07.13.11
Cisco is not your friend & corporate America hates you
Earlier this year Cisco put its CEO, John Chambers, on 60 Minutes to attest how US corporate tax rates were preventing it from bringing profits and jobs home.
Naturally, it was a lie. But the 60 Minutes segment was notably grabbed by Eric Cantor and uploaded under his name at YouTube.
More recently Cisco has had a sizable ad campaign pushing its cloud services in computer security.
“Trending now: the dark side,” announced the ad. Which could just as well be applied to Cisco itself, now one of the standard corporate cheats/predators on the national landscape.
Today, this from Bloomberg, putting to death the claim that a tax holiday would create jobs. Cisco is going in the opposite direction:
Cisco’s international earnings have been taxed at about 5 percent since 2008, records show.
Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO), the largest networking-equipment company, may cut as many as 10,000 jobs, or about 14 percent of its workforce, to revive profit growth, according to two people familiar with the plans.
The cuts include as many as 7,000 jobs that would be eliminated by the end of August, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren’t final. Cisco is also providing early-retirement packages to about 3,000 workers who accepted buyouts …
Moving along, the Financial Times ran a special on outsourcing IT to overseas data centers, again “moving it to the cloud,” so to speak.
Some cites:
The remaining countries in the top ten are Mexico, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines and Chile.
There’s some discussion on using outsourced data centers as replacement for various corporate enterprise security functions.
DD found this hysterical. The last three years saw the US press and government alive with stories about Chinese infiltration of American networks — business, military and otherwise.
As karmic justice, the US government ought to mandate search for lowest bids providers — in this time of austerity, you know.
If this were to happen, Chinese service centers could replace Booz Allen, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman contracting services in this area. At substantial savings I would imagine.
Ha ha ha.
At a recent outsourcing industry meet-and-greet in China, [an American outsourcer] was surprised to discover that other US attendees were public-sector workers, representing a number of cities and states. They wanted to understand how subsidies were being packaged in China, so that they could do something similar back home.
If you read the subtest of these stories, it’s clear China, India and other countries subsidize their service center IT shops for the express purpose of getting American (and other western) contracts.
It’s kind of an anti-labor national protection racket and it has nothing to do with the free market and everything to do with capitalizing on the US ecology of multi-national corporate vultures.
Now, the US government could easily do the same kinds of things and protect US labor. But the only place this happens is in the defense industry. The domestic non-military side is left to be picked clean. As a look at the Cisco story makes clear.
It’s not only IT that is outsourced. Anything that doesn’t require being tied to a particular geographic location in the continental US is fair game.
People in the sciences of the pharmaceutical and molecular biology industries already know this as the last few years have seen more and more their jobs just outsourced to R&D labs in Asia.
Again, from the Financial Times:
Like most other big pharmaceutical companies, AstraZeneca has also outsourced much of its IT.
“We have also signed a contract to outsource some of or human resources work, and we’ve already done some selective outsourcing of some of our R&D work,??? explains Mr Glynn.
Mr Dalal points out that the pharmaceutical industry is full of examples of companies that outsource their R&D activity for drug development.
In small part, this explains one of the reason why the war on infectious microbial disease is being lost to increasing antibiotic resistance and the lack of new compounds.
Do you really believe US pharmaceuticals are interested in the hard work and often initially unprofitable nature of this kind of work if the corporate heads are mostly focused on how fast they can send their labs to India and China?
Rhetorical, obviously.
For the future the obvious growth positions are then in jobs, services actually, which cannot be moved.
Janitors, sanitation workers, bedpan technicians, staffers of mini-marts at local gas stations, prison guards, car wash employees, waiters, bartenders, re-training camp community college instructors for 18-month certifications and bondings for these types of jobs.
Bl-a-a-a-t! I bought some new IT! It was made in China!
bonze blayk said,
July 13, 2011 at 3:26 pm
The phrase that says it all:
“We have also signed a contract to outsource some of our human resources work…”
– bonzie anne