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July 22, 2003: For Immediate Release IBM
to Export Thousands of American Software Jobs WashTech
Contact: Marcus Courtney (206) 323-6549 Alliance@IBM
Contact: Lee Conrad (607) 729-4652 Endicott NY— IBM company documents detail plans to accelerate its pattern of exporting American software jobs to India and China. This new focus by IBM – an American company with 150,000 U.S. employees -- follows the lead of Microsoft and other high-tech companies who are seeking to cut American jobs to slash costs. “Our competitors are doing it. We have to do it,” said Tom Lynch, Director of Global Employees Relations for IBM. Lynch made the comments at local meeting in March, at which IBM human resource managers presented the issue of the global job shift via the company Intranet. While Lynch did not give a specific number of IBM jobs to be moved, he was clear that the numbers will be significant (i.e. potentially in the thousands). “Sending many of the country's best paying and highest skilled jobs overseas is a dire economic threat to high tech employees and their families, one that jeopardizes the financial well-being of middle class professionals who increasingly are finding themselves under- or un-employed", said Lee Conrad a former IBM employee and an organizer with the Alliance@IBM/CWA Local 1701. “We cannot create an economic recovery at home if high-tech companies like IBM are laying off U.S. workers to create more jobs overseas.” The presentation made specific and detailed references to WashTech and the Communications Workers of America and the Alliance@IBM. These unions have been in the forefront of organizing technology workers around the issues of high-tech jobs being exported overseas. Lynch outlined IBM employment strategies from the 1990’s but suggested that in this new decade the focus will be on service jobs. He then listed the potential jobs for export: “engineering,…software development, certainly chip development as well.” Current IBM employees will “train their replacements,” he noted. He then recognized “that will raise a lot of tension, as you’re training someone to do a job that is no longer going to be yours….” Lynch indicated his belief that union organizing and not government action was the route employees would take to help fight this trend. “Governments, I think, will find that they are fairly limited in what they can do. Unionizing becomes an attractive option.” WashTech’s website was of particular focus during the presentation. “You can see some fairly appealing arguments they are making why employees need to do some things like organize to fight this.” The Alliance@IBM will be holding meetings throughout the country at IBM site locations to give employees the opportunity to see and view the whole slide and audio presentation. For more information about the campaign to stop IBM from exporting American jobs, go to www.washtech.org and www.allianceibm.org. WashTech and Alliance@IBM are local affiliates of the Communications Workers of America, AFL-CIO.
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