WELCOME TO THE NATIONAL WRITERS UNION BIZTECH DIVISION OFFSHORING CAMPAIGN WEBSITE
What’s BizTech?
BizTech is the National Writers Union (www.nwu.org) technical and business writers’ division (formerly known as BITE). Our geographical base is Silicon Valley, American home of technical innovation. Our members live all across the United States. Many of us speak several languages, have lived abroad, and understand the value of improving the lives of all workers, even as we try to affect our own circumstances locally. One of our primary concerns is the future of work.
Why an Offshoring Campaign?
It has been estimated that there are now 3 million fewer jobs in the U.S. than there were in September 2001. As unemployment continues to increase during this unprecedented “jobless recovery” we are seeing that the dotcom bust, the tech downturn and the erosion of a variety of industries’ ability to employ people stems from complex issues.
One of BizTech’s mandates is to help our members find and keep jobs. So, we have decided to home in on one issue affecting our ability to work and support our families – now and in the future: offshoring.
BizTech’s leaders have read about the issue, discussed it with our members, and reached out to other organizations and unions who share our concerns about workers and the future of jobs. We have concluded that the move to offshore jobs is here to stay, as it is led by corporations’ ongoing need to maximize profits, an accelerating global trend. In the history of industry and modernization, efficiency, cost control and investor profits have always led the way. But never before have they led with the speed, secrecy, and enormous impact on the educated worker as the offshoring trend.
From Our Shores to Bangalore’s
According to a Forrester Reseach, Inc. report from November 2002, 3.3 million U.S. jobs are expected to be lost to countries overseas within the next 15 years. It’s not the number of jobs that concerns BizTech, it's the type of jobs: software development, technical writing, customer service, accounting, back-office support, product development and other white collar work. This follows the trend of offshoring manufacturing work, which we have observed accelerating in the last few decades.
More than half of America’s Fortune 500 has moved jobs offshore. Some of the companies heavily investing in offshoring include AOL (with a significant presence in India), American Express, British Airways (both hiring in India), Charles Schwab (has moved some of its information technology division to a contractor in Bangalore), Dell, HSBC, IBM, J.P. Morgan Chase, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft (plans to invest approximately $400 million in India), Novartis, Oracle (planning to double its workforce in India), and Texas Instruments (currently employs more than 1,000 engineers in Bangalore, India, and plans an increased presence in the near future).
Unintended Consequences
1. Economics
A little reflection on the potential impact of offshoring on the U.S. leads down many paths. Obviously, first and foremost, there’s the economic hit – the lives disrupted, the families worn down by financial strains, the well-educated middle-aged worker who must find new ways to secure a steady income, hang on to the mortgage, and pay the kids’ tuition, and the college student whose educational choices may have to shift to prepare for an unknowable employment future.
Without American jobs for the educated professional -- the workers on the long-touted information superhighway -- who will be left to buy the products sold in the U.S., even if they are available at the cheapest possible prices by the ever-efficient and profitable Wal-Mart? Without jobs, who will be left to pay the taxes that keep our cities, towns and states afloat? Without jobs, how many more unhappy lives will foreshadow psychological breakdown, drug dependency, erratic behavior, and other signs of social malaise?
2. Privacy
A second impact of offshoring is beginning to be recognized by our guardians of privacy. By now we have all heard about identity theft. In this scam, either individuals or groups of accomplices steal personal identity by gaining access to individuals’ private information such as drivers’ licenses, social security numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, etc., thereby taking over their victims’ identity, and access to credit or cash. A recent story in the Washington Post by a victim of identity theft posits that his identity was stolen by a worker in a hospital he had recently checked into. Recently we heard about a corporation that outsourced their customer support worker’s jobs to India, along with the names of the U.S. workers who had previously done the jobs that would be taken over by the new workers offshore. That’s right: the U.S. workers would be replaced by workers of comparable skill in India. The company, wanting to help the new hires sound as much like their American counterparts as possible, so as not to scare away their U.S. customers, with whom they would deal by telephone, not only grilled them in voice and speech characteristics typical of Americans, they also gave them the actual names of the people whose jobs they had replaced. “First they took my job, and then they took my name,” said one of the workers, incredulous upon hearing this story.
This “name game” may have begun innocently enough, but, what if? What if a rogue employee decided to take this further, gaining not only the name of the worker, but his or her identity as well?
3. National security and the back door
A recent email we received illustrates the potential for trouble when it comes to the offshoring of high-tech work:
“I’m a former documentation manager and technical writer, and I reside in New Hampshire. (My group was outsourced in January.)
I’m concerned about software being developed in countries that are not friendly with the United States and the possibility of back doors being programmed into the code that allows these governments or individuals access to medical, financial, or strategic information. I recently read on CNN that the Bush administration believes the Nimda virus was created by the Information Warfare branch of the Chinese military. If this is the case, what’s to prevent them from putting a few well-placed programmers in companies that are doing the offshore programming? We could literally be giving away the keys to the kingdom. Since many QA positions are being outsourced and it’s not too tough to add last-minute code to an application, who’s going to test all these applications for back doors? The remaining QA folks will likely have only enough staff to make sure the application works as planned, not to test for national security concerns.
I’d appreciate any comments you have regarding this. If you feel that my statements are valid, I’d be happy to work with you to spread the word. Companies won’t stop sending jobs overseas because they’re concerned about our loss of employment, but they might if it’s a valid national security concern and we can raise the issue loudly enough….”
So, what’s a back door, you may ask? Sometimes, a software developer will build back doors into software, because they know the clients might lock themselves out of their own administrative tools (forget the password, create situations where they couldn't make changes, etc.). So they build back doors with passwords in order to be able to give the client another option. The potential for back door software to impact the security of databases, should it fall into the wrong hands offshore, is not hard to imagine.
Double Whammy: Visa Reform and the U.S. Worker
The situation of H-1B and L-1 visa holders can sometimes clash with the interests of U.S. workers. At a time of high national unemployment and with more and more jobs being sent abroad, this double-whammy is now being witnessed by workers across the country. Recently we heard from a technical writer in Texas whose employer plans to have him and his colleagues train L-1 visa holders from India to do his job. In a typical scenario, the foreign workers are brought into the United States on L-1 visas, paid wages comparable to those they receive in India (undermining wage gains of workers in the U.S.), and trained by American workers in how to do their specific jobs. Eventually, the foreign workers are sent back to India and employed offshore at low cost by the company. Meanwhile, the U. S. worker, having trained his replacement, is laid off or fired.
See below for excerpts from a recent article on this issue in ComputerWorld.
Jobless push for visa reform
A Connecticut activist group is behind several H-1B and L-1 visa bills in Congress
In a recent story by Patrick Thidobeau in Computerworld (see. www.computerworld of 8/11/03)
a group of activists in Connecticut, laid-off IT workers, are described as taking on the controversial L-1 and H-1B visas.
"Of the five bills that have been introduced this year to reform the two visa programs, three were written by Connecticut lawmakers," says the article.
EXCERPTS: ...."We've heard quite a bit from constituents in our district concerned about losing their jobs," said Lesley Sillaman, a spokeswoman for Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), who is seeking restrictions on L-1 visa use.....The group DeLauro has been working with, the Organization for the Rights of American Workers (TORAW) in Meriden, Conn., was formed less than a year ago...
Among other activities, TORAW attended an open forum meeting that Rep. Nancy Johnson held in her....
On July 28, Johnson, a Republican, joined Democratic Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut in sponsoring the USA Jobs Protection Act to reform the visa laws....
In a hearing late last month on the L-1 visa, Dodd said that from 1997 to 2000, some 3.4 million H-1B and L-1 visas were approved, 70,000 in Connecticut alone. Dodd said a growing body of anecdotal evidence suggests abuse.....
The L-1 allows companies to transfer foreign employees with specialized skills into the U.S. But critics contend the program brings in foreign replacements who will be trained to take over IT jobs held by U.S. citizens.
The H-1B, a visa that lets firms bring skilled workers into the U.S. for up to six years, is also a hot issue. But its cap will shrink from 195,000 to 65,000 in October; the L-1 has no cap, though DeLauro's bill would impose a 35,000 limit.
One day after Dodd and Johnson introduced their bills, the Information Technology Association of America released a memorandum suggesting L-1 program reforms, including the visa's requirement that employees have some "specialized knowledge." The ITAA wants a more restrictive definition of what specialized knowledge entails.... (continues).
The BizTech Vision
You don’t need a crystal ball to see how tough it’s going to get for tech writers and others in the educated masses in the coming years. Rather than bemoan our fate or yours we have a vision of how to counter the offshoring trend.
1. Beginning in Silicon Valley, where we know how things work, we will try to protect as many technical writing jobs as possible. This will take research, initiative, and outreach to workers’ groups, management, unions and legislators who may defend our cause. From this base of support, we will outreach to other workers’ groups, unions and legislators across the country.
2. We will seek ways to re-educate technical writers towards the jobs that will likely remain in the U.S. These include information architecture, publications management, technical editing and other categories. We will work with universities to create curriculums that match workers’ needs.
3. We will encourage foreign workers who are retraining for offshored American jobs to join our struggle by improving their own compensation as they learn new skills.
Want to help? To begin, please join our campaign by posting your comments to this weblog. Let us know if you are interested in working with us:
1. To gather stories about technical writers whose jobs have been offshored
2. On legislative initiatives
3. On publicity campaigns
4. On education and retraining
5. In general
Please take a look at the rest of the posts on this site to get up to date on the issues involving offshoring and how it is impacting workers nationwide and abroad. Your additional posts on offshoring are welcome!
NWU BizTech Division
Recent Comments