The Boston Globe: Bringing the jobs back home

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/04/13/bringing_the_jobs_back_home/

Bringing the jobs back home

By Robert Haynes and Jeremy Crockford | April 13, 2007

THE PLANE from Bangalore touched down last month and off stepped a group of trainees headed for The Boston Globe -- here only briefly for job training before going back to India and taking 45 Massachusetts jobs with them.

What kind of sense does this make? Not much. According to whom? According to the Globe and The New York Times.

Both papers have recently run stories about "backsourcing" -- the term used when business-savvy corporations that care about both customer service and the American economy pull back from shipping their jobs overseas and rehire locally. So who are these starry-eyed idealists who care enough to bring their jobs back to the United States? Dell Inc., Lehman Brothers, Sears Roebuck, Sovereign Bancorp Inc., Tweeter Home Entertainment Group Inc., Cingular Wireless, Comcast Corp., and dozens more.

The fact is that outsourcing is a business trend that is reaching its end and being reversed by companies that care both about their customers and their regional economies. In the two newspapers' stories, business leaders talked about customer unhappiness when they are confronted with outsourced employees who don't understand where the caller is from or what his needs are. While the 45 Globe jobs going to Bangalore do not include positions with direct contact with customers, representatives from these corporations also addressed both the perception and the reality that moving jobs overseas hurts US workers and the economy.

The New York Times Co., owner of the Globe, recently announced the elimination of more than 120 jobs at the New England Media Group, which includes the Globe -- continuing a trend that has severed the most experienced workers from the paper over the last decade. In one of the latest assaults, 45 jobs in back office finance are being outsourced to India. The job cuts came less than one month after Boston Newspaper Guild members agreed to make concessions -- no guaranteed wage increases and significantly higher employee healthcare costs -- in order to help the struggling paper.

In a particularly cruel addition of insult to injury, Globe staffers have been asked to train their new "colleagues" from India, who are shuttled to the Globe building by taxi from their nearby hotel accommodations.

FULL article at link.

Hard working Americans need jobs!

Up until April 1, I delivered for them, 250 papers on Sunday, 150 dailys.

I subcontracted with PCF, who contracted with NYT.

Just before gas doubled in price (back at $1.50 or so a gallon), subscriptions started falling off.

So PCF cancelled the $20/day/route contract and went to piecework, so many cents per copy. This meant an immediate 15% cut in revenue for every carrier (this was before things got really bad).

Then gas doubled, but not our contract. Then 2 years later, roughly, the Free Press delivery people underbid PCF by 50%--and our contract was flat out cancelled. This was a few months after NYT posted at 25% subscrition price increase.

The carriers get nothing. The Free Press carriers get to deliver twice as many papers for the same amount of money--meaning more time, more gas, more beating up their cars, for nothing.

Don't cry for the NYTimes. They deserve everything that's coming to them.