"Will Your Job Move to India?"

[XanaDUer]

"Millions of U.S. jobs will be exported in the coming decade, forecasters say. Here are the jobs that are especially vulnerable, plus 5 that aren't..."




http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/invest/extra/P62115.asp

[eyesroll]

1. Ugh. Mine's pretty safe...

I edit a trade publication. There's a better chance of the publisher going out of business than there is of my job being shipped overseas.

A friend of ours lost his job to India. (My husband has the same job function as said friend, in a different company, but so far, so good.)

[XanaDUer]

2. I called customer service yesterday

and was shocked to see they are still in the USA.

Pretty sad state of affairs.

[liberalnurse]

3. Well, I'm safe.....

One thing that is happending is that many hospitals are importing nurses from Africa and the Philippians. Many are just looking for American husbands. I know this because I did some orientation instructions to several groups. On breaks, they would ask me lots of questions about American men, old ones especially.

[XanaDUer]

4. Jeez

Hope they are not working in old-age homes...:eyes:

Do they pay them less than American nurses? Or are the shortages so bad they are importing nurses?

[yolatengo]

5. yes

There is a severe shortage in nursing. As the USA ages, it'll
become a surefire way to get a job here. For now, they do have
to import them, especially in rural areas. I don't see this as
necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it's one case where demand is
shored up with supply.

Unlike IT, where there are plenty of unemployed/underemployed
people right here in the USA, but companies don't want THEM.
Not when they can get someone in India to work for 1/3 the $$$
with fewer benefits and not when an American worker blows
part of the CEO's profit margin with his outrageous salary
and benefits (i.e. "the worker should get 10 cents an hour
and NO benefits while I, the CEO, get a $40million raise
just for being me"). Sooner or later, now that the lower
class has been destroyed (can't even work ANY job that pays
more than poverty wages), the middle class will be destroyed
and we will be Brazil. Who do these assh*les think will BUY
THEIR PRODUCTS if everyone in the USA either makes $3/hour
or $300million/year? There just ain't enough billionaires
buying 12 packs of MeisterBrau to keep the consumer economy
afloat. You can't CONSUME if you have NO MONEY. Duh!

Maybe unemployed IT people should have a training program to
get them shifted to health care. Until the boomers all die
out by about 2040, it's permanent employment!

Bigby

[cap]

18. the nursing crisis is a manufactured one...

American nurses are leaving because of the unpleasant working conditions in hospitals. Nurses are abused -- physically, mentally and emotionally -- and leave the profession or move to areas where they are out of hospital nursing like private nursing or pharmaceutical sales. Nurses are caught between a rock and a hard place. Unlike some professions, if they really screw up, they can go to jail. This places them in an untenable positon. Foreign nurses don't know the ins and outs of their legal obligations to their patients. Therefore, they will do what management tells them to do. This whole situation is a result of the cost pressures placed on hospital administrators by shareholders and HMO's. There are plenty of nurses. We are just shafting the ones we have.

My fiance's cousin is a right wing Republican nurse who is ready to hand out union hards to her staff. She is so fed up.

[camero]

19. The boomers won't die

But the Xers will and noone will be there for the boomers. Then they will die.

[liberalnurse]

6. Actually one group is.....

There was one nurse who also was there with her 2 daughtes, also nurses....She was so excited to go to the nursing home and meet widowers! She was no doubt a bit disappointed when most of them were a bit debilitated and incontient.

This is a true story.

Oh, you asked about the pay. I don't know for sure...I think some of the importing fee's are deducted...They will make starting wages, like new grads once they get an Ohio nurses license.

[XanaDUer]

7. Oh, I believe you.

Nothing surprises me at this point in my life.

My former career has shortages. Sadly , it was in the public sector where budgets are cut mightily anytime there is a fiscal crisis.

Well, when there are no more jobs for Americans, and we are like Brazil, I wonder who will buy all of the crap that sustains our glorious economy?

[liberalnurse]

8. I don't think too many of the foreign nurses will stay.

If they get a husband, they'll quit work, cultural thing...

Plus, the local nurses resent them immensely! They have to "watch over them" as it takes a long time to acclimate to our culture, proceedures, communicate with physicans..etc......more work fo the overworked charge nurse. They will be run out essentially.

Also, the hospitals would not have to recruit overseas if they would pay the current nurses more money. Another resentment issue! Pay out a fortune to import outher nurses and not pay us what we are worth while they expect us to monitor and train them.

[XanaDUer]

9. Because (as you know) traditional female jobs

are and were always undervalued and underpaid.

It's disgusting, actually.

[uberotto]

10. The funny thing about this is...

that they keep saying that Software jobs are going overseas because the people over there are willing to do the job for much less money.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. The biggest thing going on now in the Software industry is the poliferation of Free (as in speech, not beer) and Open Source Software. This is software that is typically given away for free by the people who develop it. (examples: GCC, Linux, Apache, OpenOffice.org, etc...) The people who develop this software, usually on their own time, do so because they enjoy it. And the majority of the people who develop it are living in the US.

The truth is, I really enjoy what I do and I would be willing to do my job for free if my employer would cover the cost of living here in the US. If my employer would pay for my house, my car (and my wifes car), child care, health care, utilities, cable, food and give me a few dollars for walking around money I would gladly do the job and ask for no salary. I'm willing to bet that this is a common attitude among most American workers.

The press likes to portray American workers as greedy and now getting what they deserve. The truth is that all we want is a decent place to live, reliable transportation and the ability to send our kids to a good school and keep them healthy while they grow up. The problem is that the greedy American CEO's insist on charging so much for their products that the American worker can no longer afford to do this unless they demand high salaries.

If American businesses really want cheap labor, fine, get congress to pass a law which cuts the cost of everything by a factor of 20, and I will gladly work for the same salary as someone in India or China.

[kcwayne]

11. Yes it will

I have a BS in Engineering, and a MS in Computer Science. I have been working in the field for 25 years.

I am not unemployed yet, but I expect to be within 6 months, as my current contract is with a company that is liquidating their presence in the US. All of my customers from the years have either gone bankrupt or moved their technology sourcing to India. I see no hope of finding another contract in my area because my skills are so specialized, and I doubt I could find anything in California where the skillset is used more because there are already so many unemployed engineers there.

I am financially prepared to start another business in another area, but everything I look at scares me to death because I don't have any confidence that people will be doing anything other than rolling back spending.

I expect to have to seriously roll back my standard of living, hoard cash, and not live more than 20 more years or I will be groveling at the Baptist church for soup. Of course by then, even they won't offer soup for soul unless you also sign up to vote Republican...

[glasalle]

12. Offshoring, and L-1 visas

Congress is going to study the offshoring problem in November. Another and significant problem is the L-1 , and to a lesser extent, H1-b visa. These are both non-immigrant visas, i.e. guest workers. I firmly believe that these visas make offshoring much easier for IT departments and companies. The IT dept where I work uses tons of L-1 visa contractors and does some offshoring. The contractors work for Indian companies like Wipro and Infosys which have onshore offices here. Whenever we need project work to be done, they turn to Wipro. Wipro brings in a bunch of L-1s who may do all the work themselves or liason and delegate some of the tasks to offshore. We have one or two American workers here to deal with the onshore workers. We have had very few new American workers or contractors (citizen or perm. resident) hired here in the last 18 mos. Maybe 95% of any new faces to walk in the door in door are Indians doing the job that could be filled by an American.

We have got to get involved at the political level. Write letters to your congressional leaders. Write letters to the editor. Talk to your friends. Its amazing how many people don't know whats going on. Join an organization. I belong to a group called RescueAmericanJobs (RescueAmericanJobs.com) and we just started holding local meetings in my city. There are also other orgs like TORAW - The Organization for the Rights of American Workers and NAEA -National Association for the Employment of Americans.

[kcwayne]

13. You are dead on

There is a fundamental problem with the offshore corporations that are profiting from dislocating American workers through lower wages.

The primary reason there is (soon to be was) a vibrant economy in the US, with advanced infrastructure that creates markets for products and makes moving products and services to customers efficient is the public investment in roads, electricity, communications, utilities, and education. This public investment was funded in large part by tax dollars that our grandparents, parents, and we have made.

A foreign company that moves labor or product into the US is benefitting from this massive investment we have made in our country, without sharing the load for its creation or maintenance. Even worse, they don't pay their employees wages that gives them a standard of living that makes them a target for our products and services. Hence we have a massive trade deficit problem.

US Corporations that facilitate this dislocation are doing it out of preceived necessity to be competitive. Under the laws of competition, they will destroy our economy and country as they dislocate all workers in the US and force them to accept third world wages and standards of living. Meanwhile, the corporations are reaping huge profits from the cost reductions they are receiving.

It is simply not fair or right that corporations can use and are beneficiaries of public money and publically funded infrastructure without sharing the profits that result from the benefits derived from such use. What we are witnessing today is the death of the perversion of capitalism where all profits are privitized and all losses are socialized. There will soon be no segment of the society that can pay for the corporate losses.

[srpantalonas]

14. Sign the Petition: Stop L-1, H-1B visa abuse...offshoring

http://www.crystleforsenate.com/

[Freddie Stubbs]

15. The petition makes no mention of shipping jobs overseas

It only mentions visas, as in poeple coming to this country to work. It does not mention, or offer any solutions, to jobs being shipped overseas.

[glasalle]

16. L-1/H1-b visas enable offshoring in IT

I work in IT. In my dept., we have tons of L-1s employed by offshore companies like Wipro. They do some upfront work and ship the rest offshore. About 1/2-2/3 of the Wipro staff working for us is onshore. The rates are $65/hr onshore and $25/offshore. If it was economically feasible to do it all offshore, they would. If we could get rid of the L-1 loophole, it would not longer be beneficial for firms to send offshore work. This may not apply to some other areas, but IT is( or used to be) a very large employer of American workers. I am not dismissing offshore however. I think it will destroy our economy if unchecked, but I think that the visas are easier to attack.

[srpantalonas]

17. Correct: Petition deliberately focuses on visa abuse, not offshoring...

We are taking this one step at a time in order of complexity. The visa abuse is very simple: stop the abuse, close the loophole. The offshoring issue is a lot harder and is taking more time to research, but I will come up with something soon that is both clear and hardhitting. I know a ton of people in the tech industry and have spoken with a lot of investors on both sides of the issues and it's hard for many of them to take a solid position one way or the other. On the surface, as someone who has a lot of underemployed friends, my first instinct is to completely ban offshoring. But I'm not ready to do that just yet, though it's on the table. I think we should at least adopt an approach similar to the H-1B when it comes to offshoring: a company may not use offshore work for US consumption unless they have fully exhausted US sources for the work. Offshoring would be supplementary, not the main source of labor. But there MUST be effective policing/enforcement; H-1B abuse derives from lack of enforcement.

I'd like to throw some security restrictions in there as well, given a lot of the offshoring is done by defense contractors who do not audit their offshore developers and engineers and pose a very real national security risk.

Startup companies in the Silicon Valley--for the most part--outsource as much as possible overseas to keep costs low so they can survive longer. In the meantime, their neighbors are working at Starbucks (for the benefits) if at all. I understand startups and the need to conserve cash, but I have a real hard time believing that all the startup outsourcing is necessary or even good for the startup, plus those same startups--and any company that outsources--benefit from the US entrepreurial system of democracy and capitalism, which is funded by American taxpayers. Given this, there should be some sort of limit--if less than 70% of your expenditure is in the US, you have to pay some sort of "democracy fee" for enjoying the benefits of this country but sending jobs elsewhere. I'd like to couple that with some sort of incentive program, though it pisses me off that creating strong communities here is not incentive enough, and that offshoring companies get some sort of bonus for doing what other companies do as a matter of course.

Anybody else?

[sirshack]

20. Both mine and my girlfriends jobs are pretty safe....

I work at a pretty small consulting firm. She works for a trade association.

[ramapo]

21. Not to be dark but you never know

My niece's husband thought so too. Until yesterday that is.

He got laid off from his job as a recruiter for a firm that places lower-level employees.

They are expecting a baby in the next week or two. Just bought a townhouse.

Nice, huh?

[sirshack]

22. Well....

I work in an office with 6 other people total...very small firm. The kind of work we do could not be outsourced.

I doubt she would be as well.

[srpantalonas]

23. Poll: white collar job loss...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=114&topic_id=1892