Who Stole the American Dream? by Hedrick Smith

Who Stole the American Dream? by Hedrick Smith

Author:Hedrick Smith [Smith, Hedrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9780679604648
Google: nbViRRfLWeIC
Amazon: B007MEWAX2
Barnesnoble: B007MEWAX2
Goodreads: 13572748
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2012-09-11T00:00:00+00:00


“Sometimes People Don’t Realize They Are Training Their Own Replacement”

Inside IBM, longtime employees watched for clues. Tom Midgley, a $75,000-a-year IT systems administrator at the large IBM operation in Fishkill, New York, tracked trends by watching the parking lot and the cafeteria. Over time, the parking lot developed hundreds of empty spaces. In the cafeteria, Midgley noticed a growing population of Indian IT workers, Chinese engineers, and other foreigners. In twenty-seven years at IBM, Midgley said, he had witnessed the Fishkill facility shrink from more than ten thousand workers to about five thousand, though he said that IBM keeps the numbers secret. Also, Midgley added, IBM managers became surreptitious in arranging training for foreign employees.

“They used to bring the people over here and train them,” Midgley recalled, “but now they don’t even want to spend the money. You do the training over the phone. People are told, ‘You are leaving. You are fired. You have thirty days. You have to train somebody in India to take your place or you won’t get your severance pay.’ IBM is firing proven workers. These are good performers. And they are training rookies, people with no track record. Sometimes people are training someone overseas and they don’t even realize that they are training their own replacement.”

That happened to Kristine Serrano in Colorado, who had put in sixteen years working either directly for IBM or indirectly for an IBM client, the IT department of Qwest Communications. At IBM, Serrano managed Oracle software and databases for Qwest and other corporate clients. She survived several rounds of IBM job cuts, but toward the end of 2009, she noticed something troubling.

“I was responsible for Oracle software installation. Every request for help on Oracle came through me,” she explained. “What I saw were a lot of requests from India—twenty installations or more at once. I had to provide the software because they were going to go through training for how to do an Oracle software installation. That’s when I kind of knew something was coming. But nobody ever says anything.”

About three months later, in March 2010, Serrano’s boss called her in and said she was being laid off. No cause, she said, “just GR”—“Global Resourcing,” IBM’s euphemism for firing Americans and moving their jobs overseas. Serrano was given sixty days’ notice and told to train a young Chinese woman in Atlanta, hired on contract. But that woman was just a fill-in; four months later, she was fired and phoned Serrano to say that the job had been permanently offshored to India.

Serrano was offended at IBM’s explanations and its stealth firings. “When you read that the company is parroting that there is a skills mismatch, that they can’t find Americans with the right skills, that’s dishonest,” she complained. “These people who are being fired, people like me, are experienced IT workers. They know their job, and now that very same job is over in India. That’s what happened to me. My job is in India—except at a different pay level.”



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