Jobs shipped offshore

Date: Sunday, July 27, 2003 3:03 PM

JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER

www.ZaZona.com

Stories of worker replacement are increasing in frequency and many of
them have a common theme - American citizens are ordered to train their
foreign replacements. Employers blackmail their workers by threatening
to take away their severance packages if they don't train a designated
alien to do their job.

Stories such as this one totally disprove the skill-set excuse for
displacing Americans. Corporations, universities, and government
agencies have claimed for years that they must hire aliens because
there are not enough citizens with the skills necessary to work in
today's high tech environment. If foreigners on H-1B and L-1 visas were
so well-educated they wouldn't need to be trained once they came to the
U.S.

Current laws leave white-collar workers vulnerable to this type of
abuse and it's not likely that Congress or Bush will change those laws
as long as corporations insist on cutting cost by dumping American
workers. If these workers had been organized and working under a
collective bargaining agreement, they could collectively negotiate the
terms and conditions of their severances. They might even be able to
prevent the layoffs from even happening.

Without a union the workers have no recourse but to submit to blackmail
or they will lose their severance. Corporate abuse of this type is
usually legal so individual workers don't have a chance when
negotiating with corporate attorneys who are experts at using loopholes
in the law. Massachusetts is an "at-will employment" state so employers
have even more power to terminate employment for any reason. Most of
the time it's very difficult to prove in a court that companies
violated federal discrimination laws and the expense of hiring a law
firm discourages most workers from seeking a legal settlement.

http://www.townonline.com/littleton/news/local_regional/lit_covlihewpack07232003.htm

Jobs shipped offshore

By Susan Tordella / Staff Writer
Littleton Independent
Wednesday, July 23, 2003

System engineer Maria Kehn anticipated her job might be on the line
when Hewlett-Packard bought Compaq Computers last year.

But she didn't expect to train her replacement, who then moved back to
India and assumed her job in one of the latest cost-savings moves by
international corporations, called off-shoring.

Workers also didn't appreciate the company not keeping its promise to
employ them until November.

Instead, two were laid off in February, and four engineers were told to
train their replacements and finish the assignment by June 30.

The engineers were told, "We would have a team coming in from India and
we would be expected to hand our work off to them," said Kehn, a
Clinton resident.

Although it was an awkward position, the engineers did not resign. They
stayed on to train about a dozen people who would replace them and work
offshore, in India.

When Kehn and others asked supervisors "Where's our incentive to do
this?" Kehn said they were told, "'We don't have to keep you. We could
fire you and you could have no severance package at all.'"

So the group taught them about the software product that does fraud
management for the telecom industry and how to execute quality
assurance release tests on it.

"They were all basically the same as we were. They all have bachelor's
degrees in computer science. They weren't any smarter. They weren't any
faster," said Kehn.

As part of the severance package, employees must sign a document that
states no promises were made to keep them on until November, said Karen
Hamilton, a secretary who was laid off in February with another
non-engineer.

Hamilton has refused to sign the document because the company had
promised to keep them on until November. The move may cost her three
weeks of severance pay. Other employees are reluctant to take their
case public out of fear of retribution or withholding of the severance
packages.

Hewlett-Packard did not return calls from the Independent before press
deadlines. Kehn and Hamilton had contacted their legislators, with disappointing
results.

An aide at Gov. Mitt Romney's office told Kehn she receives about 300
e-mails a day on the issue of the off-shoring of U.S. jobs. What irked
Kehn was the governor's aide's lack of sympathy or recourse.

"Do you know what their answer was? 'It's a federal issue,' and that
really made me mad," said Kehn. Romney's aides then gave her Sen. Ted
Kennedy's telephone number.

Responses to Kehn's letters to the state's congressional delegation
were not much better.

"I got letters back from the congressmen that didn't make sense for
me," said Kehn. The answers avoided the issue. "Did they understand
that US jobs are going away. Seventeen-thousand jobs went away in
Massachusetts in May," Kehn asked rhetorically.

Kehn credits Congressional Reps. James McGovern, Third District, and
John W. Olver, First District, with listening to her complaints and
working on a legislative response to plug the drain of the off-shoring
of jobs.

What Kehn finds more demoralizing is that companies who win contract
from the U.S. government take advantage of the cost savings offered by
off-shoring American jobs. The costs of the contracts have remained
stable even though labor costs have gone down.

"These companies are off-shoring the jobs and not passing the savings
along to the taxpayers," said Kehn. "It's being pocketed by the CEOs
and all the people up above. No raises are being given out" to typical
workers.

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Rob Sanchez is board member of NAEA - www.NAEA.US

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