counterfeit commercial-grade hardware that, in some cases, is decades older than the manufacturing label indicates. The problem, to be sure, is not entirely China's fault. Back in 1994 and 1996, the Clinton Administration passed two bills, the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act (1994), and the Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996...

Hi, With the grave reality of the fall of the US housing economy as well as the loss of jobs here in US,I am deeply concerned and worried about the future of our nation as a whole and thought of writing to you as you all can ring the bells into the ears of a vast-section of the population. The grave effects of offshoring and then the indiscriminate loans being provided for hiked-up properties for non-qualified people have put the country at it's very end days.We don't have jobs anymore more our people,our jobs have been transferred to India,China and...

Record oil prices have failed to temper the enthusiasm of Chinese auto buyers. In 2006, 6.2 million cars were sold in China, enough for the Middle Kingdom to surpass Japan for #2 in total vehicle sales (the United States still sells twice as many). In the first five months of 2008, Chinese auto sales show no signs of decelerating, up 17.4% from the same period last year. The rise in Chinese auto sales has been so dramatic that projections by China’s government for auto sales in 2020 were already exceeded by 2005. Millions of tons of copper, nickel, aluminum have...

ST. LUCIE COUNTY — Members of a program that brought teachers from India into St. Lucie County School classrooms will be back in the classroom in the fall, according to school district officials. Fifteen teachers who were initially part of a Florida Atlantic University pilot program aimed to bring foreign teachers into the classroom will be back teaching in critical shortage areas like science and math in the fall as regular St. Lucie County School District employees, said Susan Ranew, the school district’s assistant superintendent of human resources. The pilot program that brought the teachers to St. Lucie County ended...

<p>Would you pay extra to have an American answer your customer-service call? Dell is hoping you will.</p> <p>The computer maker recently put out a press release announcing “new premium support service.” The plan: For a fee, people get the right to talk to “the same dedicated team each time they have an issue” with a Dell product. The kicker: The service will be provided by “an advanced support team in North America.”</p>

BRIDGEPORT, Conn. - Satya Mohan never saw students dance in the hallways before, let alone bang on lockers and doors as they often do outside his third-floor classroom at Bassick High School. Eight-and-a-half months into the school year, this teacher from India has grown used to it. "Excuse me, off to your room," he tells a student who doesn't belong in his fifth-period science class, before motioning him out and shutting the door. The dozen students who do belong in the class then set about the task of finishing an assignment on polymers and recycling. Darren Thompson, 15, a freshman...

US slump to prop up India as next offshoring hotspot 14 May, 2008, 0750 hrs IST,Chiranjoy Sen, TNN BANGALORE: Belt-tightening by global technology giants—a fallout of US economic slowdown—is likely to reinforce India as the most preferred offshoring destination. Top technology firms are actively moving part of their workforce from the US, UK and European markets to lower-cost destinations. They cite availability of local talent, better delivery and conducive enviroment as key offshoring reasons. While they may not admit it, firms would be looking at stepping the gas on offshoring to curb bloating costs and to lift margins. Networking and...

The new economics of outsourcing  April 23, 2008  Softtek, a Monterrey (Mexico) provider of IT services, added 30 new clients last year. Most of them had been using Indian firms for at least part of their outsourced IT. But they came to Softtek because they "were looking for something else," says Beni Lopez, CEO of nearshore services for the company, which has operations around the world. Companies that traditionally rely on India for offshore IT services have been looking for that something beyond India for years, citing such reasons as high employee turnover and unreliable communications. But the search has...

SAN JOSE, CA (TDR) - Hundreds of angry programmers took to the streets burning Indian flags, and chanting anti-Indian slogans after Wednesday morning production meetings. The protesters - mostly young males - have reached a boiling point after years of technological imperialism and failed Indian programming policies. Busy midday traffic came to a halt as this once proud high-tech mecca was transformed into raging, socially-challenged powder keg of humanity...

The Offshoring of America's Top Jobs Many of America's top jobs are moving offshore. Which jobs are most likely to be hit by "offshoring" and what can you do to protect and safeguard your career?Jobs that are most likely to be moved offshore have these Characteristics: Work is highly repetitive (accounting) Work is predictable and well defined (customer service) Can be broken down into small manageable projects (software development) Can be turned into a routine (Tele-marketing) Proximity to the end customer is not important (phone based tech support of consumer products) End customer has already moved offshore (semiconductor sales) Jobs...

IBM is not feeling the impact yet of reduced growth in IT budgets, and plans to continue hiring global services delivery staff in India by the thousands. IBM plans to continue hiring global services delivery staff in India by the thousands, adding to the 73,000 it already has in its global services and other operations in the country. A large number of Indian outsourcers and multinational services companies have set up services delivery operations from India. Their competition for the best staff is driving up salaries. Companies are however introducing quality systems that enable them to weed out low performers....

Countering the rancour in the West against outsourcing of jobs, the chairman of IT major Wipro [Get Quote] has said India was not stealing their jobs and its businesses were moving into developed countries, which did not have enough skilled graduates to compete in the global economy. "What is of concern is how serious a shortage of technical talent is building up in the western world. Global companies are going to where not enough young boys and girls are getting into math, science and engineering. That trend is not being reversed," Azim Premji said. Premji said that as Wipro expands...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Amid new worries about a possible recession, the housing slump and rising oil prices, President Bush is exploring an economic stimulus package to reinforce the U.S. economy. White House press secretary Dana Perino said Thursday that Bush is closely monitoring economic trends and is seeking input from his economic advisers on the pros and cons of such a package. "The president has indicated that he will not make up his mind as to whether or not to lay out a package until the State of the Union," Perino said about the president's speech on Jan. 28. "Our...

US industrial conglomerate Honeywell has announced that it will move the headquarters of its electronic materials business from the United States to Shanghai to better position itself for further growth in Asia. The company also announced that Shanghai UOP Ltd, the largest molecular sieve adsorbents manufacturing plant in Asia, has completed an expansion to boost capacity to meet growing demand in China. Shanghai UOP is a subsidiary company of Honeywell China. "The relocation of the electronic materials' global headquarters to Shanghai will further underline Honeywell's emphasis on China as an important platform to drive Honeywell's globalization," Honeywell China's CEO Shane...

The bulk of 3M facilities are located in the U.S. now, but Campbell said that will change. He said more manufacturing plants will be located in low-tax overseas locations...

General Electric Co. will accelerate the shrinking of its 128-year-old incandescent light-bulb business in response to global pressure to switch to energy-efficient lighting. GE said it will close seven of the 54 plants and warehouses that serve its incandescent-bulb business by November 2008 and lay off 1,400 workers. Over two years, GE will have eliminated 16% of its lighting work force. GE previously laid off 3,000 workers in the unit. The downsizing or sale of the lighting business has been expected for several years as the market has changed. The lighting business contributed about $2.5 billion in sales in 2006,...

First VH-71 presidential helicopter flies By Graham Warwick AgustaWestland has flown the first test aircraft built specifically for the Lockheed Martin VH-71 US presidential helicopter programme. The aircraft made a 40min flight on 3 July from the company's facility in Yeovil, UK. Under Increment 1 of the programme, three additional test aircraft will fly by early 2008 and five pilot-production VH-71s will be delivered by October 2009 to meet the urgent requirement for a new presidential helicopter. An improved version of the helicopter with increased performance will be developed for Increment 2. This will have uprated engines, a new transmission,...

BEIJING: The Chinese police said on Sunday they have captured a key figure with links to slave trade after a nationwide hunt, apart from arresting 167 others in relation to the scandal involving forced labour in prison-like situations. But no action has yet been taken against any government official despite direct orders from both the Chinese president and premier to spare no one and get to the bottom of the issue. A few county and village level officials have been cornered in the investigations but the middle and higher level officials have been left untouched. The police has managed to...

Whenever critics of globalization complain about the loss of American jobs to low-cost countries such as China and India, supporters point to the powerful performance of the U.S. economy. And with good reason. Despite the latest slow quarter, official statistics show that America's economic output has grown at a solid 3.3% annual rate since 2003, a period when imports from low-cost countries have soared. Similarly, domestic manufacturing output has expanded at a decent pace. On the face of it, offshoring doesn't seem to be having much of an effect at all. But new evidence suggests that shifting production overseas has...

Whenever critics of globalization complain about the loss of American jobs to low-cost countries such as China and India, supporters point to the powerful performance of the U.S. economy. And with good reason. Despite the latest slow quarter, official statistics show that America's economic output has grown at a solid 3.3% annual rate since 2003, a period when imports from low-cost countries have soared. Similarly, domestic manufacturing output has expanded at a decent pace. On the face of it, offshoring doesn't seem to be having much of an effect at all. But new evidence suggests that shifting production overseas has...

Dell Inc. said Thursday that earnings fell slightly in preliminary first-quarter results, but the computer maker planned to lay off more than 8,000 employees over the next year as part of an ongoing restructuring. Dell said it earned $759 million, or 34 cents per share, in the three months ended May 4. That compared with $762 million, or 33 cents per share, in the year-ago period. First-quarter sales rose nearly 1 percent from the year ago period to $14.6 billion. [Snip] The layoffs, which represent 10 percent of Dell's global work force of 88,100 full time and part-time employees, come...

ATLANTA - The lesson plan was called "Artificial Unintelligence," but it was written more like a comic book than a syllabus for a serious computer science class. "Singing, dancing and drawing polygons may be nifty, but any self-respecting evil roboticist needs a few more tricks in the repertoire if they are going to take over the world," read the day's instructions to a dozen or so Georgia Tech robotics students. They had spent the last few months teaching their personal "Scribbler" robots to draw shapes and chirp on command. Now they were being asked to navigate a daunting obstacle course...

I'm a free trader down to my toes. Always have been. Yet lately, I'm being treated as a heretic by many of my fellow economists. Why? Because I have stuck my neck out and predicted that the offshoring of service jobs from rich countries such as the United States to poor countries such as India may pose major problems for tens of millions of American workers over the coming decades. In fact, I think offshoring may be the biggest political issue in economics for a generation. When I say this, many of my fellow free-traders react with a mixture of...

Last year I wrote a series of columns on management problems at IBM Global Services, explaining how the executive ranks from CEO Sam Palmisano on down were losing touch with reality, bidding contracts too low to make a profit then mismanaging them in an attempt to make a profit anyway, often to the detriment of IBM customers. Those columns and the reaction they created within the ranks at IBM showed just how bad things had become. Well they just got worse. This is according to my many friends at Big Blue, who believe they are about to undergo the biggest...

The new specialist diplomas should be scrapped because they are likely to result in underqualified teenagers being exploited as cheap labour by unscrupulous employers, Britain’s largest teaching union said yesterday. The diplomas were touted as one of the most radical changes to secondary education in 40 years, and ministers hoped that they would persuade more teenagers to stay on at school after 16, but the National Union of Teachers (NUT) said that the qualification was as weak as existing vocational qualifications. Delegates at the NUT’s annual conference in Harrogate claimed that the reforms effectively branded some pupils impossible to educate...

NEW DELHI, March 26 — Under pressure from shareholders, Citigroup is planning to shed thousands of jobs and sharpen its focus on its operations outside North America. The colossal bank will get most of its growth from its international operations, chief executive Charles O. Prince told thousands of employees in India today, as he wrapped up a tour of Asia. Mr. Prince’s stop in India comes just weeks before Citigroup will announce a broad restructuring plan that could involve the elimination or relocation of as many as 15,000 high-cost jobs from areas including New York, London and Hong Kong, several...

The mere mention of outsourcing and its impact on the U.S. is enough to elicit strong emotions on either side of the issue. Proponents argue that relocating low-skill service jobs, like those in customer service or data entry, to foreign shores is necessary to ensure the productivity and competitiveness of the U.S. economy. Detractors say American companies are betraying their own workers and destroying the middle class, all in the name of the almighty dollar (see BusinessWeek.com, 11/8/06, "Outsourcing: Job Killer or Innovation Boost?"). But amid the debate over whether outsourcing is good or bad for the U.S., an important...

U.S. trade panel ends steel tariff Carmakers say move will cut costs By James P. Miller Tribune staff reporter Published December 15, 2006 In a move that cheered automakers but angered domestic steel producers, the U.S. International Trade Commission on Thursday eliminated most of its controversial tariffs on carbon-steel imports. The ITC's ruling brings an end to what has been an unusual, high-profile feud between two American smokestack industries battered and dramatically altered by global competition: Big Steel and its crucial customer, the auto industry. The commission's action will lower the price auto companies pay for steel, and bring a...

MELBOURNE: Upset at losing their jobs due to offshoring, IT workers in the St George Bank in Australia have refused to train their Indian replacements. The employees of the bank were warned in September that they would lose their jobs and were told last Tuesday they would assist training new staff through a "buddy system", a TV channel reported Friday. The bank has told 80 of its workers that their jobs will be moved to India. "It was sickening that the bank was expecting them to do so," employees of the bank said. Around 60 employees further said that they...

Talk about a reversal of fortune. Where once the brains of India left for more lucrative pastures in the United States, today a handful of fresh American college graduates are sampling the fruits of the Indian economic boom. The recruits from America and elsewhere are not expected to fill the looming labor pinch. But they do illustrate the efforts by Indian companies to extend their global reach and recognition. David Craig, 23, is one of the new American imports. He had never left home in Tucson when the Indian outsourcing giant Infosys Technologies came calling at a job fair earlier...

LONDON: Five years after off-shoring became an accepted way of life for British business, the country’s largest manufacturing union has declared it takes "a zero tolerance view" of UK jobs going to India, even as Britain’s biggest insurer announced it would be exporting at least 1,000 posts out to East. The angry comments from Amicus, the trade union that boasts of more than one-million members in both public and private sectors, came as insurance company Aviva announced it was cutting 4,000 British jobs and sending 1,000 to India with a margin of another 500 IT posts to be outsourced. It’s...

WASHINGTON — The government's examination of offshoring has been outsourced. An obscure quasi-governmental agency called the National Academy of Public Administration is following up on key conclusions of a July 2004 study by the Commerce Department's Technology Administration on the offshoring of high-tech jobs. An academy panel will drill down into government labor statistics in an attempt to document the extent and impact of shipping more U.S. high-tech jobs to overseas design centers in India, China and other low-cost locations. The panel is examining "how adequate the currently available data are," said project director Kenneth Ryder. Preliminary conclusions from its...

Perhaps the oddest and most depressing fact about the U.S. economy these days is the lack of real wage growth. The unemployment rate has been below 5% since December, and productivity growth is still looking strong. Yet wages and salaries, adjusted for inflation, are down for virtually every broad occupational category. According to the latest numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average hourly earnings for production and nonsupervisory workers are up by 3.8% over the past year. That may sound halfway decent, but it still lags the 4.3% increase in consumer prices over the same period (see BusinessWeek.com, 8/4/06,...

If you’re not living underneath a rock you probably know about the escalating war in Israel and Lebanon. I am very sympathetic to the innocent people who are affected by this war. I prefer not to turn this into a war discussion, I am just talking about the potential effects that it has on our industry. Over the years Israel has been on the cutting edge of research and development in various advanced technologies. Israel boasts many thousands of high technology companies in a wide range of fields such as telecommunications, software, semiconductors, biotech, and medical electronics. Many of the...

NEW DELHI: The Infosys brand name has started attracting scores of aspiring professionals from all across the globe who are seeking an exposure to India through one of the most respected Indian companies. The company is expecting 125 interns from leading US, European and Asian Universities at its Bangalore campus this year as part of its internship programme 'InStep'. The first batch of 50 interns has already joined the company for the training programme, a statement from Infosys said. The interns represent 81 universities from the US, Canada, Mexico, France, Germany, Korea and the Philippines etc. In its seventh year,...

While America's job outlook is healthy and many industries are projected to grow in the coming years, there are also signs that some occupations are becoming obsolete. The majority of the decreases are in office and administrative support and production occupations, which are affected by the implementation of office technology that reduces the needs for these workers, changes in business practices, and escalating plant and factory automation. A majority of the job openings occurring in these occupations will arise not from job growth, but from the need to replace those transferring to other industries, retire or leave for other reasons...