Question:
With American corporations under increasing pressure to cut costs and
build global supply networks, two senior I.B.M. officials told their
corporate colleagues around the world in a recorded conference call
that I.B.M. needed to accelerate its efforts to move white-collar,
often high-paying, jobs overseas even though that might create a
backlash among politicians and its own employees.
Answer:
During the call, I.B.M's top employee relations executives said that
three million service jobs were expected to shift to foreign workers
by 2015 and that I.B.M. should move some of its jobs now done in the
United States, including software design jobs, to India and other
countries.
"Our competitors are doing it and we have to do it," Tom Lynch,
I.B.M.'s director for global employee relations, said in the call. A
recording was provided to The New York Times recently by the
Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, a Seattle-based group
seeking to unionize high-technology workers. The group said it had
received the recording - which was made by I.B.M. and later placed in
digital form on an internal company Web site - from an I.B.M. employee
upset about the plans.
I.B.M.'s internal discussion about moving jobs overseas provides a
revealing look at how companies are grappling with a growing trend
that many economists call off-shoring. In decades past, millions of
American manufacturing jobs moved overseas, but in recent years the
movement has also shifted to the service sector, with everything from
low-end call center jobs to high-paying computer chip design jobs
migrating to China, India, the Philippines, Russia and other
countries.
Executives at I.B.M. and many other companies argue that creating more
jobs in lower cost locations overseas keeps their industries
competitive, holds costs down for American consumers, helps to develop
poorer nations while supporting overall employment in the United
States by improving productivity and the nation's global reach.
The European WSJ had a sympathetic article about skilled workers
losing their employers in Butler, Pennsylvania. If you get a chance
read it. Those involved in rail car construction and repairs are
being pushed out by more efficient robotized construction methods,
the push is to reduce the number of more highly skilled and
therefore labor costly jobs. One man they talk about went from a $14
an hour job to a Wal-Mart at below $7. Generally hourly paid workers
have been in a stagnating earnings situations for decades, but I won`t
harp on that fact here.
Things, in fact are not so simple and job losses are moving into
the white collar groups more and more, Ford just announced cutting
2000 whit collar jobs by the end of the year.
I follow the chemical industry. I worked 10 years in industry
before returning to academia and eventually end up in France.
But the industry always interested me, had I taken another fork
in life I would have ended up a DuPont (they made me a nice
offer at the time but I went with IBM for the same offer).
The US Chemical Industry has progressively lost jobs, dropping
10% since 1992. Productivity has been improving and the sales
per employee has risen from $224,000 to $355,500 in 2002 although
stagnated in 2000 and 2001. So part of the productivity gains
are due to dropping workers, but most of it is somewhere else.
I don`t have similar sales per employee figures for Canada, Europe
and Japan and the same thing is not quite happening in those places
but I don`t have the figures to comment more.
