Posted on 03/01/2017 12:05:24 AM PST by Jyotishi
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The University of California, San Francisco on Tuesday laid off 49 information technology (IT) employees and outsourced their work to a company based in India, ending a year-long process that has brought the public university under fire.
The university announced the plan last July as a way to save $30 million over five years. The University of California system, which includes health care and research-focused UCSF, has been struggling to raise revenue and cut expenses.
Globalization and outsourcing have become hot-button political issues in the United States, as more employers cut costs by farming out work to low-cost workers in far-flung parts of the world. President Donald Trump campaigned on promises to restore lost U.S. jobs and to penalize companies that move factories overseas.
This was the University of California's first outsourcing, said a spokeswoman who added that the layoffs were necessary due to rising costs of technology. In addition to the 49 staff layoffs, another 48 positions that were vacant or filled by contractors were eliminated.
California Senator Dianne Feinstein last year said the university had a responsibility to keep jobs in the United States and pledged to seek reforms to stop domestic jobs being outsourced.
Kurt Ho, 58, a laid off systems administrator, carried a box of his personal items with an American flag draped over it, and said the university's decision will hurt service for a medical staff that relies on a smoothly running and secure computer network.
"It's a downgrading of services and a slap in the face for the customers," said Ho, who has worked in IT in the Bay Area for 25 years. He said he plans to look for a job but worries that outsourcing of IT services is a growing trend.
Last year UCSF entered into a $50 million contract over five years with India-based HCL Technologies Ltd to do the work.
(Reporting by Rory Carroll, editing by Peter Henderson and David Gregorio)
No buy American and hire American in blue states.
$30,000,000 saved over five years laying off fifty people.
$30,000,000 divided by five, divided by fifty: $120,000
$120,000 average.
Best of luck to the geeks, no sympathy at all to management who made the decision. Because what will happen is those extra functions will be foisted on existing staff whose primary responsibility isn't IT, and they'll be expected to take them on for free. It's sort of like taking your IT department back about 20 years.
$30,000,000 saved over five years laying off fifty people.
$30,000,000 divided by five, divided by fifty: $120,000
$120,000 average.
With benies and payroll taxes added in they were probably making about 80-90k average.
laying off a 58yo tech guy in silly valley is about equivalent to a career kiss of death and tells you all you need to know about how much the industry upper management treasures experience and maturity and keeping jobs in the USA. this guy is on a fast track to selling his house to squeeze out some coasting money from the equity and moving to a studio apartment in Redding and a McD janitor job. Or, maybe Richmond if he wants to try to stay close and risk the gangbang stray gunfire. Anyway hope he can somehow land on his feet or a rich uncle suddenly dies.
I find most DC's managed by these folks in poor condition (unless the customer keeps someone around to ride their asses), and for the most part they only know how to call the vendor support hotlines to force the vendors to do their jobs for them. I also have decades in this business, and this trend is enough to make me want to take early retirement. The arrogance and ignorance of these off-shore companies is enough to do it. Those that bring them in find out in the long run that they have done a true disservice to their company and the people and customers who were left...
More money for the "administrator" mandarins then!
Before the workers in America were let go, they were handling tons of calls that those in India, with the scripts, clearly had no clue. The customers were livid; threatening never to use my company ever again.
Several months after this disaster, several of the American workers were hired back to 'Handle' sensitive customers. But the majority of the customers continued to get the clueless with their scripts.
Yesterday I was dealing with my network at home and being locked out of my providers website. After convincing the clueless foreign sounding person not to follow the script and saying that the box had done this over and over again (locked up) they finally said a technician would be dispatched with a new box and that they would 'take care' of me being locked out of the website.
I solved the lockout myself while waiting for the tech. It was simply by requesting a password 'reset'.
When will we bring back American Exceptionalism so I don't have to battle the clueless so much??
And this is why EDS/HP/HPE/CSC/DXI is in the toilet and many, many American IT workers are losing their jobs.
Above is just the metamorphosis my employer has gone through, but the same is true for Xerox and others, they don’t care about Americans or quite frankly the company’s future, just this quarter’s stock numbers and their huge bonuses for saving money by offshoring work or what they are now calling fly-ins (H1B).
Not everyone has nothing to show for a 35-year career. Some very unlikely-looking people have pots of money. If he saved and invested over a long period of time, he might have done well.
$120K/yr in SillyConAlley are slave wages.
What does it say about the value of the degree in IT they provide?
See "Inside Job" on Netfix. Same stuff happening here. CFO's are selling their companies and stockholders future down the tubes for their quick buck (bonus) and then they jump...
I have a family member who is a sysadmin for a large company. They are extremely competent and run a tight ship. Seems the CFO and CIO have been floating the "managed services" idea as a "cost savings measure". I asked him that if this starts to firm up as an idea, that I be invited in to present the cons of this idea to their upper directors. Not to be biased in favor of my family member, but to give real-life examples of how this is killing American jobs and American companies....
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