From Editor and Publisher:

“SANTA ANA An Indian company will take over copyediting duties for some stories published in The Orange County Register and will handle page layout for a community newspaper at the company that owns the Pulitzer Prize-winning daily, the newspaper confirmed Tuesday.

Orange County Register Communications Inc. will begin a one-month trial with Mindworks Global Media at the end of June, said John Fabris, a deputy editor at the Register.

Mindworks’ Web site says the company is based outside New Delhi and describes its work as providing “high-quality editorial and design services to global media firms … using top-end journalistic and design talent in India.” …”

How much lower can consumer spending go? The malls are like mausoleums, retail clerks are getting laid off, and AOL recently featured on its welcome page the story of man so cheap that he recycles his dental floss – hanging it from a nail in his garage until it dries out.

It could go a lot lower of course. This guy could start saving the little morsels he flosses out and boil them up to augment the children’s breakfast gruel. Already, as the recession or whatever it is closes in, people have stopped buying homes and cars and cut way back on restaurant meals. They don’t have the money; they don’t have the credit; and increasingly they’re finding that no one wants their money anyway. NPR reported on February 28 that more and more Manhattan stores are accepting Euros and at least one has gone Euros-only.

The Sharper Image has declared bankruptcy and is closing 96 U.S. stores. (To think I missed my chance to buy those headphones that treat you to forest sounds while massaging your temples!) Victoria’s Secret is so desperate that it’s adding fabric to its undergarments. Starbucks had no sooner taken time off to teach its baristas how to make coffee than it started laying them off.

While Americans search for interview outfits in consignment stores and switch from Whole Foods to Wal-Mart for sustenance, the world watches tremulously. The Australian Courier-Mail, for example, warns of an economic “pandemic” if Americans cut back any further, since we are responsible for $9 trillion a year in spending, compared to a puny $1 trillion for the one billion-strong Chinese. Yes, we have been the world’s designated shoppers, and, if we fall down on the job, we take the global economy with us.

“Shop till you drop,” was our motto, by which we didn’t mean to say we were more compassion-worthy than a woman fainting at her work station in some Honduran sweatshop. It was just our proper role in the scheme of things. Some people make stuff; other people have to buy it. And when we gave up making stuff, starting in the 1980s, we were left with the unique role of buying. Remember Bush telling us, shortly after 9/11, to get out there and shop? It may have seemed ludicrous at the time, but what he meant was get back to work.

We took pride in our role in the global economy. No doubt it takes some skill to make things, but what about all the craft that goes into buying them – finding a convenient parking space at the mall, navigating our way through department stores laid out for maximum consumer confusion, determining which of our credit cards still has a smidgeon of credit in it? Not everyone could do this, especially not people whose only experience was stitching, assembling, wiring, and packaging the stuff that we bought.

But if we thought we were special, they thought we were marks. They could make anything, and we would dutifully buy it. I once found, in a party store, a baseball cap with a plastic turd affixed to its top and the words “shit head” on the visor. The label said “made in the Philippines” and the makers must have been convulsed as they made it. If those dumb Yanks will buy this…

There’s talk already of emergency measures, like making Christmas a weekly holiday, although this would require a level of deforestation that could leave Cheney with no quail to hunt.

More likely, there’ll be a move to outsource shopping, just as we’ve already outsourced manufacturing, customer service, X-ray reading, and R & D. But to whom? The Indians are clever enough, but right now they only account for $600 million in consumer spending a year. And could they really be trusted to put a flat screen TV in every child’s room, distinguish Guess jeans from a knock-off, and replace their kitchen counters on an annual basis?

And what happens to us, the world’s erstwhile shoppers? The president recently observed, in one of his more sentient moments, that unemployment is “painful.” But if a pink slip hurts, what about a letter from Citicard announcing that you’ve been laid off as a shopper? Will we fill our vacant hours twisting recycled dental floss onto spools or will we decide that, if we can’t shop, we’re going to have to shoplift?

Because we’ve shopped till we dropped alright, face down on the floor.

I am among thousands of attorneys who believe unionization is the only way to change the unconscionable exploitation by the employment agencies and their law firm clients upon whom we depend for work. Some of us depend on this work because of the six figure law school debt incurred because the mid- and lower-rated law schools misrepresent both the employment opportunities and the income that can be earned in the market. As a result, the market is being flooded with graduates whose only employment opportunity is temporary work, namely, document review, offered through agencies which are widely suspected of engaging in a variety of illegal anti-worker practices.

Others of us are over 50 years old and out of work as the result of layoffs and downsizing. Because of our age, we are unemployable and depend on agencies for document review work. My experience demonstrates that age only adds to the extreme difficulty in obtaining even a temporary assignment — all of which, by the way, are low-paying and benefit-free.

Now, in addition to the foregoing, our cheap document review jobs (which the law firms are already marking up by 200+%) are being sent to India. As an attorney admitted in New York, I cannot even get a job in New Jersey — so how is it that my potential job can be sent to India? It is time to organize and stop this madness.

For those who don’t know, only a small fraction of attorneys earn the “big bucks.” The big money is “earned” (more accurately “made” or “stolen”) on Wall Street, not in the vast majority of law firms. The rest of us — 90% or so — are struggling just to keep our heads above water and maintain even one foot in the middle class, i.e, pay for the roof over our head and buy health insurance out of pocket. This situation is undoubtedly not confined to the legal sector and is unsustainable. It is time — past time — to organize, unionize, compel our bar associations to side with us, and put an end to this insanity.

For information about offshoring and outsourcing, check out the links on the following site:

http://www.madnamerica.com/links.htm

My education is in science and computer technology. I have a BA ( 1971) in Chemistry, and training in several computer languages. I have been a computer programmer analyst for about 25 years, mostly in the turbine engine business. I also speak, read, and write Spanish and French, and a little Greek.

The aircraft industry was in a slump in 2001. Software was also being outsourced to India and Pakistan. During those 25 years my hearing deteriorated also to about 3% of normal hearing. Then in December of 2001 my aorta burst resulting in surgery, and recuperation. I went back to work in February of 2002, and was laid off in about a month. We were told to think “globally.” I pointed out that I could conduct business in Spanish and French, and could easily learn Portuguese and Italian if I needed it. I was told that the speech referred to “off shore locations,” that means cheap labor countries that Americans were asked to donate to in the form of charities. We were also told that there was no point in applying for SAP training because Americans were not going to be assigned to the job anyway.

Then 9-11 hurt the aircraft industry, and made the business of software support for it worse. I must use a TTY relay service for the phone, and potential employers simply do not return the calls. The ads I see are an example of what Mr. Cohen is talking about, no one would ever meet all of that criteria. There is always some minor reason why I do not qualify for the position.

Here’s an item of interest to United Professionals. Click on the link to view the whole message.

http://www.madnamerica.com/

Join our Labor Day

iTunes Picnic

On September 3, 2007 please help us out by downloading your .99 cent copy of “Mad in America”, a song by ETx, from Apple iTunes. Send a musical message to Washington DC on Labor Day,that we are tired of corporations and government giving away American jobs to foreign countries through outsourcing and relocating factories. Our aim is to get on the iTunes Top 100 chart on Labor Day, and make our message known on one of the worlds largest download sites.

I worked for an investment management firm for 15 years before outsourcing made it possible for them to reduce staff yet again. Since then I have been working as a consultant with no real job security or benenfits. The company I work for now has hired me as a consultant to help them get through the tough times so that they can outsource parts of their operations areas to India. And people ask me, why don’t I find a permanent job? I tell them there are no more permanent jobs.

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.

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