US companies moving more jobs overseas

US corporations are picking up the pace in shifting well-paid technology jobs to India, China and other low-cost centers, but they are keeping quiet for fear of a backlash, industry professionals said.

Morgan Stanley estimates the number of US jobs outsourced to India will double to about 150,000 in the next three years. Analysts predict as many as two million US white-collar jobs such as programmers, software engineers and applications designers will shift to low cost centers by 2014. But the biggest companies looking to “offshoring” to cut costs, such as Microsoft Corp., International Business Machines Corp. and AT&T Wireless, are reluctant to attract attention for political reasons, observers said this week.

“The problem is that companies aren’t sure if it’s politically correct to talk about it,” said Jack Trout, a principal of Trout & Partners, a marketing and strategy firm. “Nobody has come up with a way to spin it in a positive way.”

This causes a problem for publicly traded companies, which would ordinarily brag about cost savings to investors. Instead, they send vague signals that they are opening up operations in India and China, but often decline to elaborate.

Offshoring companies “are paying Chinese wages and selling at US prices,” said Alan Tonelson, of the US Business and Industrial Council, a trade group for small business. Recently, AT&T Wireless told the US Securities & Exchange Commission that it would lay off 1,900 employees this year. Communications Workers of America members obtained an internal memo prepared by Tata Consultancy Services of India that discussed how it would assume those US jobs.

Subsequently, AT&T Wireless officials acknowledged it was exploring the job shifts but didn’t offer details.

While some companies, such as Electronic Data Systems Corp., CAP Gemini Ernst & Young and Sapient Corp., acknowledge they shift jobs abroad to exploit cost advantages and around-the-clock work, IBM asserts that it is not moving jobs but creating new ones. (Reuters)

Canadian unions demand inclusion

Premier Jean Charest says social peace in Quebec is safe but the province’s powerful unions are threatening a general strike in 2004 that could paralyze the province.

The unions are already angry, but the real labor wars will likely hit this spring when negotiations reach a critical stage between the government and the unions representing about 500,000 public-sector workers.

The Liberal government upset labor by rushing through a series of laws that will give unions less control over the Quebec economy. The government infuriated unions by ditching the usual Quebec practice of bringing them deep into the decision-making process. “They have antagonized the unions like never before in history,” PQ Leader Bernard Landry said recently.

“This session has already made history. We have never seen a new government create such a level of unsatisfaction in such a short period of time, not Robert Bourassa, nor Daniel Johnson nor anyone. I hope what they are doing won’t massacre economic growth.” The five major labour groups represent civil servants, teachers, nurses and other public sector workers. They will simultaneously try to hammer out a deal by summer in Quebec’s unusual system of collective bargaining.

The unions have demanded a 12.5 percent pay increase over three years. The government has raised the idea of a wage freeze. (Canadian Press)

UAW contract ratified at NC freightliner plant

A 65-percent majority of union members at the Freightliner Parts Manufacturing Plant here voted Sunday to accept a first-time contract. The Members of the United Auto Workers Local 5286 ratified the agreement, the final resolution in what had been a standoff since the union first tried to organize the plant in early 2002.The contract means an immediate $800 signing bonus and a raise of 50 cents an hour for union members.

Workers will also receive an increase of 30 cents an hour in the second year of the labor agreement, and 45 cents more an hour in the third year. Skilled trades will receive an additional 25 cents an hour in the second and third years of the agreement. The contract also reduces worker health care costs by eliminating monthly premium sharing on health insurance. The new contract became effective upon ratification and will expire at midnight on March 31, 2007.

First-year contracts were also passed at Freightliner’s heavy-duty truck plant and Product Distribution Inspection Center in Rowan County and at a Mount Holly plant this month. (The Gaston Gazette)

San Francisco sex workers demand legal protection

San Francisco’s prostitutes and strippers are calling on the city’s newly elected young mayor to help decriminalize the world’s oldest profession and crack down on abuses of exotic dancers. Dancers charge that the city’s outgoing mayor, Willie Brown, the former lawyer of a prominent strip club owner, ignored years of labor law and safety violations in San Francisco’s strip clubs.

Fed up with non-enforcement of labor laws, dancers have filed two class action lawsuits against the city’s strip clubs charging that managers seized their tips, failed to pay them wages, and charged them hundreds of dollars per shift for the privilege of working.

They say these illegal fees led to a climate that coerced them into prostitution at increasingly low rates. “We are not trying to close the clubs, what we want is safe working conditions and we want to have our labor rights respected,” said San Francisco dancer activist Daisy Anarchy. Anarchy and other dancers are particularly angry that police ignored the presence of illegal private booths at the clubs which dancers say led to assaults by customers. When they complained to police, dancers say investigators failed to take their concerns seriously.

Local prosecutors say the charges were hard to substantiate. San Francisco activists have formed a US chapter of the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP), an Australian-based group which successfully advocated for the decriminalization of prostitution there. The liberal city’ SWOP-USA founder Robyn Few points out that legalization of prostitution typically creates a brothel model like that which currently exists in Nevada.

SWOP-USA presented prostitution decriminalization initiatives for the California cities of San Francisco and nearby Berkeley last week. It has also drafted statewide legislation for the 2004 national elections. The liberal city’s strippers and prostitutes have also criticized police for cracking down on street prostitution and private brothels, which they say has only driven the prostitution business into the strip clubs.

Many who support labor rights for strippers here say decriminalizing prostitution is potentially a far more effective solution than attempting to stamp out the market for sex. (AFP)

Justice probing claim of being chained in

The US Justice Department has begun to investigate a new case of slavery in Florida involving a group of undocumented Mexican farmworkers who say they were forcibly detained and threatened with violence by labor contractors. In that article, a 28-year-old Mexican man said that on more than one occasion in late 2002, he and other migrant tomato pickers were locked inside a trailer in the town of Wimauma, in Hillsborough County, by a family of farm labor contractors who claimed the workers owed them money.

Those alleged debts were smuggling fees the workers incurred while being transported clandestinely into the US from Mexico. The man, who used the alias Jose Moreno, claimed he and the other laborers had to work off those debts before they could change jobs, were chained in the trailer at times and threatened with violence if they tried to leave.

Such actions violate anti-slavery laws. One of the attorneys was identified as Susan French, who has been active in previous cases of slavery and indentured servitude in Florida.

Federal courts have convicted several Florida labor contractors in such cases during the past six years. The latest trial was in 2002 when two contractors were sentenced to 12 years and another to 10 years for an incident in the central Florida town of Lake Placid.

He said the contractors, afraid the workers would try to escape, began to guard them at all times and, on some occasions when no guard was available, locked them in a trailer that was secured with a thick chain, a padlock and windows that were nailed so that no one could get out.

On a Sunday in December last year, an elder from the nearby Good Samaritan Mission, a Christian church, arrived at the trailer to invite some of the men to services, but he was denied permission to take them. Moreno, who insisted on his right to attend church, was eventually allowed to go, but he was the only one.

That same week, the youth pastor from the church went to investigate and said he found the young men locked in the trailer. He and the church elder told their stories to The Post, and the newspaper tracked down Moreno, who by then was working in Ohio. He confirmed what the two churchmen had said.

Referring to the men who had locked him up, Moreno said: “Those apes were denying me my right to worship.” He said he wanted to see them in prison.(Palm Beach Post)

Steelworkers won’t participate in Dean Rally

The local chapter of the steelworkers union in Georgetown, SC has withdrawn permission for Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean to use its hall for a rally next week.

Dean wanted to speak to the job losses of the steelworkers and others in South Carolina suffering from layoffs, a campaign spokeswoman said. “Being there with these workers who are really suffering at the hands of the Bush administration really appealed to him,” Delacey Skinner said.

National union leaders ordered Steelworkers Local 7898 to back out because the union has endorsed US Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri in the nine-way race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Georgetown Steel Co. closed its doors earlier this year and filed for protection from its creditors in US Bankruptcy Court. Almost 600 workers lost their jobs.(AP)