Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Amazingly, off-shoring proceeds apace

Greetings good citizen,

Chrysler may emerge from bankruptcy as soon as next week but it’s anyone’s guess as to when it will resume production. GM, having only entered bankruptcy protection yesterday, may not emerge for months…

But Mr. Market doesn’t mind, there are still too few buyers and even less demand.

GM is said to, er, ‘support’ in the vicinity of 11,500 parts suppliers. Naturally most of these suppliers provide parts for other carmakers. It’s the few that make ‘brand specific’ components (like fenders and headlight/tail light assemblies) that are finding themselves behind the ‘eight-ball’

Already a couple of the larger parts suppliers have filed Chapter 11. Left to our imagination is how many of the 11,000 plus others can weather a three plus month ‘drought’.

Before the GM bankruptcy is was estimated that roughly 3 million workers had jobs connected to the automotive manufacturing industry. Whereas one in ten jobs is related to the transportation industry.

If we were to add in warehousing and distribution we’d be talking one in four jobs. (I’m hip-shooting here, it may be higher than that, considering who our number one employer is.)

That said, one thing is certain, our automotive industry will be considerably smaller than it used to be. How many of the three million workers that ‘used to’ earn their living from the auto manufacturing sector will be permanently displaced, we can only guess.

With the global economy doing so lousy, you’d think patriotic US companies, especially companies on taxpayer ‘life support’ would be doing their best to hire ‘displaced Americans’.

sadly, no

India Feels Less Vulnerable as Outsourcing Presses On

By HEATHER TIMMONS
Published: June 2, 2009

NOIDA, India — The global downturn has slowed the rapid growth in India’s outsourcing business, but only slowed it. In fact — because of the pressure on companies, and even governments, to reduce costs — many outsourcing businesses are booming. And a mood that was deeply uncertain just six months ago has turned much more optimistic.

Unemployment has risen to 8.9 percent in the United States, a 26-year high, increasing longstanding pressures to “keep jobs in America.” But managers of companies big and small, squeezed between political pressures and the necessity of slimming down to survive, are choosing the bottom line.

J. Brandon Black, president and chief executive of the Encore Capital Group, a debt collection company based in San Diego, said he planned to significantly increase his work force in India in the next few years, in part because of the tough economic times.

“The thing it boils down to is the supply of well-trained educated labor at reasonable prices is just too great to ignore,” said Mr. Black. In India, “we’re hiring college-educated people.” The company is not doing that in the United States, where it would incur greater infrastructure and health care costs. [Tens of millions of US citizens are losing their jobs and THIS is how US commerce repays us? Worse, this is how our government is ‘protecting’ us?!]

“Outsourcing is here to stay,” Mr. Black said. [But you on the other hand, may not be.]

Some of America’s biggest companies continue to invest in India, even as they trim costs at home.

Hewlett-Packard said last month that it would cut an additional 6,400 jobs, on top of the 24,000 it said it was eliminating in September after a merger with Electronic Data Systems. About half of the September cuts are expected to come from the United States. In March, the computer giant said it was opening “HP Software University” in eight cities in India to train software testers. [Tell me good citizen, how inclined are you to buy a HP printer now?]

Last month, Honeywell International, the manufacturing behemoth based in Morristown, N.J., said it would invest $50 million in a new research and development facility in Bangalore that would employ 3,000. The move comes after Honeywell began a reorganization, closing plants and trimming hundreds of jobs recently in the United States. [This while the US is bleeding jobs!]

The company declined to comment for this article, but when it initially announced its India plans, its chairman and chief executive, David M. Cote, said about half of Honeywell’s employees and half of its business were outside the United States. [How would Mr. Cote like ALL of his business to be ‘outside’ the US?]

“Anything that creates any kind of protectionism, anything that stops the globalization activity, will be harmful,” he said. [There is the ‘problem’ good citizen, these morons may have MBA’s but none of them understand what TREASON is!]

Many in India say they believe that demographics are on their side in the long run.

“In most developed economies, the work force is aging,” said Ranjit Tinaikar, a partner with McKinsey, a consulting firm. The health care costs associated with employing those Western workers will continue to increase, he said, creating a “big opportunity” for India. [Where apparently if you get sick they drag you out to the gutter and shoot your sorry ass.]

A decade ago, McKinsey and India’s powerful information technology and outsourcing trade group, Nasscom, predicted that revenue from outsourcing by foreign companies would reach $50 billion in India in 2010. The global economic slowdown has delayed that by three or four quarters — revenue is predicted to reach $47 billion this year. [Understand good citizen, these are jobs US citizens could (and should) be doing.]

And in April, Nasscom and McKinsey predicted that by 2020, outsourcing would yield $175 billion in revenue here.

Growth will slow this year at many of India’s biggest outsourcing companies, however, because of the implosion of some of their largest clients: banks, mortgage servicing companies and Wall Street firms. But that does not mean revenue is no longer growing. [Um there isn’t one Wall Street firm that isn’t taking the US taxpayer’s dime…]

“People who have never looked at outsourcing before are saying they have to do it,” said Amitabh Chaudhry, the chief executive of Infosys BPO, the outsourcing arm of one of the largest Indian information technology companies. He expects his unit to grow 25 to 30 percent this year, compared with 40 to 50 percent in the past.

But political pressures are making a difference in how business is done. One growing trend, many outsourcing executives say, is placing more Indian employees in offices in the client’s home country. That way the job, ostensibly, does not move abroad. [Same fuckin’ difference!] But over the long term, many are likely to be moved across the globe.

“Our view is we start work onshore, then move it to Poland or Morocco, and then over time to India,” said Sachdev Ramakrishna, director of marketing for Steria, an information technology and outsourcing company. Steria is based in Paris, but one-quarter of its employees are in India, and it has offices in Morocco and Poland. “It’s like opening the tap in bits.”

Since Steria’s clients include public utilities and governments in Europe, getting them comfortable with the idea of moving jobs abroad can take time. “Everyone recognizes that this is a changed world order, and the focus is more on preservation of jobs,” Mr. Ramakrishna said. [The preservation of jobs! Easy for the thief to say…but it brings up and crucial point, if the workers weren’t ‘needed’ then neither would their jobs.]

And yet, new business is coming from all over: insurance companies with a growing number of elderly clients to monitor; pharmaceutical companies looking for more efficient ways to conduct drug trials and handle customer calls (even emergency inquiries, like overdose concerns); [Great idea. let’s out source matters of life and death to people where English is their second language! Is their no limit to their greed?] corporate legal teams balking at $350-an-hour fees to outside law firms. Even companies based in once union-friendly countries like France and Germany, as well as once-flush Middle Eastern firms, struggling media companies and companies that have been taken over by private equity firms are looking to outsource. [Mostly because these private equity firms leverage everything they touch to the point of unprofitability!]

Indian companies that relied on Wall Street and big banks for much of their business are aggressively learning new skills.

East of New Delhi, on a corporate campus that was once farmland, dozens of Indian doctors, nurses and pharmacists are scheduling checkups for patients in the United States and monitoring clinical trial data for some of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies. [Yet drugs still cost an arm and a leg…where’s the ‘savings’? Check the CEO’s pockets!]

Thirty miles to the southwest, in the town of Gurgaon, hundreds of Indian lawyers in a glass high-rise are conducting due diligence on deals, combing through contracts and studying intellectual property rights for Western clients. [Yep in a world ‘infested’ with ‘terrorists’, we want to send our sensitive, proprietary information to a ‘low cost’ not particularly secure country to be vetted…insane! I’m sure you are all aware that thousands of US lawyers have been sacked in the past six months, many of them with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of student debt.]

In the legal field, “there’s been a sea change in awareness of what’s possible” in the last 12 months, said Daniel Reed, the chief executive of UnitedLex, which has its headquarters in Atlanta but has the bulk of its employees in Gurgaon. More and more sophisticated work is coming to India, he said.

Matthew Fawcett, the general counsel of JDS Uniphase, a fiber optics company in California, started looking at outsourcing some legal work to India two years ago and is now a UnitedLex client.

“When you run a legal department of a publicly traded company,” he said, “you care about cost and overhead.” [But nobody gives a shit about jobs for US workers?]

Patni Computer Systems, which employs doctors and nurses in Noida, is working with health insurance companies in the United States whose policies provide home care for elderly patients. Patni’s doctors and nurses call the patients regularly for checkups, and if the patient needs a physical examination, they call the insurance company, which dispatches a nurse. [Have we just found out why US health care costs are climbing exponentially? It sure as shit ain’t getting ‘cheaper’! Every health care provider that uses these services should be prosecuted for fraud!]

“It’s a proactive measure, rather than reactive” said Sanjiv Kapur, the head of Patni’s outsourcing business, intended to prevent the patient from falling ill and winding up in the hospital. “It’s less costly for the insurance company.”


So, we have the US hemorrhaging jobs while US employers can’t off shore jobs fast enough! Worse, many of he worst offenders are currently on taxpayer supported life support!

Are you ‘pleased’ that these ‘frugal’ companies are watching their costs or are you bullshit that these traitorous bastards are keeping the ‘savings’ for themselves?

I’ll once again charge ‘off the reservation’ to point out a very basic point…if a pig is a pig and a duck is a duck then a dollar is a dollar.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A LOW COST LABOR POOL!

What we’re witnessing is CURRENCY MANIPULATION, plain and simple!

If we fail to put a stop to this nonsense, we won’t have an economy left to save!

Understand that we have already lost ALL of the jobs created during the eight years of the Bush administration. Yet US employers have been ‘focused’ on building their overseas workforces…

That shit don’t float. If the Indians want to provide healthcare services for somebody, their population is FIVE TIME LARGER than ours, We don’t have enough qualified caregivers here, surely they must be experiencing the same situation?

We don’t ‘need’ healthcare providers located six thousand miles away, there are plenty right here more than willing to do the job for a living wage.

No US workers equals no US economy…but apparently the greed heads can’t figure this one out.

I’m not saying anything you don’t already know. The ‘management’ of our nation is badly broken; we have precious little time (and no tools) with which to repair it.

The ‘no tools’ part is the most troubling aspect because it means we can’t fix what we have, we will be forced to replace it.

Worse, time is running out.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

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