[thunderous_funker]

Published on Tuesday, November 4, 2003 by Reuters
US Job Cuts More Than Doubled in October- Report
by Dan Wilchins

NEW YORK - The number of job cuts announced by U.S. employers more than doubled in October to the highest level in a year, a report said on Tuesday, raising worries that persistent layoffs would undercut the economy's robust recovery.

Planned layoffs at U.S. firms shot up to 171,874 jobs in October, from 76,506 in September, job placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said in their monthly job cut report. That was the highest amount since 176,010 job cuts were announced in October 2002.

Challenger also said that according to a poll it conducted, 78 percent of human resources executives did not expect any significant upturn in hiring until the second quarter of 2004.

"We're not out of the woods yet with regard to the labor market," said Lehman Brothers economist Drew Matus.

The Challenger report raised caution that Friday's employment report could show job losses in October, throwing into question whether the economic rebound will be sustained next year.

Economists polled by Reuters expect a 55,000 rise in payrolls after a 57,000 gain the prior month, though that is below the 150,000 or more rise in payrolls that analysts believe is needed to bring down the unemployment rate, now at 6.1 percent.

In a sign the job market may face another difficult month in November, Tyco International Ltd. on Tuesday said it would eliminate 7,200 jobs as it streamlines its far-flung empire.

Even as the economy grew a whopping 7.2 percent in the third quarter, its fastest pace in two decades, firms eliminated 41,000 positions -- showing that even robust growth has not led to hiring.

Some economists cautioned that job losses in October are usually higher due to seasonal factors. Other data, like weekly claims for jobless benefits, have suggested the labor market is starting to stabilize after hemorrhaging nearly 3 million jobs in the past three years.

Manufacturers nationwide slowed their pace of layoffs in October, and some regional surveys have showed renewed hiring for the first time in the past few years

[thunderous_funker]

Published on Sunday, November 2, 2003 by the Boston Globe

As Economy Gains, Outsourcing Surges
by Hiawatha Bray

MANILA -- To hear how far and deep the outsourcing of American jobs has traveled, listen to Christian Mancenon in barely accented English take an order over the phone for HBO from a man in Lebanon, Ill. "I'm showing here that you love movies," the 25-year-old Filipino said, while looking at his computer screen in a low-rise building in Makati, Manila's business district. Mancenon and 600 others work for a subsidiary of Philippines Long Distance Telephone Co. that fields customer calls for Dish Network satellite TV of Littleton, Colo.

Like India, Pakistan, and Russia, the Philippines has a growing share of the world's high-tech jobs that have fled high-cost places, such as Massachusetts and California's Silicon Valley. But even workers filling customer orders, with few skills, have trouble competing with the $300 a month Mancenon is paid in the Philippines, one-fifth of what a worker in the United States would get for doing the same job.

The spread of outsourcing, beyond hard-hit technology workers, is a big reason the US economic recovery so far is a jobless one, and has stayed that way much longer than in previous upturns. A study released recently from the University of California at Berkeley says the country lost more than 1 million white-collar jobs in the 1990s and "hundreds of thousands more since the turn of the century."

Precise data are hard to come by and estimates vary widely, but the UC study says that outsourcing is accelerating. "If you simultaneously read Indian newspapers and US newspapers, you're going to get a good correlation between layoffs here and jobs being created there," said Ashok Deo Bardhan, a researcher for the study. He added that as many as 30,000 jobs were lost to India alone in June, and that 14 million US service jobs are vulnerable.

Lured by lower costs overseas that enable them to increase profits in tough times, companies like Dell Computer Corp., Procter & Gamble Co., American Express Corp., and Citibank employ 20,000 Filipinos to answer their phones. The Philippine government predicts that call center jobs will double over the next year.

Filipinos also are competing for high-tech jobs like software development and engineering, the kind of work US firms have been sending to India. US jobs also are going to Ireland, Russia, China, even Ghana.

Many economists say the lost jobs will be absorbed as the economic expansion lengthens and as baby boomers retire, shrinking the overall US labor force. But the UC study says that unless the US economy pioneers new high-wage industries to employ the displaced workers, they can expect a future of lower pay and a reduced standard of living.

US companies say they have no choice. In a global economy, they say, they must stay competitive with companies that operate in lower-cost countries -- akin to the argument that if one guy does it, everybody has to just to keep alive.

"Clearly, US companies have looked offshore because they have to reduce their operating costs in order to survive," said Rita Cruz, a partner at the consulting firm Accenture, which employs 2,000 Filipino software developers.

Inevitably, that means tougher times for many US workers. Despite a Commerce Department report last week that the economy grew at a 7.2 percent annual rate in the third quarter, the sharpest growth in 19 years, the economy still lost 41,000 more jobs.

One year before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Northwest Airlines employed more than 52,000 workers. By last September, that was down below 39,000. Meantime, the St. Paul, Minn., company employs computer programmers in Manila. Foreign workers "cover commodity tasks, enabling us to shift employees to focus on key innovation areas," said Mary Stanik, an airline spokeswoman.

One school of thought says that over time, Americans will benefit from the higher corporate profits that come from outsourcing. Low-level work will be performed in low-wage countries, saving US employees for more demanding, higher-paying tasks.

Mike Gildea, executive director of the Department for Professional Employees of the AFL-CIO, which represents 4 million white-collar workers, does not believe the explanation that Americans will do better in the long run. "It's a load of crap," he said. "This is exactly what we were told about manufacturing jobs 15 years ago."

In a country as poor as the Philippines, outsourcing is a bonanza. The Philippines is regarded as the Asian tiger that never roared, a promising country that did not achieve the booming economic growth that came to Taiwan, Singapore, or South Korea. The country's 84 million people include a sizable middle class, but according to government statistics, average household income as of 2000 was about $2,600, with a third of all households earning less than $1,000 a year.

But the literacy rate is well over 90 percent. The universities produce 350,000 graduates a year, 50,000 of them engineers, more than the domestic economy can absorb. Most speak English.

Because the Philippines is near the Asian mainland and Australia, and because of longstanding economic and military ties to America, the country has superb telecommunications links. A network of undersea fiber optic cables connects the islands to North America, Asia, Africa, and Europe, providing excellent voice and data communications at low cost.

But decades of corrupt misrule and martial law spoiled the Philippine economy. Once the only hope for educated Filipinos was a plane ticket out. Today, it's a phone or a computer terminal.

Cristina David, a 35-year-old engineer at Software Ventures International in Manila, oversees several software projects for US companies. Like many of her colleagues, she knows how things are done in America. "I worked there for two years," she said. "I felt so lonely, so I had to come back."

And why not? She can do the same work in the Philippines, and although a $4,000 annual salary is sub-poverty in the United States, it lets David live the sweet life in Manila. She drives a Mitsubishi Lancer -- "fully loaded," David said.

In the home David shares with her widowed mother, there is a live-in maid who does all the cooking and cleaning, six days a week, in exchange for room and board and $50 a month. Every December, David and her friends fly to Hong Kong or Thailand for vacation. Software Ventures has been developing software in Manila for nearly 30 years. During that time, said president and CEO Gil Guanio, the company hired and trained about 6,000 people, only to see the best of them immigrate to the US, Canada, or Australia.

Today, the company finds it far easier to keep its 500 software developers at home because opportunity in the United States has dwindled but keeps growing in the Philippines. "The only way to keep what I call the best people," Guanio said, "is to pursue an offshore strategy that brings the work from out of the country into the country."

The strategy has been working as a growing number of US firms have sent programming work to the Philippines. Since 2000, Thomson West, an Eagan, Minn., publishing company, employed Software Ventures for software maintenance and support services. Con-Way Transportation Services, a major trucking firm in Ann Arbor, Mich., has had its older software maintained by Software Ventures since 2001. "It frees our people up to do more cutting-edge stuff," said Con-Way's marketing director, Joe DeLuca.

That's no solace to out-of-work US programmers, who are competing against the likes of Mary Rose Dela Cruz. She has worked for seven years as a software developer for Headstrong Corp., a Fairfax, Va., consulting firm. The company's global development center in Manila employs 150 software developers, tackling projects for US, European, and Asian firms.

Dela Cruz makes about $1,000 a month, a fraction of what an equally skilled American would earn. But in the Philippine economy, she can afford a car and overseas vacations, while providing financial aid to put other members of her family through school.

Most Philippine outsourcing jobs do not go to software engineers. The biggest boom comes in lower-skilled technology work like medical transcription. Consider eData Services, a Manila company that provides an 800 phone number in the United States for doctors to dial in and dictate medical information. The eData workers, all of whom hold a degree related to medical care -- usually nursing or physical therapy -- type it up. Doctors working for eData part time act as editors and check the accuracy of the work. Once it is verified, the transcripts are e-mailed back to doctors' offices in the United States.

At the call center where Mancenon works, the company sends workers through "Amspeak" training courses. The schooling seeks to purge workers' voices of "foreign" accents and familiarize them with the latest American slang.

Nonetheless, despite the training in American English and pop culture, Mancenon estimated that 3 of 10 callers realize they are speaking to someone outside America: "If they ask us if we're American, we proudly say `no.' "

[mr. natural]

I hear there are a lot of good job opportunities here:





Of course, you could always move here:

[MacGorilla]

Sad Factoid: Between George I and George II NO net jobs were created.

[stupendousman]

Here's a fun timeline:

Halfway through GHWB's Presidency, there's a short recession.

The recession ends and the economy starts unprecedented growth

At the begining of the growth cycle, a Presidential election campaign starts. All we hear from the Democrats are cries about "the economy". They play on the fact that Americans knew we HAD been in a cyclical recession despite the fact that the economy was growing.

Clinton gets elected and inherits a growing economy. It's spurred on by a brand new technological niche: public access to the Internet. Lot's of money is invested and new high-tech jobs are in play.

Clinton's a little over halfway through his second term. The economy starts a downward cycle. George Bush and Dick Cheney keep mentioning that the next President will have to deal with inheriting a crummy economy. Instead of crying about "the economy" the democrats had nothing better to do then to accuse Bush of "talking down" the economy

Bush inherits a lousy economy. People have been laid off and not as many are employed because the huge growth that occured during the Clinton adminstration was largly on the back of the "Internet Economy", and it went bust. You couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting someone who'd been laid off by an Internet Start-up that was promising, but sank.

The Democrats start caring about the economy again.

The Democrats start caring about the jobs lost during the end of the Clinton administration.

The economy starts to surge. The Democrats stop caring about the ecomony. They say only the jobs are important.

.......

What comes next? Figure it out for yourself. What will the Democrats have to complain about once job growth occurs do to the corporate growth caused by the surging economy? They'll start making fun of Bush's intelligence again.

GOOD LUCK!

[Lerkfish]

Originally posted by stupendousman:
What comes next? Figure it out for yourself. What will the Democrats have to complain about once job growth occurs do to the corporate growth caused by the surging economy? They'll start making fun of Bush's intelligence again.

No need to make fun of Bush's intelligence.

My objections to the Bush administration and the neocon agenda go far beyond that, and far beyond a mild economic surge or drop in the next year before the election...

In economic terms, I'm more concerned about the highest budget deficit...ever. That's an economic impact our grandchildren will be paying for.

In ethical terms, I'm more concerned about the practice and precedent of preemptively regime changing other countries based on cherrypicked intelligence and intentionally misleading the american people.

In global terms, I'm more concerned about where we stand in brinkmanship and diplomacy with nearly every other country on the globe. I'm concerned Bush, et al. have done irreparable and debilitating damage to our ability to function or be trusted ever again in terms of treaties or diplomatic efforts.

In humanitarian terms, I'm more concerned that the Bush administration can so egregiously beard their machiavellian brutal foreign policy machinations with false "liberation" rationales.

In short, I could care less whether Bush is a moron or a rhodes scholar. The salient point is that he, or his advisors/handlers, have proven themselves to be extremely dangerous, to the world, and to what america is supposed to stand for.

[kvm_mkdb]

Feeling a draft?

[finboy]

Originally posted by MacGorilla:
Sad Factoid: Between George I and George II NO net jobs were created.

You mean during the Clinton administration?

[fireside]

all the jobs are moving to China/Tawian/Japan/other Asian countries. labor is much much cheaper over there than it is in the States, so more companies are sending work over the seas to different countries. simple as that. do we really need to make fun of our presidents intelligence for a simple business action?

[Nonsuch]

Originally posted by Lerkfish:
In economic terms, I'm more concerned about the highest budget deficit...ever. That's an economic impact our grandchildren will be paying for.

You shouldn't have had to point out something so obvious, Lerk, but thanks all the same.

[The Mick]

I'm sick of all the outsourcing going on. It seems that every time I have to call a vendor or someone in tech support at work, I get some dude in India who can't speak English worth a damn, has no knowledge or experience and could give a damn less about me since he's 15,000 miles away. Every time I hear that voice I just want to hang up.

[Zimphire]

Yeah NAFTA was a bad idea.