This is a followup to Kos'
IBM exports everyone to Asia post. Highly educated and compensated workers are now seeing their jobs shifted overseas.
IBM just announced it was "shifting" about 4,700 software jobs overseas from offices in Dallas, Southbury, Conn., Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Raleigh, N.C., and
Boulder, Colo. To further add to the indignity of the process, IBM expects their pink-slipped employees to train their overseas replacements.
The reason for the switch, simple economics. Overseas engineers are cheaper. Nothing personal just business. I do, however, remember a lot of these engineers expressing little symphathy for their manufacturing brethren who experienced offshoring earlier. Many of them shared Cato Institute Stephen Moore's sentiments that the 2.5 million (manufacturing) unemployed had only to shift to knowledge-based jobs, and then corporations would line up to pay [them] an even better salary for [their] brainpower.
Now that the "knowledge-based" myth has been descredited, who's to blame now. Unions cannot be blamed as they had been in the past. These skilled workers are not unionized. IBM put the blame on education levels and modern communication networks. Of course how this applies to Boulder, one of the most educated and high-tech regions in the country, I simply don't know.
But at least the engineers are waking up. With the high unemployment rate and the lousy safety net, they realize their American dream is not immune from turning into the American nightmare. They are starting to politically organize. After years of ignoring the average worker's plight, they now realize we are all in this together. Unemployment does not discriminate anymore.