Populist outrage in 3…2…1. IBM is laying off 5,000 U.S. employees and “building its work force in India and other locations,” according to the WSJ. Foreign workers now make up 71% of IBMs workforce of 400,000.
In a bit of nastiness many of the laid off workers have trained their Indian counterparts before getting the axe. In fact, this who story sounds like the premise for a new romantic comedy only involving real jobs and real lives. Just add this to the long choo-choo train of IBM’s continuing irrelevance in the technology market.
*cheers* having the image promoting the FairTax http://www.fairtax.org with this article
Eh…not a surprise given IBM’s recent issues and fading relevancy in the big time tech market. They’re saving every penny they can.
So, IBM is being sued for being a mainframe monopoly. They don’t want trouble with people questioning their motives in buying Sun. Understandable. It’s only business.
Now they want to make more money from Americans, while taking jobs away from Americans, who will no longer be able to pay for what IBM provides.
This is business in America in the 21st Century.
Welcome to the United States of Wal-mart, where the only jobs available are minimum wage jobs requiring minimal job training. IBM will be selling mainframes to India, I guess, since nobody here can maintain a workforce to operate them.
But all good things come to those who wait. Some day WE (as in our descendants) will get the jobs as they outsource high-paying jobs from Gujarat to the US of W!
See how that works? We end up with the good jobs in the end!
IBM is a business, not a charity. Its not their job or their responsibility to keep jobs in the United States, its their “job” to be competitive and profit. If they can find skilled labor on with (or exceeding) that which they can find in the US, its their prerogative whether they take advantage.
Based on how their stock is performing over the last year or so, a logical person would argue they’re a model for succeeding in a terrible economy while the rest of the world goes down the crapper. This success is directly attributable to the moves they’ve made over the last few years to align themselves for success in the future, rather than always being beholden to stock holders to make a quick buck (often at the expense of “sacrificing” their standing in the technology market…) – i.e. many, many other publicly traded companies.
Just my two cents.
Congratulation!
A WINNER IS YOU!
Thanks for the economics lesson, professor. You seem to have skipped over an entire chapter in your Economics 101 there. Social responsibility is good business and very profitable in the long term. What IBM is doing is a very narrow minded and short-term solution.
But it seems that since most of the jobs are being outsourced, we might as well get used to the crumbling economy and live on minimum wage.
Ironically, judging by your words you are either a corporate whore for IBM or just a highly paid ‘viral advertiser’ working for them. Either way your two cents are about to get thrown right back into your f-in face.
Have a pleasant day. ^_^
Not only is it BS that IBM does this, but any other USA company. Talk about slaughtering our economy, geez.
I called tech support at IBM (or was it dell)? Recently and spoke to a woman in india, after trying to decide if she was human or a computer with automated smart responses, i figured out she was human, and asked her if she was trained to speak English by a computer. She refused to answer me! She sounded EXACTLY like that MS female voice that you might have reading your email to you! How sad is that? These people are being trained to speak English by a computer that is barely intelligable in the first place!