Techies Asked To Train Foreign Replacements 765
Makarand writes "David Lazarus of the San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that Bank of America (BofA) is moving thousands of tech jobs to India and has asked its techies to train their Indian replacements or risk losing severance pay. Although there is nothing in writing that says precisely this, the employees have been made clear about this responsibility in their meetings. BofA is outsourcing tech work to Indian companies whose employees do the work at half the cost of what a U.S. worker gets paid. According to an estimate, outsourcing has allowed the bank to save about $100 million over the past five years."
Time to change banks... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Time to change banks... (Score:5, Informative)
NO. Time to change to a CREDIT UNION (Score:5, Informative)
Any services you know of that a bank can do a CU cant?
Didn't think so.
Plus, they are nicer, have better customer service and seem to do a better job hiring hot chicks to run the teller lines.
Re:Another Silly Outsourcer....... (Score:4, Informative)
"Curry smelling dot-head" is bigotry.
Idiots like you are what allows _real_ bigotry to flurish, you cant even recognize it when you see it.
I have met some quite skilled folks from India over the years. Mostly in telcos engineering departments... but they were in the US and either born here or on their way to US Citizens. The ones answering the phones while still in Bombay... chances are "idiot" is a pretty good description of their skill level and experience in whatever job they are doing. The GOOD ones get better jobs after a short time.
By the by- what BofA did is illegal... (Score:5, Informative)
the thing right off as soon as you see it.
It's in violation of Federal Depository Regulations (The one that governs check cashing, etc.) to place a hold
on a Government check- per the regulations, they are to be treated as if the check was a CASH
transaction.
It's a violation of Federal law for them to do it and any fees incurred by this hold are due back to you
including any fees the people you pay end up charging you, etc. I've had BofA branch managers stand toe
to toe with me on that one, only to back down when shown a copy of the actual regs from the Fed website.
They know the regs, even going so far as to being balsy enough to try to palm off things that aren't in
the regs as being "per Federal Depository Regulations"- and I've had to jam it down their throats
repeatedly. Again, it's a good thing I'm shifting my banking elsewhere; this BS is just one more good
reason.
We need to Boycott (Score:5, Informative)
Re:splitting semantic hairs (Score:2, Informative)
Re:splitting semantic hairs (Score:3, Informative)
Yagu hit the nail right on the head. This pisses me off doubly, as being replaced by an indian for half the wage happened to me and all of my techs when I worked for a major computer manufacturer. Now my bank is doing it? BASTARDS!
Here's what I'm going to do, and I'll urge the rest of you to do the same if you're BofA customers. I'll be closing my personal and business accounts next week. I'll sit with one of their account representatives and explain that their lack of ethical conduct in regard to their employees has prompted me to take my business to another bank. I'll explain that there is a reason that I chose 'Bank of AMERICA ' and that they are no longer representative of the organization I started doing business with. Oh, and I'll take a cashiers check, thank you.
Re:In a capitalist economy, stuff like this happen (Score:1, Informative)
Re:splitting semantic hairs (Score:1, Informative)
Or not solved, just work under the table like before. Or as US Citizens they can collect welfare, then they don't have to work at all.
Then their relatives come across the border, take all the low-skill jobs, wait until a future administration grants them citizenship. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Re:In a capitalist economy, stuff like this happen (Score:3, Informative)
complete BS, but in your limited view go on adn believe it. Lots of people have left US after recieving an H1B because they can go to Infosys and work in the outsourcing projects, making half as much money but living in a much nicer home with a couple servants and a nice car. Especially in India, money goes much much further.
oh, how do I know? because already several members in my family have done just that.
of course, the BofA system is nice to thwart you. If you are believed to have done a sub par job, they pull your severance pay(it was in the article).
Re:Erm, and? (Score:3, Informative)
But I think I can add some information to this discussion. The shortage of doctors and resulting skyrocketing prices (an average of 15% increase in cost for the same service, per year, at least since the 70s) has nothing to do with the attractiveness of medicine.
It has to do with the AMA, which desired this exact situation, in order to make medical doctors' wages higher. When my late grandfather, Joseph F. Rudmin, was a health commissioner in NY (state), the state had a law that only AMA members could practice medicine there.
One year, he noticed an additional charge added to his annual dues, "for lobbying". Interested and politically active, he asked what they were lobbying for. The reply was that they were lobbying to reduce the number of doctors, so that there would be an increase in their salaries. He said he'd support no such thing, and he wasn't paying that fee for lobbying. They said it wasn't optional. He said that in that case, he was dropping out of the AMA. They said, in that case he wouldn't be able to practice medicine. He returned that they could explain in the papers why their most popular health commissioner could suddenly no longer practice medicine. They said that they were giving him honorary lifetime, dues-free membership.
Since that time, the lobbying was successful, the number of licensed doctors that the medical schools were permitted to graduate was decreased, and the prices started shooting up.
Welcome to Americas Socialist Redistributive Healthcare System. It's no less socialist than Canada's, and it is at least as bad. It's just that America's socialized medicine is rightwing.
That doesn't say that leftwing socialized medicine is good, either though. One of my personal friends, Ilona Daukas [jeffersonreview.com], was a Lithuanian. Lithuanians traditionally hunt mushrooms, and she was a great lover of mushrooms, but ate a false morel. The hospital she was taken to was a state hospital, and though they could have administered an antidote or pumped her stomach. They did neither, and she died. The basis of their reasoning was that the hospital couldn't afford more expensive treatments, and by law they couldn't offer them for a fee, since poorer patients would be adversely affected.
Regarding the redistributive system and taxation issue, I do think that the wealthy get far more service than the poor. The greatest service that they recieve is the protection of their property at the expense of taxpayers, under the multiple ownership (the state owns all property within the state, and defends it; the country owns all property within the country, and defends it; and the owner also owns all his own property. So the property is thrice-owned. But the state and nation also defend the owner's rights, as well.)
So based upon fee-for-service, it would be quite right to tax the wealthy far more than the poor.
Indeed, there is little service given by the state in the labor contract. Therefore, the income tax is not well justified under that viewpoint. But that's all theory. Money is roughly equivalent to power; and we have what we have, and it's not going to change for the better. At least, until someone figures out how the powerless are going to use power to take power from the powerful, changes will generally be for the worse. And when someone does figure it out, I don't doubt that we'll have something as bad as the French Revolution, and then things will be much, much worse.
Indian bank union demands end to outsourcing (Score:3, Informative)
Fancy some irony?
RBI staff threaten to strike work
New Delhi, June. 6 (PTI): Reserve Bank employees, who observed a token sit-in protest today, threatened to strike work if their demands for putting an end to outsourcing of jobs and continuation of revised pension scheme were not met.
Read the rest... [hindu.com]
Looks like it's not just US workers who feel threatened ... :)
Re:Take your own medicine please (Score:3, Informative)
Emergency hospitals can't refuse to treat you if you are critical. This means that if you are in immediate danger of dying, they have to make you "stable". This means that you are no longer in immediate danger of dying.
Now, if you have a serious illness or injury, but you are not in immediate danger of dying, then they can kick your ass out into the street. Or, they can charge you hundreds of dollars for a bandage (check your bill next time you go to the hospital). This means that a lot of people will not go to the hospital until their problem becomes really bad, which means it will be much more expensive to treat, when a shot of penicillin early on might have cleared the whole thing up.
This is one of the big reasons that health care in the US is so expensive - cheaper preventative care is skipped because the poor can't afford it, and won't be able to pay the very large bills that come when the problem becomes impossible to ignore. These costs get passed on to you.
There are two solutions to this problem - simply paying for the cheaper preventative treatment for the poor out of public funds, or allowing emergency rooms to kick anyone they want out, resulting in the avoidable deaths of a great many people (very few people want this).
Of course, the health insurance companies benefit the most from the current setup, so they want things to stay the same. But the rest of us would be far better off if we just paid for all simple treatments out of public funds.
give up......its a free market (Score:2, Informative)
Re:We need to Boycott (Score:1, Informative)
Also, the attrition with our Indian outsourcers is not good. Many people are quiting half-way though the training. Then someone new is brought in, but the lay-off date isn't pushed out so they don't get their full training.