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This page was last updated 01/28/05
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As you read the information please remain mindful that in the USA today we have a serious unemployment problem. A problem unique to any era in our nation since these are not merely jobs lost in transition, nor due to hard times that will be temporary -- these job losses are PERMANENT! Americans today are worried that we would be attacked with WMD, yet our corporations have managed through greed to place the USA in a situation where we can be held hostage by a third world nation. Americans worry that we will be nuked, when all India, or China need do is unplug us. You may respond that these same nations will also suffer the loss of resources, but I ask you -- given the history of the citizens of the nations in question which citizens will survive? Which citizens have a history of doing without -- suffering and surviving hardship? The answer not only gives me pause, but also makes me shudder.
Globalization
News and Commentary Off-Shoring and Outsourcing to India The appropriately named Tom Lynch, IBM's Director of Global Employee Relations, said in a conference call that "Our competitors are doing it and we have to do it." Lynch also told staffers that he was aware that US politicians are feeling the heat from their constituents, and that there is a growing backlash against the trend by companies to move jobs overseas for low-cost labor. "It's hard for me to imagine any country just sitting back and letting jobs go offshore without raising some level of concern and investigation", Lynch said in the conference call. A digital copy of the conference call was made available by an patriotic IBM employee to the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, which in turn provided a copy to the New York Times. The Times article reports that "IBM executives also warned that when workers from China come to the United States to learn to do technology jobs now being done here, some American employees might grow enraged about being forced to train the foreign workers who might ultimately take away their jobs." [New York Times, 7/22/03, pages C1, C2] Corporations moving jobs to India From the New York Times [8/11/02]: "If you lose your luggage on British Airways, the techies who track it down are here in India. If your Dell computer has a problem, the techie who walks you through it is in Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley. Ernst & Young may be doing your company's tax
returns here with Indian accountants. Indian software giants in Bangalore,
like Wipro, Infosys and MindTree, now manage back-room operations ---
accounting, inventory management, billing, accounts receivable, payrolls,
credit card approvals --- for global firms like Nortel Networks, Reebok,
Sony, American Express, HSBC and GE Capital. ... GE's biggest research
center outside the US is in Bangalore, with 1,700 Indian engineers and
scientists. The brain chip for every Nokia cell phone is designed in
Bangalore. Renting a car from Avis online? It's managed here." [Thomas L.
Friedman, New York Times, 8/11/02, Sect 4, page 13] He also reported that Hewlett Packard is boosting
its staff in India from 1,500 to 5,000. As Mr. Thompson so eloquently
stated, "Eventually the United States won't make any hard goods, won't do
the cerebral stuff and won't fulfill the orders. Then, what's left? Brand
building? Business development? Shopping? Would you like fries with that,
sir?" [Newsday, 7/15/01, page B15] Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates visited India in
November 2002, and told the media "A couple of years ago, the biggest
American corporations would have considered it risky to outsource
mission-critical work to India, but it is now becoming a common sense
proposition." [Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates quoted in the New York Times,
12/25/02, pages W1, W7] The article states that "An estimated 20 percent of the 545 members of the lower house of parliament have criminal backgrounds, ranging from graft to murder. There are even more criminals in state assemblies,
particularly in the most populous states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar." Inder
Malhotra, a political analyst in New Delhi, is quoted as saying that "The
Indian system of government is becoming like the Cosa Nostra." [Financial
Times, 8/8/02, page 12] According to the New York Times, "Forrester
Research of Cambridge, Mass, predicted in a recent report that the
acceleration in outsourcing would result in 3.3 million American jobs moving
offshore by 2015...". The Forrester report estimated that "70 percent of
these jobs will move to India, 20 percent to the Philippines and 10% to
China." The Times article goes on to report that Mr.
O'Neill and other programmers "talk of 'sleeper bugs' that could be set to
go off at a later date, or back doors that would let intruders in to shuttle
money around, steal fractions of a penny from millions of transactions or
shut down the system entirely. They warn of risks from political
instability, organized crime and terror cells, and even from governments
that might demand the ability to spy." The article quotes an accounting industry
consultant as estimating that between 25,000 and 45,000 tax returns will be
have been processed in India this tax season. I described the economic depression that American
and British workers are living with, and reminded her that her own newspaper
has expressed serious concerns about the health of the economy. Ms. Hunter
defended the conference on the basis that outsourcing to India is a subject
of interest to many corporations, and assured me that the Financial Times
would never organize a conference that they were not "ethically comfortable"
with. Increasingly, municipalities all over the United
States are buying their manhole covers, sewer grates, water meters, and
other castings from India. They can buy these items from Indian foundries at
1/3 the cost US manufacturers charge for the same work. Even with the higher
shipping costs, the Indian foundries save on labor costs. In the meanwhile,
foundries in the US are closing. The bank is sending to India software programming
that is now done in-house. Some employees say that they are worried about
their future and are upset that foreign firms are taking their jobs. According to The Los Angeles Times, "India has
suspended NEC's export license, revoked passports of senior company
officials and raided company offices and homes. NEC's general manager, who
was jailed for four months last fall, has detailed the elaborate scheme to
investigators. Further criminal charges are expected." The article reported
that even if Iraq didn't use the equipment or supplies, it is a violation of
UN Security Council resolutions just to acquire them. [Newsday, 1/19/03,
page A7] For instance, hospitals can't ship patients to India for their healthcare needs. However, nurses are being imported from India to the United States on special visas, as a result of claims by hospitals that there is a "shortage". According to Newsday, "Prompted by a growing
shortage of nurses in the U.S., ATC Healthcare Services said ... that it has
contracted with a company that will recruit, train and bring nurses to this
country from India." [Newsday, 8/7/02, page A45] As indicated on the gnp.org 'Quality of Life' page, a study by the University of Pennsylvania found that oppressive workloads are causing registered nurses to flee careers in hospitals, adversely affecting patient care. According to Linda Aiken, the lead
researcher for the study which appeared in the Journal of the American
Medical Association, analyzed "unrealistic caseloads and job dissatisfaction
and how these issues are having an impact on patients."
[Newsday, 10/23/02, page A18] Nurses have always been overworked and underpaid. However, we had a voice in how the patient was treated. Nurses are with patients 8-12 hours a day. A physician spends 2.3 minutes with a patient. The nurse as the patient advocate stood as an obstacle to the corporate agenda, of the bottom line coming before the patient. Nurses left and are leaving the medical field due to their frustrations at not being able to perform their job according to their ethical standards. Nurses will skip breaks and not take lunch if their patient care demands they remain on the job. Nurses many of them continue their education and have academic loads to carry, striving to keep up with the cutting edge technology and medical breakthroughs. A nurse can go on vacation for two weeks and return with several new drugs to administer. Nurses have families who are profoundly affected by the nurse's schedule, missed holidays and birthdays. The families also deal with nurses' emotions and psycho dynamics associated with working so intimately with humans. The nurse is the pivotal professional when it comes to patient care. The nurses makes sure the doctor addresses the main issues related to the patient's care. However, there are many entities to each individual and nurses as the primary care giver treats her patient, as a WHOLE being. Body, mind spirit. When hospital alliances began, the nurses were the first to go. Replaced with kitchen and laundry staff who were trained for eight weeks, to take over the nursing duties of assessing vitals signs, phlebotomy and ancillary duties. The reason the nurses were being removed through attrition was again due to the bottom line. The nurses high end salaries at the time were approximately $30,000/annually. The kitchen and laundry staff could be paid half that, and yet the CEOs continued to make their high six figure and seven figure incomes, along with cushy perks. Some believe that the act of destroying nursing and medicine was purposeful. Some believe the greed so heinous that the removal of nurses was not due to incompetence and downright stupidity of the finance department and administration, but rather was due to greed in that there was more money to be made with people being sicker and by controlling the costs and consent to treat based upon pharmaco-economics analyses along with critical pathways which treat the disease/diagnosis not the patient. The result of this decision to make medicine a business has been a dismal failure and any good business person would abandon such an endeavor, unless THEY are the ones making the money. The people who believe the nefarious agenda claim the 'proof is in the pudding' -- with epidemic medical mistakes, complications resulting in increased length of stays (LOS) as well as epidemic law suits. Infections that have to be treated for longer periods of time. More people injured results in the need to spend monies to rehabilitate, to re train, paying staff and other monies to cover a life time of healthcare costs. The funeral and cemetery industry making a fortune as well. Medical and nursing studies have identified that medical mistakes -- complications -- infections -- falls -- medication errors have been directly connected to the nurse patient staffing ratios. The idea of implementing tort reform to remedy the health care crisis is to advise us the goal is not to stop making mistakes -- but rather to place caps on compensation -- continue making mistakes and pay less when mistakes are made. When do we address the increase in devastated lives and a growing stack of dead bodies? If you think bringing in foreign workers to remedy the problem is the solution then more lives will be lost. The choice remains OURS -- YOURS. When do patients, families, workers and consumers just say NO? It is not too late. The life you save may be your own. Come to think of it, if healthcare is a business, then as the consumers We the People Have the Power!
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