Archive for May, 2007

30+ year technology worker holding titles such as CIO and VP of Technology for a number of firms. Since 2002 when my DotBomb company went bust, I’ve been in and out of work. I’m more fortunate than most but I’m way below what would be considered normal middle class wages & benefits; no perm job, no vacation, no 401K, etc. I work with people 15-20 years junior to my experience and have to endure their inexperience.

On the flip side is the age discrimination that usually means I’ll never hear back on any job and if indeed I do talk to a recruiter, the excuse they use to not pass my resume along doesn’t stop them from passing along someone with the same problem. More and more the county is losing its middle class due to the concentration of wealth in the top 5% and the increased competition from illegal immigrants, offshoring, and onshoring (H1B visa program, etc) and quite frankly, the white middle class is as much an object of discrimination in our society – more than others because of the lack of any voice. I’m hoping to change that. To correct the problems I’ve encountered so that my children and grand children will not have to endure the same problems that I’ve encountered.

The world may be flat, as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has written, but I always liked to think I was standing on a hill. Now comes the news that pasadenanow.com, a local news site, is recruiting reporters in India. The website’s editor points out that he can get two Indian reporters for a mere $20,800 a year – and no, they won’t be commuting from New Delhi. Since Pasadena’s city council meetings can be observed on the web, the Indian reporters will be able to cover local politics from half the planet away. And if they ever feel a need to see the potholes of Pasadena, there’s always Google Earth.

Excuse me, but isn’t this more or less what former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair was fired for – pretending to report from sites around the country while he was actually holed up in his Brooklyn apartment? Or will pasadenanow.com be honest enough to give its new reporters datelines in Delhi (or wherever they live)?

I should have seen it coming. In the eighties, US companies began outsourcing the manufacturing of everything from garments to steel, leaving whole cities to die. Education was the recommended solution for the unemployed, because in the globalized future, Americans would be world’s brains, while Mexicans and Malaysians would provide the hands. Let the low-end, repetitive jobs scatter to the ends of the earth, we were told — the intellectual and creative work would stay right here.

So no one really complained when the back office and call center jobs migrated to India in the nineties: Who needed them? We would still be the brains of global business. When the IT jobs started drifting away, we were at first assured that only the more “routine” ones were outsourceable. As for all the laid-off techies, they were smart enough to develop new skills, right?

But no one can pretend any longer that we have a global monopoly on intellect and innovation. Look at the “telemedicine” trend, which has radiologists in India and Lebanon reading CT scans for hospitals in Altoona and Chicago. Or – and this was never supposed to happen – the growing outsourcing of R&D, with scores of companies opening labs in India or China – “Chindia,” as they are known in the biz lit. In 2005, a Microsoft manager told the Financial Times that “The question is how you make [the Chinese] truly creative, truly innovative.” Whoops – weren’t we supposed to be the innovators?

Still, writing was believed to be safe – the last stronghold of Western creativity. Explaining the outsourcing of almost every newspaper function, including copy-editing, the billionaire CEO of a consortium of Irish newspapers wrote: ”With the exception of the magic of writing and editing news … almost every other function, except printing, is location-indifferent.” But the magic has clearly been fading, starting two years ago when Reuters started outsourcing its Wall Street coverage to Bangalore. Is there nothing an actual, on-site, American can’t do better than anyone else?

In the Pasadena case, I can’t even complain, as US-based Reuters’ workers did when their jobs were outsourced, that the quality of journalism will suffer as a result. One of the Indian reporters just hired by pasadenanow.com has a degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, which is one of the three or four best j-schools in the country. I have taught there myself, and know that the students are scarily smart. Too bad that they these reporters couldn’t get real journalism jobs, at normal American wages, but American newspapers are axing good journalists even as I write.

No, I don’t resent the Indians for moving in on the kind of work I do. I just wish the next time some managers get the idea of cost-saving through outsourcing they’d go for the CEO’s job. That’s where the big bucks are, and there’s no reason to think a Chinese or Indian person couldn’t do a CEO’s work, whatever it may be, perfectly adequately, and at less than a tenth of the price. As for me, I’m retraining as a massage therapist, at least until they figure out how to do that from Mumbai.

From ”In These Times”: 

Voters aren’t happy with the reality of free trade—and Democrats are starting to listen.

The majority of Americans want their elected leaders to know that globalization isn’t working for them. Democratic politicians have heard the message and are now taking a few first steps to better regulate America’s integration into the global economy.

The November elections—when 37 House and Senate seats changed from “free trade” to “fair trade”—created a Democratic majority that needed to stake out a new position on trade. Globalization and offshoring of jobs ranked among the electorate’s top issues, according to polls by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research and Public Agenda. Results in key races indicate that Democrats could have picked up even more seats with a stronger message on global economic issues, according to an analysis by Chris Slevin and Todd Tucker of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, an organization critical of corporate-backed free trade.

Recent public opinion surveys reveal that Americans often support globalization in theory but criticize the reality. Steelworkers President Leo Gerard put it this way: “I don’t know any worker or trade unionist who is against trade, but we’re against exploitative trade that pits worker against worker, and country against country, and that’s what this current round of globalization has brought.”

Click “link to article” to read entire story

Colonial African childhood, archaeology/anthropology degree; exile from Thatcher’s Britain trailing marine ecologist spouse; odd jobs, most lately making coffee and copies for citizens’ group in the dying Florida Keys; aspiring to go to graduate school in the Fall to contemplate resource collapse in the wider Caribbean.

I entered the United States Navy at the age of 17 after quitting high school and receiving an Adult High School Diploma. After serving 10 years I left the service in 1991 and began college as a young father, working three jobs to support my family and attending school full time.

 I now have a BA in Psychology, a Masters in Public Administration, both from the University of Central Florida and an MBA from the University of South Florida. I work for a Non-Profit in Tampa and find it alarming and distressing the lack of stability and opportunity in Florida. I have spent a lot of money in my education and my family has sacrificed quite a bit in the past 16 years since leaving the military to have such little opportunity.

On December 3, 2003, the Target I worked for took me to an upstairs office. I didn’t think to ask why I was asked to go up there beforehand. I also did not know this was going to be the longest night of my life. This started sometime around 3 PM and ended about 6 hours later. I was asked about a transaction I made a year ago. It seems that I sold a video game system at a discount to another employee. They wanted to know why. Truth be told I did not remember, and still don’t remember to this day. That’s not good enough, said Asset Protection, after about an hour of trying to tell them that I don’t remember anything about that day let alone that transaction.

 I had to use the restroom. I asked if I could and was denied. This goes on for another hour when I say, “Look I have to pee, bad, can I go to the restroom?” Again I was told no. So I stand up and start walking out the door, and was stopped. At this point I thought to myself, “They’re looking to fire me!” So I start to think of ways that transaction might have come to be. I say something like, “I would never give a discount unless a manager or a supervisor told me to.”

I was interrupted and told that it sounds like I was trying to place my mistake on others. Three hours into this and still needing to pee I was told that I need to write an apologetic letter to the company with every detail that we just went over and then I could use the restroom. They are going to use that time to fax it to the district office. I am told they are going to decide if I am to be fired or suspended. I write the letter, not that I believe anything I’m saying in it. He then looks at it and takes a highlighter and tells me I need to rewrite these parts. Now I sit and wait. In the room where I was being held captive I look through a window that had dark tint so that Asset Protection could spy on their employees. I look down on the sales floor and see my coworker’s — friends. I want to scream out for help. But I can’t. Because I still have hope.

After being released I call the Target store because a friend of mine seemed to have been upset when the cops walked me out in handcuffs. Let’s call her Jenny. I find out that Jenny’s now being held captive. My heart stopped, my inner cave man took over. I have to save the girl. So I drive back to the Target parking lot. I plot ways to get her out.

 I never acted because it would have gotten her in more trouble. So I waited for about 5 hours until they let her go. When I did get to see her I told her I would make everything okay again. I failed. I was hoping the

Reginald L. Goodwin describes his book, “Unemployed — A Memoir” 

“This blog began with what you will soon read in the introduction.  The conditions that caused my predicament existed, before it did.

Author: “Unemployed - A Memoir”
http://www.reggiegoodwin.com

“The soul that is within me, no man can degrade.” Frederick Douglass

“As two H-1B reform bills were introduced in Congress, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that as of late Monday afternoon, April 2, 2007, it had received approximately 150,000 cap-subject H-1B petitions, more than enough to meet the congressionally mandated cap of 65,000 for fiscal year 2008. April 2 was the first day that employers could file petitions to employ foreign workers temporarily in specialty occupations such as engineering under the controversial H-1B program. …”

Click on link to article to read entire story.

“Indian software industry body Nasscom has pressed for an increase in the quota of H-1B visas for India.

In a presentation before US Indian Business Alliance (USIBA), an independent business alliance between US and Indian business, and Congressman John Conyers, the group called for increased lobbying in this context.

H-1B visas are non-immigrant visas that are granted to ‘specialty occupations’ including technology, biotech and other knowledge-oriented sectors. The number of H-1B visas granted by the US was drastically reduced from 195,000 to 65,000 in 2004.

Both US and Indian companies have repeatedly stressed the need to raise the cap.

In the meeting held in Washington DC, Conyers, who chaired, urged USIBA and Nasscom to testify at upcoming hearings of a Congressinal panel looking into the issue of immigration, on H-1B visas and green card-related matters. …”

 Click on link to article to read entire story.

 “Student loans have become the most profitable, uncompetitive, oppressive, and predatory type of debt of any in the nation. This has occurred due to legislation that was largely paid for by the the lobbying machine of Sallie Mae, the largest student loan company in America. Vast personal fortunes are being made by both Sallie Mae executives, and others who paid for this legislation, at the expense of decent citizens who were not able to capitalize on their education. This has effectively crippled MILLIONS of decent citizens who want to repay their original debt, but are prevented from doing so by staggeringly higher amounts being demanded from them by both “non-profit”, and for-profit student loan companies. This has truly created a swath of economic destruction across our land.”

 From: http://www.studentloanjustice.org:80/