Posted on 06/27/2004 4:52:11 AM PDT by neutrino
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Jolted workers rethink life's basics
09:54 AM CDT on Saturday, June 26, 2004
Mark Olesen and Jerry Dugick live 181 miles apart. They're strangers to each other, but they share a common bond. Losing their tech jobs to overseas workers cost each of them more than paychecks and pride. For Mark, a former software engineer for IBM in Austin, it led to bankruptcy and nearly a year away from his family, driving big rigs to natural gas fields around the country. Jerry, a former engineer and project manager for Cadence Design Systems, sold the Dallas home he treasured to eliminate debt. He can pay for his daughter's first two years of college. But he doesn't see a way to cover the rest of her tuition with a part-time job. The upheaval in both their lives illustrates why moving U.S. white-collar jobs overseas has caused so much anxiety and controversy. In many cases, the disruptions go far beyond lost income. The irony: Offshoring has been a boon to American businesses, consumers and Third World workers – boosting profits, cutting prices and increasing incomes. "We are kind of a victim of our own success," says Dane Anderson, program director of outsourcing and service providers for META Group, an information technology research and consulting firm. White-collar workers affected by offshoring usually land other jobs. But for the first time in their lives, many are struggling to adapt to a lower standard of living. And the emotional toll can be just as burdensome. Most worked hard to get a good education only to discover what plenty of former manufacturing employees already know: Workers overseas can do their jobs for less money."There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore," Carly Fiorina, chief executive of Hewlett-Packard Co., declared earlier this year. "We have to compete for jobs."
Humbling experience
Offshoring has come full circle for Mark, a 37-year-old with curly brown hair and a wide grin. Three years ago, his job was moved overseas. Now he spends his nights at his north Austin home collaborating with a group of programmers in Israel. The group is updating software used to help companies and entrepreneurs figure out whether their products will sell on eBay. The programmers perform the work, and Mark sends them sales data. The job pays $36,000, about half of what he earned at IBM. He and his family lack health insurance. And with Israel eight hours ahead, he stays up most of the night. During the day, he talks to his boss in Utah and other folks. But the software engineer isn't grumbling. He's relieved to be employed in the tech field again, especially since the small firm from Provo, Utah, that hired him is owned by one of his college buddies. A year ago, Mark rarely saw his wife and the two teenage girls he helped raise. He spent his days at natural gas fields in Colorado, Michigan and other states, setting up and moving pumps and other heavy equipment. His nights were spent sleeping in strange hotels. Most of the men he worked with hadn't gone to college. And the pay: $10 an hour plus overtime. It was the best he could do. When Mark lost his job in the midst of the tech slump, he couldn't find anything that would allow him to use his computer science degree from Brigham Young University. Employers were interested in hiring only foreign workers on H-1B visas. The months dragged on. One of his cars was repossessed. On the brink of losing his house and unable to hold off his creditors any longer, he filed for bankruptcy.
Moving on
The move allowed him to reorganize his finances and clear away enough debt to save his house. But it also frightened him, leading him to sign up for the oil services contracting job. "It was a humbling experience," says the Star Trek fan who grew up in Long Island, N.Y. "You start to really realize how fragile life is." It's the last thing Mark expected to happen when he decided to study computer science. "I wanted to go for a career that provided me with some security," he recalls. One day while out on the road, Mark received a call from one of his college pals, asking whether he'd be interested in a job. In October, he began working from home. Today, Mark is paying off medical bills for his family and struggling to make his property tax payments. He hasn't bought a pair of shoes for himself in more than a year. And like many other laid-off tech workers, he has lost his respect for corporate America. "It's really hurting the American people," he says of offshoring. "They are strip-mining society." But the turmoil in his life has yielded an unexpected benefit: a newfound appreciation for what he does have. His family has learned how to have fun the low-cost way – with barbecues and visits to state parks. "I don't think I take things for granted anymore," he says. "Life beats you down. You can either stay down or get back up and try to live."
Absorbing the shock
For Jerry, offshoring has been more of a one-way street heading south. For seven years, he was proud to work for Cadence Design Systems, a company in San Jose, Calif., that sells software used to design microchips, printed circuit boards and other items. A trim man with alert blue eyes and closely cropped hair, Jerry spent most of his time interacting with Cadence's customers. He taught them how to use the software and listened to their concerns. Most recently, he was in charge of making sure chipmaker Intel Corp., one of Cadence's biggest customers, received top-notch technical support. The questions he encountered often proved so complex that he needed a team of engineers to find the answers. The work was rarely dull. He never lacked for something to do. And he earned more than $100,000 a year. One day last August, after dropping off his daughter at the University of Arizona for her first year of college, Jerry returned to North Dallas to find an e-mail from his manager. Would he be at work the next day? The next morning he was told his job was moving to Noida, India. Cadence could hire three or four engineers for what they were paying him, Jerry learned. Until that point, Jerry hadn't thought much about offshoring. He knew Cadence wanted to staff a technical support center in India and had started eliminating jobs in the United States. But the University of Missouri electrical engineering graduate never thought one of those jobs might be his. "I had never been fired or laid off in my life," said the 43-year-old from St. Louis. "This kind of shocked me." He felt like he'd been pushed from a train. Once he got over the initial shock, Jerry started looking for another tech position. He quickly realized just how many people with master's degrees couldn't find work. His wife had just received her MBA and was also searching for a job. To prepare for the worst, the couple decided to sell their house in North Dallas, where they had lived for the last seven years. It sold the day they put it up for sale, at the asking price. The couple rented another house nearby so that their 14-year-old son wouldn't have to switch schools. With the money, they paid off debts and made some investments. Jerry got a few interviews, but nothing came of them. The one offer he got required him to travel more than 80 percent of the time. He turned it down. "My job is not worth my life," he says. In the meantime, he took some classes at the University of Texas at Dallas, passed an exam and got certified in project management.
New priorities
Without a job, Jerry started to take stock of his life. He realized that he had been working for his family and his company but not himself. If he had died the next day, he says, his tombstone would have read, "He was a good employee." Jerry began volunteering and networking with others who'd lost their jobs. He vows to make the next 20 years of his life more fulfilling. "I am not going to become a slave to some corporation," he says, still stinging from the memory of how he sang Cadence's praises before it dropped him. A few months ago, he walked into the office of a small engineering firm in Dallas. It was the first time he'd dared to drop into an office to leave his résumé and cover letter. He knew the owner from his days at Cadence. What do I have to lose? he asked himself. Today, Jerry is working part-time as a project manager for Circuitpac Corp. in Dallas, earning about a third of his former salary. He and his wife, who speaks fluent Spanish, hope to start their own business, selling computers to Hispanics. "I feel more stress than I used to," he says. "I'm still trying to figure out where Jerry is going to be a year from now." |
PS, thanks for the update on your/EDS status in your earlier post. Very interesting. Screw them, and the customer too.
The whole "H1B" madness is a travesty that should be stopped, abandoned, and fled like the plague that it is. But I'm not holding my breath waiting for that to happen.
When we're forced to "compete" with third world foreigners for third world wages, we will end up a third world nation.
I have no doubt that we're headed down that path. Some of the "leaders" [spit] who are driving us in that direction are doing so out of greed, some out of stupidity, and some -- the most dangerous, IMO -- are doing so because that's the goal -- the "third-world-ization" of the United States.
The sick mix of Lenin's rope-merchants, Stalin's useful idiots, and our contemporary social engineers, will bring this nation to its knees, and then stand around pissing on the not-quite-dead body as it -- as WE -- lay writhing in the dust.
Apples and oranges. Buggywhips were no longer needed. Their use no longer existed. No on uses buggywhips anymore
The output of these outsourced jobs is still VERY MUCH a part of the economy.
Bingo.
That should be carved in stone and placed in a monument in DC, alongside the Vietnam and WWII monuments. A monument to the economic war LOST to foreign employment.
You've cut right to the heart of the matter. The "buggywhip" BS is exactly that -- bulls#!+. This is not some "paradigm shift" (how I despise that buzzphrase!) in which one type of industry is eclipsed by another. This is nothing less than the wholesale destruction of the human infrastructure of this country.
For the buggywhip-ranters consideration, let's say that you're right -- the technical industry has been eclipsed (yes, yes, I know, it's madness, but humor me for a moment as I humor them). It's over, it's done, it's gone, *poof*, it's time to move on.
So, what do we move on to? Hell, it doesn't matter. So let's make something up. We "move on" to an industry based on the design, manufacture, and maintenance of framjumustorian mafulasticoid consorbite lutonics.
Great, ain't it? Hell, we corner the market on those... things.
Oops, guess what just happened?
Right. You got it in one.
We hired in a bunch of Chinese and Indians to take over all the key jobs in the framjumustorian mafulasticoid consorbite lutonics industry -- and, "offshored" the rest of the jobs -- to China and India.
What we have here is a situation in which we're not "the world leaders", we're just a crop -- to be harvested when ripe.
The rest of the world can just sit back, watching and waiting, as we expend all the R&D money to create new industries and new markets -- seeing which ones fly, and which die on the vine -- and then, once we've done the dirty work, they can just swoop down, pick the fruit, and leave us with the weeds.
Beautiful system "our" legislators have given us.
The "H1B" nonsense, and everything along those lines, needs to be recognized for the treachery it is, and stopped.
I don't see that happening, though.
I don't see much of a future for us. I'm not gonna pull a rose-colored-glassed job you anyone. I'm just gonna call it as I see it. And that's what I've just done.
Go ahead, flame me (not you, TB, I know you've got your head on straight). I dont' give a rat's ass. I'm old enough to have the bulk of my life behind me, and the taunts of those who can't see the forest for the trees is just so much noise so far as I'm concerned. I tune it out the same way I tuned out the sound of "the el" every few minutes back when I was growing up in the low-rent part of the Bronx.
But it's our children, and our children's children that I fear for. I don't know what kind of world they're going to have to face.
Oh, damn. I just lied to you. I know full well what kind of a world they'll have to face. It's just that I don't want to have to face the fact that we've damned them to a future that's so bleak as to defy description.
Oh, well. I'll be dead long before it comes to that. For those of you who're young enough to have to explain to them why you left them that kind of world, well... go rent a copy of Soylent Green or something like that. Maybe it'll give you something to tell them.
I'd wager they aren't selling too many copies of that title in India or China.
Nice of "our" legislators to go out of their way to ensure that we kill two birds with one stone: We not only make sure that "Life is difficult" becomes The Way It Is for us, but, they also ensure that our pockets are emptied to make sure that it's less and less of a truism in a handful of other countries.
But hey, I guess after everything that China and India have done for us over the centuries, we owe them everything we can do to smooth the path to prosperity for them -- even as we smooth the path to poverty for ourselves.
The founders of this nation would be so proud of us, wouldn't they.
Or how about, "Sanjay and Wong discover that the United States does owe them a living"
Suggested reading: "Unrestricted Warfare", by a couple of bigwigs at the People's Revolutionary Army, translated by the CIA, available for free download at a variety of sites. Google is your friend. Here's the first match it turned up:
Hint: Those Chinese were not "businessmen", they were warriors. And that money was actually a munition.
Sounds like they're making a lot of direct hits on their target.
Ah, I misread your last post -- I thought it was Chinese that were bringing satchels of money to meetings with local Americah officials.
But you know something? I'd wager that's going on, right here in this country. And I do recommend taking a look at "Unrestricted Warfare". China has a plan, and they're are not shy about telling us. They are that confident in our will to be blind to it. Our faith in "it can't happen here" must bring many a chuckle to Peking.
And not the government either. It's too busy greasing the skids, looking the other way as foreign workers come here "for jobs no American will take", and creating incentives like "MFN" for an avowed enemy.
I don't give this country another 25 years.
A quarter century from now, the "management class" and "technical class" will be filled with people who were trained in damn little more than "Feeling Good About Myself", and they'll be sitting there feeling like a train hit 'em as it all collapses around them.
Krushchev is getting the last laugh. He can finally put that shoe back on.
It is not unreasonable to expect our leaders to look out for our interests including those as related to employment. After all, they expect us to die on the battlefield at their command. When does the loyalty get reciprocated?
Excellent point.
A corporate entity is a recipient of privilege, and it owes something back to those it takes from.
As it stands now, there is a one-way transfer of wealth from the USA to a few select other nations, one of which has vowed our destruction.
In the Fortune 500 I worked for, we used to take the ones that were dangerously inept in the lab and promote them to middle managers, paying them off to stay away. Then they could sit there like a potted plant, issuing the occasional disruptive and disasterous decree, and collecting their bonuses.
I feel badly when a contributing technical person who generates products, profits, or value-added gets the ax.
When a middle manager, who just juggles numbers to make the current Quarter look artificially better at the expense of the future gets it, I find it difficult to be as sympathetic.
No, I'll be eligible to retire in only two years. Ain't gonna get canned.
"Just wait a few more years. They have spent your pension fund already, and it is going to be worth zilch shortly, when they devalue the currency. Timeframe - 2008-12."
LOL! My pension's fully funded, as well as my government 401K. The federal government matches my 401K contributions 1-for-1 up to 5% of my salary. I'm currently contributing 11%, and the 401K is doing VERY well, invested in a variety of investment vehicles. As for "devaluing the currency," since the dollar floats, anything can happen, but whatever happens to me is also going to happen to EVERYONE WHO HOLDS DOLLARS. Like, duh!
There's a big part of me that just wants to call you a cynical old codger. Unfortunately, I agree with all of your posts. This nation is being sold out at record rates. I hope it lasts more than 25 years but I am not going to count on it.
Teach 'germ theory' and suddenly no one wants to be around anyone who is at high risk for AIDS..Teach someone how to analyze data and the nonsense numbers on the nightly news are shown as being as meaningless and/or deceptive as they are. The whole 'global warming' furor would cool off quickly.
The education industry is not willing to give (or, in some cases, capable of giving) students the skills necessary to critically assess and debunk their own pet truisms.
Until we get past the social agendae driving the education industry, we will continue to fall further behind other countries where people manufacture pins instead of debating the number of angels who can dance on the head thereof, or write rules limiting the angelic capacity for safety purposes.
I am reminded of my favorite news story.
How do we communicate with our elite class of leaders? We can learn from the elders of the "Greatest Generation."
In the summer of 1989, Mr. Rostenkowski, then a congressman from Illinois and the powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, was besieged by a crowd of 50 senior citizens in Chicago . . . the protesters -- shouting "coward," "recall" and "impeach" -- forced him to sprint through a gas station to his car. . .[car? it sure looked like a government limo to me]
The protesters were angry about [a new Medicare law] . . .That law was soon repealed. But the television images of Mr. Rostenkowski under assault struck fear in the hearts of politicians . . .
"Politicians were traumatized by the Rostenkowski episode," said Henry J. Aaron, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
"Assault" is too strong of word but the seniors made sure Rostenkowski knew that they did not come there to praise him.
Original thought is rare in any generation. From what my engineer husband has observed, though, engineers used for outsourcing aren't that creative, either. In fact, they usually *can't* be, because the job has to be clearly laid out for them. They have to treat it like an "assembly line" process. The advantage they bring to the equation is that they're "cheap."
Here in the US, we do have serious social issues that result in the killing of original thought. We don't buy kids chemistry sets - if you can even *find* a real chemistry set anymore. We don't leave kids alone with power tools or rocket kits. Kids aren't free to wander up to the library when the thought strikes them. When I was growing up, it was not rare for kids to visit older adults in the neighborhood, to help them with chores or just talk. Today we'd all be terrified that those adults would be child molesters.
In short, our kids' lives are so scheduled, subscribed, and physically limited that any natural creativity is often crushed. Outsourcing is an immediate & serious problem, but the crushing of native creativity will bite us hard in the long-term.
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