You said, "Up and down. Isn't that how it's always worked?" And I say, yes, that is always how it worked. But nowadays things are not working how they always have worked. 
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." |
I'm glad you have that option. The problem is, low wages due to globalization will propagate to other fields. Those who think this is just an IT problem are tragically wrong.
You said, "Up and down. Isn't that how it's always worked?" And I say, yes, that is always how it worked. But nowadays things are not working how they always have worked.
Then how could you turn around and say this after reading it? In post #29 you said, "It'll be your turn after a while, I suspect."
Again, if you read it and understood it, how could you say that it would be my "turn after a while" since I admitted that it had already happened? That's why I asked the rhetorical question about things going up and down in the business world.
I could once more be laid off. There's no denying that. And if and when that does happen, then I'll survive it again.
No one owes me anything. Emotionalism and fear-mongering don't work on me. It may on others. But not me.
$710.96.. The price of freedom.
Corporations cannot by themselves just waltz into another country and set up business. It takes the hated "government interference" to make it possible. It takes the hated "government interference" to protect against risk doing business "over there." They don't call Ex-Im Bank Boeing Bank for no reason. Then there's OPIC and other types of hated "government interference." The good kind of "government interference."
IMO this is more than jobs chasing cheap labor. It's the Third Way. It's Kyoto-lite, redistribution of wealth that lets corporations profit instead of forced redistribution of wealth to the third world.
This is post-America. Leftist tranzis, "free" traders, multi-national capitalists, leftists, rightists have all moved beyond being Americans. As long as there are enough young, patriotic Americans to enlist and fight to protect them they will continue to loot America and profit -- oh, and BTW, those young Americans have no right to a job when they return from war.
Let's have fair trade, not "free" trade driven by ideology and government interference (the "good" kind). Our decades-old trade with Europe is free trade. Let developing countries prove their comparative advantages, first by eliminating corruption and tyranny.
So, in the end, China would only be a global player, not challenging our dominance but among the big boys -- that big boy list would be the US, the EU, Japan, China and India. The US would be dominant well into the future -- both China and India's GDP per capita are barely 1/10 of ours.
I used to work as an IT contractor, good pay, but the periods between contracts have been farther and farther apart.
Now I'm in the process of incorporating my history website (which has been a valuable Internet resource for 6 years) into a non-profit foundation with 501c(3) status. Hopefully this will get the ball rolling again. It will mean biting the bullet for a while until we can receive grants.
While working on this, I have also gone back to my dream of writing novels.
I get discouraged sometimes, but I don't believe that G-D closes one door without opening another.
We live in a democracy. We should all be able to tolerate working with people of varied educational backgrounds. Isn't making this an issue just subtle class warfare?
We live in a democracy. We should all be able to tolerate working with people of varied educational backgrounds. Isn't making this an issue just subtle class warfare?
Precisely, Alouette. It's that thing we call faith.
Is there anything too hard for Him?
$710.96.. The price of freedom.
Because you can bounce around within a outsourcable technical field until the room becomes too narrow to rebound. Surely, you can survive, but to do so will inevitably require you move from the field in which you are educated and experienced.
Myself, I spent 30 years in such a technical field and saw the handwriting on the wall. I'm now in a non outsourcable field.
The problem isn't survival, it's the break down of the high standard of living that has motivated individual commercial activities that, taken all together, provide us security on the world stage.
You and I are just nodes. Our situations are fragments, our survival a personal thing. But the situation is compounding and accelerating, and will eventually touch us personally.
And you're right, nobody owes us anything, but it may well turn out that we find that we owe increasingly international job providers more than we are willing to part with.
And you're wrong, domestic corporations do most certainly owe us something as Americans: the first on the short list to participate in their enrichment, and ours. These corporations are state (as in one of the United States) created entities, under laws benevolent to their free exercise of business opportunity, and which laws are created, nurtured and fought for by Americans, not Indians, not Chinese.
What we are hearing is the silence of the canary, which ought to be singing. We ought to pay close attention to the fact it's not, instead of exclusively concentrating on sticking our proboscis into dwindling pools of economic opportunity.
We can tolerate most anything, unfortunately in many cases. It's not what we can tolerate, but the right we have to pursue what we prefer, and not be put down because we prefer it.
Has nothing to do with class warfare, in my estimation. Has to do with not having our communication limited in scope to what goes into the mouth and what comes out at the other end.
We don't live in a democracy, heaven forbid. We live in a democratically ordered republic. Enough people forget that, and we will live in a democracy, and find out first hand why the founders were so against it.
You support outsourcing to China. That makes them stronger.
Remember. Be assured, I will.
IMO this is more than jobs chasing cheap labor. It's the Third Way. It's Kyoto-lite, redistribution of wealth that lets corporations profit instead of forced redistribution of wealth to the third world.
This is post-America. Leftist tranzis, "free" traders, multi-national capitalists, leftists, rightists have all moved beyond being Americans. As long as there are enough young, patriotic Americans to enlist and fight to protect them they will continue to loot America and profit -- oh, and BTW, those young Americans have no right to a job when they return from war.
If you want on or off my offshoring ping list, please FReepmail me!
If we have to compete evenly, ala Carley, they level the playing field.
Until I see some action on that, like Miss Fiorna taking a strong stand for individual rights and an end to such pernicous practices as madated affirmative action I will need to continue boycotting HP products.
Really? So are you ready to say, clearly, openly, forthrightly, that you oppose sending American jobs and infrastructure offshore?
If that's the case, please, correct me! I'd like nothing better!
The fault for this are all those folks who buy made in China stuff, even though American has better value for money
Great! We're in total agreement on that point! Now, are you willing to stand with me in opposition to the trend? Will you support changing the rules of the game to favor America and Americans?
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