Walmart just cannot squeeze it's employees enough. Now Walmart is considering offshore outsourcing it's I.T. jobs.
BANGALORE: WAL-Mart, the world’s biggest retailer, which until now has been dependent on its inhouse information technology division, is evaluating a business process outsourcing (BPO) contract worth around $300- $500 million, as it seeks to outsource non-core processes of procurement, merchandising , finance, accounting and payroll.
IBM, TCS, WNS and Wipro are exploring this opportunity, people familiar with Wal-Mart’s outsourcing decision told ET on conditions of anonymity. Despite becoming such a case study for global retail, Wal-Mart had not yet looked at BPO or IT outsourcing,” he said. However, the current economic challenges are making the retailer seek more cost saving options including outsourcing of non-core processes.”
Congressional Democrats stripped from President Barack Obama's economic stimulus plan a local lawmaker's bid to assure that American high-tech companies would get jobs funded by that plan.
U.S. Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Upper St. Clair, said his amendment would have required that any health information technology system bought under a $20 billion grant program in the stimulus package be manufactured in the United States by American workers.
Obama's new CTO, or Chief Technology Officer is boiling down to two candidates. Guess what? Both of them are being said to promote offshore outsourcing, wage arbitrage and U.S. worker displacement through the use of guest worker Visas, the most notorious of these being H-1B.
They are Padmasree Warrior, the chief technology officer of Silicon Valley networking giant Cisco Systems (CSCO), and Vivek Kundra, who holds the same title in the government of Washington, D.C., the sources say.
The two candidates offer President-elect Obama a clear choice of skills. Warrior, who previously was CTO at Motorola (MOT), represents hard-core technology expertise. Kundra, who was named to the D.C. post in 2007, has held similar government positions in the past and has a reputation for using technology to make government more open and inclusive
India has been importing U.S. jobs for some time. It appears they imported another American corporate problem, fraud.
Indian offshore outsourcer, Satyam Computer Services, admits to falsifying books:
The chairman of India’s Satyam Computer Services resigned on Wednesday after confessing to fixing the IT outsourcing company’s books for the past “several” years, the country’s first major fraud case to emerge following the global financial crisis.
In a letter to Satyam’s board, B Ramalinga Raju admitted wildly inflating Satyam’s margins to paint a picture of good performance and retain his management position, in one of the worst scams to have hit India’s outsourcing sector.
How bad is it? Looks like a reported 24% profit margin is actually 3%.
Barack Obama's pick for commerce secretary, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, vows to create millions of technology jobs that can't be outsourced. Sounds good, particularly in this melting economy.
On the other hand, Richardson supports expanding the H-1B visa program, which had greased the departure of good-paying tech jobs to lower-wage countries. The program lets U.S. companies employ up to 65,000 temporary foreign software designers, engineers and other skilled professionals a year.
There is a new study out hinting at some quantifying number of jobs being offshore outsourced. Outsourcing is very hard to get hard data on, simply because Corporations do not want you to know the hard data (for you might demand Congressional Action!).
From the Study abstract:
Despite significant public, media, and academic interest in offshoring, there has been very little data available through which to assess how offshoring has affected US-based information technology workers. In this study, we use data from two new, nationally representative surveys to examine how offshoring has already affected the US based IT workforce, and to test the hypothesis that offshoring is making interpersonal skills more valuable for US-based IT workers.
A hearing that will probably have a lot of good information about globalization and US jobs is happening this Thursday. There usually is a webcast to watch these, so I want to give ya all a heads up about it. I will also write about it after the hearing is over. Details:
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