Kudos, IBM. Kudos indeed. Unlike many multinational enterprises that lay off workers, IBM is actually going out of its way to rehire its pink-slipped former employees.
If more large employers behaved similarly our economy and the psyche of the American workforce would both benefit.
buy cipro online pharmacohealthcare.com/wp-content/themes/twentysixteen/inc/engl/cipro.html no prescription
Yes, for the unemployed ex-IBM folks there is finally a sliver of good news: you can have your old job back.
The bad news is that you have to relocate.
To India.
In what can only be described as the Divine Comedy, Super Mario Bros. negative world version of outsourcing, IBM is actually trying to get its discarded American workers to move to India and resume their old jobs. "Project Match," they call it. It "matches" people to jobs they already know how to do, and it matches employees to the salary IBM feels like paying! Everybody wins!
Not convinced? Well, "The climate is warm, there's no shortage of exotic food, and the cost of living is rock bottom." Conveniently disregard the fact that exactly the same thing can be said of Somalia, Bangladesh, or a burning orphanage.
Be more positive. Think of it as the Invisible Hand of the Market adjusting your standard of living!
Act fast, folks, as the Project Match is available only to "satisfactory performers who have been notified of separation from IBM U.S. or Canada and are willing to work on local terms and conditions." In other words, you get the real, authentic experience of being on the exploited end of neocolonialism! If you think being a laid-off American worker is bad, wait till you see how much better things are for the Indian to whom your job was given. Sure, you'll spend the first three weeks shitting like a mink and struggling to breathe the gel-like air of urbanized India, but after that it's all uphill.
Think of it as an adventure. Think of India like a slightly more crowded United States with the occasional separatist violence, a lot more human feces in the streets (note: does not apply to American workers from Buffalo or Detroit), and intermittent outbreaks of cholera. Think of your new wages as a simple adjustment according to "local conditions" in your new home. And most importantly, think of this entire scheme as an act of corporate magnanimity rather than a sick example of how the post-globalization American worker is quite literally forced to compete with, or in this case accept, developing world wages.
Kulkuri says:
To get an idea what it will be like, go watch "Slumdog Millionaire"!!
Michael says:
When I was getting my MBA, probably 20-25% of my classmates were from India. I used to ask, if I took my US salary to India, would I live like a king? And every one of them – 100% – said, in no uncertain terms, You Do Not Want To Live In India.
john says:
Being an IBM employee myself, I feel compelled to offer a different perspective. IBM is a true international company. We have more employees outside of the US than we do in the US. Given that fact, how should the loyalty you seem to find lacking work? If software is being developed for use by customers in 100 different countries, to which one should IBM loyally turn to regardless of cost? When your local mechanic charges twice as much as the chain place down the road, where do you take your car?
IBM's job is to be efficient and competitive. My job, and the job of every IBMer, is contingent upon my ability to do it better — in terms of cost to the company for benefit received — than the next guy. Whether the next guy is in Bentonville or Bangledesh really makes no difference. IBM's committment to me is to compensate me better than the next company. There is no false pretense about this.
Would it suck to have your job outsourced? Certainly. Is it IBM's responsibility to employ a person regardless of whether the job can be done more efficiently elsewhere? Certainly not.
Brandon says:
Following along John's line of argument, and just throwing some ideas out there, I'm actually pretty undecided on the whole neoliberalism/globalization thing. I realize that opposition to economic globalization seems to be a prerequisite to being a "true liberal" these days, but I find the whole issue very complicated. The fact is that globalization and free trade have had varying effects and have benefited and hurt different economic sectors in different countries. For all the concern about poor working conditions in Chinese and Vietnamese factories, those countries were absolute shitholes two decades ago. Integration into the global economy has enabled them to grow their economies at dizzying, previously unheard of rates over the past two decades, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Has that growth been perfectly spread? Of course not; there are still incredibly poor areas in Asia. There are incredibly poor areas in India that have barely benefited from India's rise as an high tech magnet. But if anybody has secret plan to lift those millions of poor peasants out of poverty, I'm sure there is a Nobel Prize awaiting.
If you've read the news lately, there have been hundreds of protests in China recently due to factory closing brought about the global recession. If those jobs are so incredibly exploitative and "neo-colonial," shouldn't those workers be thankfully returning to their home villages and embracing the wonderful life of a Chinese peasant? Shouldn't those young women who may have finally found some measure of economic independence and respite from traditional gender roles thankfully go home and get married?
I realize that blue collar workers (and even white collar workers in many sectors) in the industrialized world will have a very different perspective, and understandably see economic globalization as a threat to their livelihoods. I don't profess to know how our elected leaders should balance loyalty to their domestic constituents in threatened industries with their commitments to free trade agreements with other countries. I also don't know how liberals should balance their support for access to decent, secure employment for American workers against support for the ability of third world countries to develop their economies. But I think throwing around terms like neocolonialism paints a pretty simplistic portrait of the complexities involved.
Mike says:
I assume this is a way to retain HN1B's that they are laying off – since I doubt many employers are floating work visas, many HN1B's will have to return to their countries, and this is a way of not losing that work knowledge.
John,
I understand your point. However the whole argument is contingent on people in Bangledesh being able to do the job better ("more efficiently elsewhere"). Clearly they can't, if they need to send the highly educated and productive American workforce _there_. Globalization isn't doing it's promised job of lifting all boats if there is an implicit "we need more people living in poverty for this to work" clause in the contract.
Mike says:
Brandon,
I don't think you need to look at the globalization/neoliberal issue as a "either you are with it or against it issue" – not only are there lots of shades of grey, but that also (to use the Marxist term) reifies the notion of the market, treating it as some kind of immutable Law of Nature that one denies like one denies evolution, when really it is the result of thousands of often clumsy human decisions. I'm all for increasing the factory base of China and India, and I'm all against exploitative IMF loans whose capital stay entirely inside the USA.
But to address Ed's complaint with the harshest neoliberal hat on, IBM wants the supply curve of labor to shift downward – that the more they need to buy labor, they should be able to get it cheaper. That's retarded, with very little complexities.
Ed says:
John, that is the kind of argument, as an IBM employee yourself, that will seem much less appealing when your job is the next to go.
Ditto Mike on the 20 years of being told we need to outsource jobs (or import foreign workers) because there aren't Americans who can do it and/or do it "efficiently", i.e. cheaply. This kind of program indicates that they need the skills of their laid-off employees but want them at third world wages.
john says:
The appeal of an argument has nothing to do with its validity. Were my job to be next, would I be arguing that IBM was justified in outsourcing it? Probably not — but that says more about me than it does about the argument.
I haven't seen a description of the jobs in question, so what exactly it is that they are moving to India I don't know. That things can be done in other workforces more cheaply than they can be done in the US workforce is undeniable. That does not always make it more efficient — the two are not the same, to suggest so is a straw man argument.
As Mike pointed out, there are a good number of IBM employees who came here from India, as well as every other corner of the globe. To assume that relocating back to India would be akin to moving to India yourself is, well, just not logical.
Switching gears a bit, I do have a question for you:
Where does this line of thinking stop? If it is wrong for a company to shift jobs from one country to the next — with the totally selfish goal of improving profits — is it wrong to shift from one state to the next? What about one city to the next? Surely the effects of a factory moving from rural Arkansas to suburban Texas is just as devastating on the local economy (more so, honestly) as IBM moving jobs from the US to India is on the national economy. Or, put another way, at what point does the employer's responsibility to the community and its employees begin to outweigh its obligation to generate profits?
I do believe there is always a balance between an entity's obligations to generate profits and its obligation to improve the world in which we live — I think I just believe that balance is a little more towards the former than seems to be the consensus here.
john says:
Regarding Mike's point:
You're making an assumption that IBM needs the US worker to work in India to achieve higher or equal efficiency. I would expect this is not the case (that is also an assumption, but no less valid than your own).
Mike says:
You’re making an assumption that IBM needs the US worker to work in India to achieve higher or equal efficiency. I would expect this is not the case (that is also an assumption, but no less valid than your own).
According to the press release, IBM is willing to pay a sizable transaction cost (relocation, local visa issues) in order to move the US worker to be paid the same as a foreign worker. Ergo, unless IBM is fucking retarded (not seeking positive NPV investments, in MBA speak), they have an expectation that the marginal productivity of the US worker is higher by at least that transaction cost.
The only other rational market explanation is that they are going to burn that transaction cost to generate positive publicity or be kind to their "communities", like donating to charity. Given that the publicity they are receiving is cynical and negative, that biases in favor of my "assumption."
Mike says:
That things can be done in other workforces more cheaply than they can be done in the US workforce is undeniable. That does not always make it more efficient — the two are not the same, to suggest so is a straw man argument.
Agreed. I take it for granted in perfect markets the wage is equal to the marginal productivity ('efficiency') of labor. What Ed and I are pointing out is that IBM wants American productivity/efficiency at third-world wages, when first-world wages are the result of American productivity. IBM's plan is offensive to the idea of markets – there shouldn't be free lunches for employers, even though, by definition, that would raise profits.
Switching gears a bit, I do have a question for you:
Where does this line of thinking stop?…Or, put another way, at what point does the employer’s responsibility to the community and its employees begin to outweigh its obligation to generate profits?
We can get into this, but:
– I don't take it for granted this move generates long-term profitability for the firm because it was done; it may be a cynical move to boosts stock prices to meet CEO stock options or the needs of hedge fund traders. I think this is a serious problem of our financial markets, that they've been hijacked by the short-term trader, instead of meeting the needs of the long-term 'community.'
– Some of the reasons companies go abroad aren't just to take advantage of cheap labor. Perhaps Africa is, in Lawrence Summer's lovely phrasing, "underpolluted." But it's not just a matter of moving from Detroit to Texas.
– I think the share of corporate profits from 2001-2008 wasn't distributed to labor in a market efficient manner. I think most of it went to stock price manipulations with stock buybacks, etc. and executive salary (I have graphs if requested). I think that is a market failure, though I can also subscribe to this in a more radical critique.
john says:
Mike-
Another rational market explanation, to use your term, is that the cost of identifying and hiring a new worker is greater than the cost of moving the current one. This seems incredibly likely to me. Simply the resource hours involved with hiring an employee are likely to outweigh transportation and visa costs, to say nothing of the typical 3-12 month period of inefficiency that a new worker implies.
Your argument centers around a company with an American workforce. IBM is not such a company. As I said in my original comment, most IBM employees are not employed in the US (I *think* it's somewhere around 16K in the US, 20K elsewhere). Jobs are constantly moving between countries and IBM typically tries to retain its employees when that happens — it's simply more expensive to find a new employee that can do a job than it is to move a current one, all other things being equal.
As to your other points, perhaps upper IBM management does have nefarious pocket-lining purposes for this move. There's no point arguing that one way or the other, because there's no way to know. I assume it is not — given my experience with this company for the past several years, they treat their employees very well and are focused on making the company successful, not just getting bagging big bonuses at the top. I fully acknowledge that is an opinion/assumption, but it is mine (and I'm just a standard IT specialist, not likely to benefit from said pocket-lining).
Matthew says:
Jesus christ, people – this is a comment thread on a political blog! Stop having reasonable disagreements and respecting each other! Compare each other unfavorably to farm animals and speak disrespectfully of each other's mothers! Suggest that your opponent commit the anatomical impossibility!
Fuck!
This is the internet, folks. Start acting like it.
Mike says:
Another rational market explanation, to use your term, is that the cost of identifying and hiring a new worker is greater than the cost of moving the current one.
We are kind of off the deep end here, but the "3-12 month period" is in fact efficiency gain that should be compensated. You can't have that both ways – that America workers have innate advantages over new hires but should be compensated as new hires.
But another way of saying what you are saying is "skilled labor is scarce there, and difficult to come by, and not that efficient when it does come immediately online." If that's the case, then why move resources there? Or why not increase wages? That the labor is plentiful and cheap is the whole point of being there.
I didn't mean to imply IBM in that critique, I just wanted to point out there are reasons to be hella mad about what is going on with globalized labor that doesn't require thinking globalization is a sham or that companies should be nicer to their communities.
john says:
I can agree with that — and I think I could have made that last point more clearly. When a new hire comes on, in most cases there is a burn period (regardless of where that new hire is) where he/she is actually a drain on productivity due to the need for training. Ie, until some inflection point, he spends more time reducing the productivity of those around him (asking questions) and adding to their work (making mistakes that must be corrected) than he does accomplishing things. Just the nature of the job. So any moves made for the sake of an efficiency gain must take that into account — one of the ways to combat it is to keep current employees rather than hiring new ones.
Not a statement of a US worker vs a non-US worker, just a statement of a typical IT type job. I assume it applies to the other areas of IBM from what I know of them.
Kulkuri says:
I think it was back in the 80's when I first heard that IBM means I've Been Moved!
I like Matthew's comment!!
Michael says:
I still think outsourcing sucks.
Michael says:
I still think outsourcing sucks.