Alliance@IBM "Show Us The Jobs Tour" article

Show Us the Jobs' tour protests loss of work to overseas Saturday, March 27, 2004
By Bob Freund

The Post-Bulletin

One by one, idled workers stepped up to a microphone with stories about U.S. jobs that have disappeared, usually gone overseas.

The stories were packed with poignancy; most of the speakers were talking about their own jobs.

Most were among the real-life accounts available from the Show Us The Jobs Tour that stopped in Rochester on Friday. Fifty-one workers -- one from each state and the District of Columbia -- pulled up in the tour's buses for an appearance and news conference in the Rotunda at the city-county Government Center

Sponsored by the AFl-CIO union and a new national group called Working America, the tour was in the third day of its 8-day route from St. Louis across the Upper Midwest and mid-Atlantic states to Washington D.C.

A large concentration of high-tech jobs put Rochester on the tour's map, said Cathy Finken of Rochester, second vice president of the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees. Both Minnesota and Rochester have felt the impact of industry job losses, she said. Numbers of information technology jobs in the state have fallen 30 percent from a peak in 2000, she said. The Rochester area lost more than 2,700 technology jobs from 1998 to late 2003, she said.

The Rochester stop focused on shifts of white-collar jobs from the United States to low-cost areas overseas, such as India. Local speakers joined workers from the tour to blast corporate actions and Bush administration policies that, they said, allow them.

Software engineer Garrett Lanzy, vice president of union-affiliated Alliance@IBM criticized corporations that "rewrite the social contract" with their workers.

The government, which grants legal and tax benefits to corporations, should ""demand good citizenship," he told a crowd gathered in the center's Rotunda. "In particular, why should any company that offshores jobs receive any tax benefits from any level of government?" he asked.

Computer consultant Eric Starnes of Dover said competitors using overseas labor drastically undercut his company's bids for contracts beginning as long as two years ago. Jobs that had fetched $90 an hour a couple of years ago brought offers of $25-$35 an hour. "We were literally working for free just to keep the doors open," he said. "The past year, we had trouble finding work at all," he said.

Janet Krueger of Rochester, a former 23-year IBMer who has been a national leader in worker protests over IBM's pension changes, also appeared.

Minnesota's representative on the tour, Dan Pechek, told of his layoff after 15 years as a finishing technician for papermaker Stora Enso's mill at Duluth. His unemployment benefits have run out and, despite a degree in industrial relations, he hasn't been able to find a job for 12 months, he said.

Natasha Humphries of Santa Clara, Calif., who was making $90,000 a year as a senior software quality assurance engineer with computer company palmOne Inc., said she was flown to India to train engineers making $2 to $4 an hour. Then, after returning home, she was laid off. In effect, "I displaced myself," she said. Humphries has turned activist and has testified at a Congressional hearing.

Myra Bronstein of Mercer Island, Wash., an IT worker with WatchMark Corp., said she also was notified of her own layoff and told to teach overseas workers to do her job. "I think it should be illegal to force employees to train their replacements and use the severance and unemployment (insurance) as hostage," she said.

The tour is scheduled to reach its destination in Washington on March 31