Another job Americans won't do

It's not a problem, it's an opportunity for illegal workers .

September 5, 2007

No More Privies, So Hikers Add a Carry-Along

By FELICITY BARRINGER

SUMMIT OF MOUNT WHITNEY, Calif., Aug. 29 — The highest outhouse in the continental United States is no more.

High-altitude sanitation is too hazardous a business. Helicopters no longer make regular journeys up the steep-walled canyons in tricky winds while rangers in hazmat suits wait below to tie 250-pound bags or barrels of waste onto a long line dangling below the aircraft.

So from the granite immensity of Mount Whitney in California to Mount Rainier in Washington to Zion National Park in Utah, a new wilderness ethic is beginning to take hold: You can take it with you. In fact, you must.

The privy, which sat about 14,494 feet above sea level, and two other outhouses here in the Inyo National Forest — the last on the trail — have been removed within the last year. The 19,000 or so hikers who pick up Forest Service permits each year to hike the Whitney Trail are given double-sealed sanitation kits and told how to use them — just as they are told how to keep their food from the bears along the way, and how to find shelter when lightning storms rake the ridges.

The kits — the most popular model is known as a Wagbag — are becoming a fixture of camping gear. On high western trails, Wagbag is now as familiar a term as gorp (a high-energy mix of nuts, seeds, dry fruit and chocolate) or switchback (a hairpin turn in the trail).

“It’s one thing to take a risk to fly up there to pick up a sick or injured person,” said Brian Spitek, a forest ranger who works in the Inyo National Forest. “To do it to fly out a bag of poop is another.”

Other options, like burying waste, are ineffective where there is too little soil, too many people or both.

The pack-it-out ethic has long been practiced by Grand Canyon river rafters, who used old ammunition cans.

The Wagbags (WAG stands for Waste Alleviation and Gelling) are manufactured by Phillips Environmental Products in Montana and have been adopted by agencies including the Pentagon and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said the company’s president, Bill Phillips.

Their appearance in places like the John Muir Wilderness or the Grand Canyon is one more indication that park stewards want visitors to take responsibility for themselves. For several years, the National Park Service has required visitors who need helicopter rescues to help pay for the cost of sending in the copter.

Hikers on the Mount Whitney trail, in most cases, willingly shoulder the burden of the new sanitation regimen.

“If I’ve got to do it, I’ve got to do it,” said Scott Whitten of Danville, Calif., about halfway up the trail. “I’m not a big fan of it.”

So far this year, more than 4,500 pounds of waste in Wagbags has been deposited in receptacles at the Whitney Portal trail head, all of it headed for landfills, where the bags are designed to biodegrade over six to nine months.

“I don’t mind it,” said Marilyn Nelson, 64, who had just finished her first hike to Trail Camp, at 12,000 feet the highest camp below the summit of Mount Whitney on the eastern approach. “There are so many indignities on the trail anyway. And people do that all the time with their dogs in the city.”

But while her son, Brendan Nelson, 43, who works in television promotion in Los Angeles, accepted the need for the change, he was still nostalgic for the Trail Camp outhouse that was dismantled this year.

“I do miss it,” Mr. Nelson said. “It was a great place to get out of the wind. It was really a luxury to have it up here.”

For years hikers have boasted about their moment on the seat at the Whitney summit. Behind the single rock wall that hid it from hikers, the seat was open on three sides to the swirling clouds and the immense granite ridges that rise from delicate alpine valleys.

“It was a photo point for a lot of people,” said Rob Pilewski, a Sequoia National Park ranger whose district includes the western approaches to the mountain and the summit itself.

Backpackers have accepted the new pack-it-out policy, said rangers who have distributed Wagbags in Sequoia National Park to the west and the Inyo National Forest to the east. (The Wagbag is actually two separate plastic bags. The inner one is a funnel-like bag with powder at the bottom. Water causes the powder to gel, encapsulating anything in the bag.)

In the past, keeping the privies on the eastern side of the Inyo National Forest clean between helicopter flights was a huge headache.

“If you didn’t clean the outhouse regularly, it was a cascading nightmare,” said Garry Oye, the Inyo National Forest district ranger who put the new Whitney regimen into place.

But with 300 or more people on the trail each day, it was hard to do. “Can you keep your bathroom clean if 400 of your closest friends go through there each day?” Mr. Oye asked.

Joanne Rife, who went to the Whitney summit to celebrate her 75th birthday with her daughter, Susan Rife, 51, and granddaughter Alexis Rife, 21, said the new policy worked. “Most people are using it,” Alexis Rife said. “The few who don’t are ruining it for everyone else.”

So among the visual images of the 103-year-old Whitney trail — myriad tiny holes that hikers’ poles make in the trailside or the winking headlamps of predawn hikers heading up 99 rocky switchbacks — add one more: olive drab bags netted outside hikers’ backpacks.

“Nobody likes it,” said Erika Jostad, a Sequoia Park ranger. “But people understand.”

Indian Outsourcing Firms US Lobby

See my comments below ... note the part about the 'Information Technology Association of America' .... next time you hear about an op-ed from the CEO of a major American IT/consulting firm, remember who is feeding them much of their information ....

September 4, 2007

Lobbying in U.S., Indian Firms Present an American Face

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

MUMBAI, India — In the heat of the 2004 presidential race in the United States, John Kerry compared outsourcing to treason, Lou Dobbs harangued against it on CNN and the Indian outsourcing vendors were left scrambling.

Engineers to the core, their leaders fired back with data-packed PowerPoint presentations. Outsourcing is good for the economy, they said. It increases efficiency. It creates more jobs than it costs. But in the eyes of many Americans, those arguments proved no match for accounts of laid-off software engineers.

“Telling someone who loses their job in North Carolina or Jacksonville that this is good for the economy doesn’t work,” said Phiroz A. Vandrevala, an executive vice president at Tata Consultancy Services, one of the largest Indian vendors, who serves as a Washington strategist for Tata and other Indian companies.

But if four years is a lifetime in Washington, it is an eternity in Bangalore. And as the 2008 campaign starts to pick up speed, the Indian outsourcing companies have returned to Washington as veritable insiders, slicker and better connected than ever.

They have hired a former official in the Bush administration as a lobbyist. They are humanizing the issue by bringing Americans they have hired into meetings with politicians.

And, most striking, they have mastered the Washington art of waging proxy battles through local organizations, which allows them to not appear to be foreigners with an agenda.

Lakshmi Narayanan, the chairman of the National Association of Software and Service Companies, which represents the Indian outsourcing industry, agreed that the approach was crucial. “The moment Nasscom says something, it is a vested interest,” he said. So in the last few months, Mr. Narayanan said, the trade group has decided “to provide the data, work behind the scenes, but really to be fronted by the local organizations.”

The Indian companies are mounting this effort out of fear that the pressures of the presidential election, and of the Democratic primaries especially, will induce candidates to lash out at Indian vendors. Their business model is a perpetual lightning rod: the companies carve out tasks from their American clients and perform them more cheaply in India or other places with low costs for overhead and labor.

The Indian vendors’ main worries are two Democratic candidates: Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, whose campaign has hinted at opposition to outsourcing, and John Edwards, former senator of North Carolina, who is running a populist campaign. Many Indian executives consider Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, more sympathetic to their industry, but they are concerned that she will be compelled to match the others’ statements in a tight contest.

The Democrats’ new majorities in Congress were built in part on opposition to unpopular facets of free trade like outsourcing. For the Indian companies, a recent attempt in Congress to further restrict visas for skilled workers underscored that a storm is gathering.

Some in Washington would like to make outsourcing an issue again, said one Washington lobbyist who represents some of the Indian companies and who asked not to be identified because of company rules.

But if the movement against outsourcing is roused again, it will find itself jousting with a changed opponent. The Indian vendors have in no way strayed from their belief that outsourcing benefits both India and the United States. But they have found smoother ways to get the point across.

The Indian trade group has hired as its chief Washington lobbyist Robert D. Blackwill, a former senior White House adviser who served as the ambassador to India for the Bush administration. As the president of Barbour Griffith & Rogers International, an arm of one of the most powerful lobby shops in Washington, he is a heavy hitter on Capitol Hill.

Over the last year, Mr. Blackwill and the Indian companies’ executives have met with staff members of more than 100 lawmakers, said the lobbyist who asked not to be identified.

Mr. Vandrevala said executives from the Indian companies visiting the United States, including those on a trip organized by the Indian trade group in May, have met with aides to all the major presidential candidates, including Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama, the former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona. Several months ago, he said, the National Association of Software and Service Companies had an evening reception for members of the House’s India caucus. It drew 40 to 50 people.

But the core of the Indian vendors’ new strategy appears to be removing themselves from the limelight. Outsourcing is not about us, goes the new pitch to lawmakers, it benefits Americans, including ones in your district.

The Washington lobbyist who asked not to be identified said that a focus of the campaign was to collect data on Indian companies’ investments in the United States and then to lobby members of Congress from districts where those investments have created jobs.

For example, a lawmaker from Washington State might be told something like this: Indian outsourcing companies may funnel some Seattle-area technology jobs to India, but with the affluence that creates in India, more and more Indians are flying. That has made India a huge buyer of Boeing aircraft and thus a creator of jobs in the Seattle area, where Boeing does much of its manufacturing. ( how much work has Boeing offshored to Indian firms ? This is an easy number to get but no one asks the question .... much of the development work for Boeing aircraft is now done in China , India, etc. and the boom in it's sales has not seen a concurrent boom in hiring in the US, blue or white collar jobs)

Kiran Karnik, the president of the Indian trade group, said his organization has collaborated with research firms like the Brookings Institution and the Heritage Foundation. His group shares data on the outsourcing industry and provides access to Indian companies. It has also made what Mr. Karnik described as “symbolic” donations of about $10,000 to $15,000 to each of the major research organizations it works with. “Because we’re able to give them a lot of data on information technology in India,” he said, “maybe that enables someone to write a good paper on the global trade in services.” ( I am suspect of reports that are paid for by lobby groups ... not only paid for but most of the data comes from the lobbying group !! ... the first question to ask about any report is 'Who paid for it?' ... e.g. if a report says that , contrary to previous reports, eggs are good for your health and it was paid for by the egg council )

The Indians have also begun to use their own customers, which include the largest United States companies, as proxy soldiers. (normally they mention some by name, but curiously the NYTimes doesn't mention any names !?)The vendors and the clients belong to trade groups like the Information Technology Association of America ( here's the list of companies in this lobbying group, ALL the major computer and IT and consulting firms) , which help coordinate lobbying campaigns in which American chief executives write op-ed articles for newspapers or address Congress on topics that serve the American companies as well as the Indian vendors.

“We don’t want to be seen as very active there because it can seem that India is trying to poke its nose into the debate,” Mr. Karnik said. “We would prefer that the active effort of working the Hill is done by U.S. companies.” (do American firms represent US workers interests or the interests of workers elsewhere in their public pronouncements?)

Indian-American political groups in the United States can also be effective proxies. The U.S.-India Political Action Committee has defended outsourcing vendors, most of whose employees are in India, although the group represents Indian-Americans. A profile of Mrs. Clinton on the group’s Web site notes that “even though she was against outsourcing at the beginning of her political career, she has since changed her position.”( no surprise since most presidents have been strong free-trade proponents for the last 30 years or so .... this really accelerated during her husband's tenure) .

In an internal memo leaked in June, staff members from the Obama campaign contended that Mrs. Clinton’s ties to wealthy Indian businesspeople had made her favor outsourcing. The memo cited the Clintons’ ties to Vinod Gupta, an Indian entrepreneur who founded InfoUSA, one of the United States’ largest brokers of information on consumers. Mr. Gupta, a major fund-raiser and benefactor for the Clintons who was nominated for ambassadorships by President Bill Clinton, was detailed in the Obama memo because his company outsources to India and he has vocally supported the practice.

In a sign of their changing approach, the Indian vendors are also imitating a tactic used against them in the last election: putting a human, and preferably American, face on the issue.

Tata Consultancy has, for example, brought its American communications director, Mike McCabe, into meetings with lawmakers’ staffs and to a recent technology conference in Washington, according to an Indian executive who is familiar with the meetings and who asked not to be identified because of his organization’s privacy rules. The executive said the objective was to remind politicians that Tata hires Americans.

The Washington lobbyist who represents some of the Indian companies said that when the opposition paints outsourcing as bad for the United States, proponents can counter by making Americans the face of Indian companies.

US Wage Growth flat while productivity leaps

The article makes it sounds puzzling, a real mystery . In the past there has always been increases in wages when productivity has steep increases but not this time.

The answer is obvious that globalization and offshoring of jobs has kept wages down, both for blue and white collar work.

In this 'good' economic period wages has been flat; the prediction for the current slowing economy is that unemployment will rise and wages will fall.

So, in good times , you're lucky to have a job (forget the raise!) ... in bad times, good-bye job .

GDP growth not reaching paychecks

The economic recovery that began in 2001 has lifted productivity growth and employment of late, but has had little impact on many workers' wages.

September 3 2007: 12:09 PM EDT

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The economic expansion that began six years ago has failed to benefit most workers, according to a report from the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute, released Monday.

Productivity growth, although slower of late, has been strong since 2000. After a sluggish start in the period, employment has picked up, although at a slower pace than in past recoveries. Yet, that growth hasn't transferred to workers' paychecks, particularly for workers at the lower and middle end of the pay scale, the report found.

After rising quickly in the second half of the 1990s, most workers real wages have been stagnant in the 2000s, especially since 2003.

While productivity jumped almost 20 percent since 2000, the real median hourly wage of all workers rose just 3 percent in the same period. Since 2003, productivity has risen 5 percent, while the median hourly wage fell 1.1 percent.

Women saw a bigger rise in wages between 2000 and 2007, up 4.7 percent. Real median wages for men during the same period were up just 1.1 percent.

Both high school and college workers saw hourly wage gains of about 2.5 percent since 2000.

Yet, in the period between 2003 and 2007, wage gains for median workers, male and female, as well as high school and college workers have all been flat or falling.

Not so for workers at the highest end of the wage scale. At the 95th percentile, real wages have risen 9.4 percent since 2000 and 5.1 percent since 2003.

A separate measure, the Employment Cost Index (ECI) showed faster growth of 5 percent since 2000. That's because unlike the measure of median wages, the ECI includes a broad range of workers and therefore gets a boost from high earners. Also, the ECI includes employer-provided benefits, which have risen faster than wages since 2000. However, even with these added advantages, the ECI has been roughly flat since 2003.

One of the reasons for the discrepancy between growth and productivity and real wages is that workers' bargaining power has diminished during the period, the report showed.

Although the unemployment rate has been low in historical terms, it doesn't fully reflect the problems in the labor market caused by weak job growth or workers withdrawing from the labor force altogether.

Looking forward, the combination of recent slower productivity growth and rising unemployment is likely to drag down wages in the near- to medium-term, the report found.

U.S. workers: world's most productive

Bernanke: Fed ready to act

GDP at highest growth rate in a year

Labor Day

More education is the panacea from economists to cure all societal ills. It is the mom-and-apple-pie solution that no one questions or attempts to further drill-down with additional questions.

The future for American workers is 'knowledge-based' work, according to the Secretary of Labor .

What are the employment rates for 'knowledge-based' work in Brazil, Russia, India, China (BRIC) as well as Malaysia, the Phillipines, Vietnam, Slovakia, etc? Double digit increases every year while US workers have experienced a leveling off of demand or dramatic layoffs.

This simple question is never asked about any new technology ... 'Can the work be done overseas?'

If so, then 'what prevents it from being done overseas?'

If information is available instantaneously to all parts of the world, then all new technologies are also quickly available to be learned and utilized by cheaper workers overseas.

If the new work being created today is indeed knowledge-based as the Secretary of Labor says, what is the advantage that an educated American has over an educated Vietnamese to fill that position ?

Lastly, if millions of Americans took her advice and went back to school tomorrow, what are the chances that our economy , or the world economy , would absorb millions of new knowledge-workers from the US within the next year or 3 ? Or would job market economics come into play and decrease wages since so many people in so short a time flooded the job market ?

Published September 3, 2007

America's economy increasingly knowledge-based

Elaine
CHAO

For more than a century, Labor Day has been a federal holiday. And American workers have never been more deserving of formal recognition than today. Our nation's standard of living, freedom and accomplishments are the envy of the world. That's a tribute to the strength, productivity and resiliency of America's work force. By continuing to help our workers access the training and tools they need(what training and tools , specifically?) , this new century promises to be America's greatest yet.

The U.S. labor force is 153 million people strong. Three traits of the American work force position our nation for tremendous gains in the increasingly competitive 21st century worldwide economy: high productivity, flexibility and mobility.

The mobility and flexibility of America's work force are truly remarkable. Every year, about one-third of U.S. jobs change hands, largely because workers have found better opportunities. Change is the norm in our society and is a primary route to advancement. (what statistics does she have to show that 'most' workers change jobs to get 'better' jobs ? How does she define 'better' ? what parts of the economy -- lower, middle or upper pay scales -- are changing for better jobs?)

America's economy is increasingly a knowledge-based economy. Two-thirds of all the new jobs being created require(require college? sounds like a federal full-employment program for colleges... in reality most jobs require a HS degree and some specialized knowledge that can be gotten on the job or via a certification program. The generic prescription is for people to go to college , or get another degree, or get more training. What exactly to study is also generic , 'knowledge-based ' work! ) some kind of post-secondary education. Over the next decade, America will need 3 million health-care professionals and 1.7 million schoolteachers. We will need more than 900,000 engineers, including aerospace, biomedical, civil, computer software, and environmental engineers. (3 million health care workers ? what level ? more health aides than doctors or nurses as the boomer generation ages . 900,000 engineers over 10 years? 90,000 a year for all these many types of new 'knowledge-based' engineers ? 90,000 is an incredibly small number in an economy of over 150 million current workers that she mentions ... 6/100ths of a percent !!!) We will also need workers in other high-growth industries including nanotechnology, geospatial technology, and the life sciences, to name a few.(she neglects to put a guesstimate on how many will be needed in these areas) .

Higher-skilled jobs that require more education are clearly the future for the United States in the worldwide economy. And acquiring the skills and training to access these jobs is absolutely critical to the success of individual workers. From 2001 through 2006, high-paying occupations grew almost three times as much as lower-paying occupations. There is a "skills gap" in our economy that has kept lower-skilled workers from seeing their wages rise as quickly as workers in higher-skilled occupations. (what are those higher paying occupations? give an example or two . And this is most probably a statistical 'lie' , there are always much fewer higher-paying jobs than lower-paying ones, so any increases are bigger as percentages than in the aggregate. )

With the new school year starting, students need to be aware that high school dropouts make about $522 (this is $13/hr for HS dropouts!! I would think they would make closer to minimum wage ... She must be adding in any 'benefits' but I'm not sure what benefits minimum -wage workers get .... and maybe she is adding in some overtime hours ) per week for full-time work and their unemployment rate is about 7.1 percent. Meanwhile, workers with a high school diploma average $704 ($17.5/hr) weekly, and this segment of the work force has a 4.4 percent unemployment rate. Workers with associate degrees average about $846 per week($21/hr), and this group's unemployment rate is 3.5 percent. But workers with a bachelor's degree or higher average $1,393 per week ($35/hr)and have an unemployment rate of 2.1 percent.

More than ever before, education, training and retraining are the keys to future earnings. Graduating from high school really does pay off and going onto college pays off even more!

To empower more workers with higher work skills and education, the Bush administration has invested in work-force training that is more relevant and responsive to the changing times. That investment includes training individual workers for jobs in the new, knowledge-based economy.(ok, what are these specific training programs? For what fields and where do I sign up?) Other investments serve as the catalyst for entire regions to align their resources so they can compete worldwide.

America's success - past, present and future - rests on the strong foundation that America's workers have built. Our challenge is to ensure that workers continue to have access to the education and skills necessary to remain competitive in the 21st century worldwide economy.

ELAINE L. CHAO is the U.S. Secretary of Labor.

IBM's new enhanced vacation policy

No one's watching the vacation day accruals ? Then why do some employees get 3 others 4 and still others 5 weeks ? Maybe they intend to just open it up totally to 'as much as you can take, and still get your job done' .... which in today's IBM would be a zero vacation policy for most people !

I don't remember being told that this 'open vacation' policy had been implemented in 2003 ... I must have been on vacation and missed that dept mtg ....

I like how IBM always spins stories like this, in their favorite media outlet, the NYTimes, as a positive ... an enhancement .... comparing us to Google, etc ... ! In actuality people take less time off and work longer hours with policies like this ...

August 31, 2007
At I.B.M., a Vacation Anytime, or Maybe None
By KEN BELSON
SOMERS, N.Y. — It’s every worker’s dream: take as much vacation time as you want, on short notice, and don’t worry about your boss calling you on it. (yeah, right!) Cut out early, make it a long weekend, string two weeks together — as you like. No need to call in sick on a Friday so you can disappear for a fishing trip. Just go; nobody’s keeping track.
That is essentially what goes on at I.B.M., one of the cornerstones of corporate America, where each of the 355,000 workers is entitled to three or more weeks of vacation. The company does not keep track of who takes how much time or when, does not dole out choice vacation times by seniority and does not let people carry days off from year to year.
Instead, for the past few years, employees at all levels have made informal arrangements with their direct supervisors, guided mainly by their ability to get their work done on time. Many people post their vacation plans on electronic calendars that colleagues can view online, and they leave word about how they can be reached in a pinch.
“It’s like when you went to college and you didn’t have high school teachers nagging you anymore,” said Mark L. Hanny, I.B.M.’s vice president of independent software vendor alliances. “Employees like that we put more accountability on them.”
But the flip side of flexibility, at least at I.B.M., is peer pressure. Mr. Hanny and other I.B.M. employees, including his assistant, Shari Chiara, say that they frequently check their e-mail and voice mail messages while on vacation. Bosses sometimes ask subordinates to cancel days off to meet deadlines.(vacations, once approved, used to be inviolate in the past)
Some workplace experts say such continued blurring of the boundaries between work and play can overtax employees and lead to health problems, particularly at companies where there is an expectation that everyone is always on call.
“If leadership never takes time off, people will be skeptical whether they can,” said Kim Stattner of Hewitt Associates, a human resources consultant. “There is the potential for a domino effect.”
Frances Schneider, who retired from an I.B.M. sales division last year, after 34 years, said one thing never changed; there was not one year in which she took all her allotted time off.
“It wasn’t seven days a week, but people ended up putting in longer hours because of all the flexibility, without really thinking about it,” Ms. Schneider said. “Although you had this wonderful freedom to take days when you want, you really couldn’t. I.B.M. tends to be a group of workaholics.”
I.B.M. officials said they have no idea whether workers take more or fewer days off now than before, and have not studied the policy’s effect on efficiency.
But they point to employee surveys showing that the self-directed work and vacation policy is one of the top three reasons workers choose to stay there.
“Change is change,” said Richard Calo, vice president of global workforce relations. “We had some initial questioning of it. But at the end of the day, you remember how much time you spent. This wasn’t a difficult sell.”
Mr. Calo, the human resources chief, said that the open-ended vacation policy is “not a total license to do whatever you want to do,” and that workers are expected to produce quality work, even if the company is not paying attention to when or where they complete it.
The hands-off approach to vacation time, which gradually took hold over the past decade, has come amid I.B.M.’s shift from engineering and manufacturing into services like consulting and is part of a broader demise of old notions of eight hours’ pay for eight hours’ work at a fixed location.
Aided by broadband connections, cellphones and video conferencing software, 40 percent of I.B.M.’s employees have no dedicated offices, working instead at home, at a client’s site, or at one of the company’s hundreds of “e-mobility centers” around the world, where workers drop in to use phones, Internet connections and other resources.
Long a trendsetter in human resources — it began offering family leave in the 1950s — I.B.M. is probably the largest company to do away so completely with tracking vacation, although a number of newer, smaller firms have similar policies.
Best Buy has introduced a program called Results Oriented Work Environment for its 4,000 corporate employees, giving them freedom to do their jobs without regard to the hours they put in daily.
Motley Fool, the online investment adviser, has, since its founding 13 years ago, let employees take as many paid vacation or sick days as they need; the company’s director of human resources, Lee Burbage, said that most of its 180 workers take three to four weeks a year. Netflix, the online DVD distributor, no longer allots specific numbers of vacation days to its 400 salaried employees.
“When you have a work force of fully formed professionals who have been working for much of their life,” Patty McCord, the chief talent officer of Netflix, said, “you have a connection between the work you do and how long it takes to do it, so you don’t need to have the clock-in and clock-out mentality.”
I.B.M.’s vacations-without-boundaries system started in the early 1990s, when managers in the human resources, finance and technology departments questioned whether tracking days off helped the company grow — and some complained that it was an administrative burden.
So the company stopped counting days in a few departments, then gradually expanded the new policy. Since 2003, it has covered everyone in the company, from the chief executive, Samuel J. Palmisano, who has a vacation house in Kennebunkport, Me., to workers at I.B.M.’s chip and server factories in East Fishkill and Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
Luis H. Rodriguez, the director of market management in I.B.M.’s software group, said he visits his office here in Somers about once a week, working the rest of the time on the road or at his home in Ridgefield, Conn., where he sat one recent afternoon at the kitchen table with his laptop open.
He said that in six years at I.B.M. he can recall only one time when he asked a co-worker not to take a long weekend off — when their group was about to buy another company — and that calling colleagues or checking e-mail while visiting relatives in Texas or Illinois is a fair trade for being able to work from home so he can spend more time with his children, Alec, 5, and Evia, 2.
“I get an incredible amount of flexibility from the company, but it cuts both ways,” he said. “Because people’s schedules and needs are so structured, you need flexibility at work.”
For most companies, keeping track of time worked and time off remains a critical and transparent benchmark for workers and bosses. It is also a necessity in factories, call centers, restaurants and other workplaces where business would grind to a halt if managers were unable to predictably have enough employees on hand.
“If you look at the organizations that have done more radical things, they tend to be technology companies with salaried people,” where flexibility in job performance “is embedded into the culture of the place,” noted Max Caldwell, a managing principal in the work force effectiveness area at Towers Perrin, a human resources consultant.
Indeed, I.B.M.’s Mr. Calo said that the flexibility has helped the company compete with the more freewheeling atmosphere at start-up rivals in the technology world that have lured away some of its talent over the years.
“We have a reputation of not being as hip as a Google or a Netflix,” he said. “You don’t have to be the coolest guy on the block, but you don’t have to be the Big Blue nerd, either.”

IBM

China Wage Worries

Sounds like they are just like US Companies ... hire just young, inexperienced workers .... no families or responsibilities ... work them long hours .... get rid of them when they get older and have families and learn what are reasonable type of working conditions ....

Note that wages are around $1 an hour .... piece-meal work also ....

1.4 Billion people and can't get enough workers ? Sounds like BS to me ... same suituation we have here with illegal workers .... they can't get locals for those wages and working conditions so illegals come from neighboring countries .... next stop , Vietnamese and North Korean workers in China , doing the work that Chinese workers won't do !

August 29, 2007

Wages Rise in China as Businesses Court the Young

By KEITH BRADSHER

SHENZHEN, China, Aug. 28 — At the Dahon bicycle factory here, Zhang Jingming’s fingers move quickly and methodically — grabbing bicycle seats, wrapping them in cardboard and smoothly attaching them to frames.

Working a 45-hour week, Mr. Zhang makes the equivalent of $263 a month; as recently as February, he was making just $197. Some of his higher pay comes from working more efficiently. “When I first started, I wasn’t this fast,” he said.

But a good portion reflects a raise Mr. Zhang got: to 1.45 cents for each bicycle seat from 1.32 cents. It is a small difference that signifies major change.

Chinese wages are on the rise. No reliable figures for average wages exist; the government’s economic data are notably unreliable. But factory owners and experts who monitor the nation’s labor market say that businesses are having a hard time finding able-bodied workers and are having to pay the workers they can find more money.

And higher wages in China are likely to lead to higher prices in the United States — at the mall, at the grocery, even at the gas pump.

Chinese companies are already passing along some of their higher costs to overseas customers. Prices for goods from China, after years of gradual decline, have risen 1.2 percent since February, according to the Labor Department. July’s increase was the biggest yet: 0.4 percent compared with June. Chinese companies and contractors are also passing on the cost of the rising value of their currency, the yuan, up 8.8 percent against the dollar in the last two years.

For decades, many labor economists said that China’s vast population would supply a nearly bottomless pool of workers. So many people would be seeking jobs at any given time, this reasoning went, that wages in this country would be stuck just above subsistence levels. As recently as four years ago, some experts estimated that most of the perhaps 150 million underemployed workers in the countryside would be heading to cities.

Instead, sporadic labor shortages started to appear in 2003 at factories in the Pearl River delta of southeastern China. Now those shortages have spread to factories up and down the Chinese coast, specialists say.

This summer, Mary Gallagher, a Chinese labor specialist at the University of Michigan, visited five sportswear factories near Shanghai and Guangzhou. She found them all struggling to hire and retain workers. One had shut one of its two main production lines because it had nobody to sew shirts and other garments.

“Basically half the factory was shut down and one dormitory was empty,” Ms. Gallagher said.

In interviews, factory executives across the country complained of being forced to give double-digit raises in order to find and keep young workers at all skill levels. Three or four years ago, said Zhong Yi, vice general manager of a leather-jacket manufacturer in Hangzhou in east-central China, 800 to 1,100 yuan a month ($105 to $145) “was a good salary.”

“Now,” he said, “1,500 is the bottom” ($198).

Chinese officials are quick to say that there is no overall shortage of labor — rather, there is a shortage of young workers willing to accept the low wages that prevailed in the 1990s. Factories in cities like Guangzhou advertise heavily for young workers, even while employment offices consider it a success if someone over 40 can find any job in less than a year. (BINGO ! )

“Now they’re taking workers into their early 30s,” said Jonathan Unger, director of the Contemporary China Center at Australian National University in Canberra, “but anything older than that and they think they can’t take the conditions, the 11-hour days,” as well as work on weekends, and a tedious life in factory-owned dormitories.

Plant owners’ refusal to hire blue-collar workers over 35 or 40 is colliding with the demographic reality of China’s one-child policy. The number of workers in the 20-to-24-year-old range is already shrinking as more of them go to universities instead of entering the work force after high school, and the International Labor Organization projects that workers in this age range will edge slowly downward through at least 2020.

Visiting villages from tropical Gaoyao in the southeastern corner of the country to dusty Houxinqiu in the northeast, it is striking how few young adults remain after so many have left for the cities. A recent government survey of 2,749 villages in 17 provinces and autonomous regions found that in 74 percent of villages, there were no workers fit to travel to distant cities, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

A separate report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences warned of coming labor shortages even in rural areas as soon as 2009.

This lack of laborers of desirable age is hardly making China a worker’s paradise. Factory wages remain extremely low by Western standards: roughly $1 an hour for better-paid workers near the coast, compared with as little as 50 cents early this decade.

The pay looks especially low in dollar terms, partly because China has intervened in the currency markets to hold down the value of the yuan and keep exports competitive. The cost of living is low in dollar terms for the same reason; entrees at an air-conditioned restaurant three blocks from the bicycle factory here start at 50 cents for a large plate of fried rice.

Moreover, labor regulation is weak in China, as shown most vividly this year by the discovery that brick kilns in the north of the country had kidnapped and enslaved hundreds of children and mentally disadvantaged adults, working them under brutal conditions with little or no pay.

And wages are stagnating in the middle of the labor market — workers who consider themselves too educated for entry-level jobs in a garment factory, but lacking the skills or experience to command a premium salary elsewhere. “It’s easy to find a job with not a very high salary,” said Chen Zheng, a 24-year-old auto worker and high school graduate in Ningbo. “It’s not easy if you want a higher wage.”

The hardest variable to judge in China’s changing labor market is the pace of productivity growth. Since there are few reliable statistics, the best way to assess productivity is to look at individual factories like the Dahon operation here, which produces bicycles that collapse for easy storage.

David T. Hon, chief executive of the privately held Dahon Group, said that while he had been raising wages 10 to 15 percent a year, the average labor cost for each bicycle had actually edged downward. This is possible, he said, because sales are growing 30 percent a year and increasingly large-scale production has brought savings. The cost of engineering a new bicycle design, or handling the accounting and other back-office operations, is spread over more and more bicycles as production rises.

The price changes in China are unlikely to immediately affect broad measures of inflation in the United States though longer-term effects are likely, the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, said in a speech on March 2, just as prices for imports from China were reaching a low point. Mr. Bernanke suggested that the price changes would have minimum effect because the total of Chinese imports was small in relation to the broad American economy.

A bigger question, one harder to answer, is how much cheap Chinese imports have forced American manufacturers to keep their own prices low. And will that price restraint persist if Chinese products become more expensive?

For instance, American, European and Japanese automakers have been putting a lot of pressure on parts suppliers to cut prices by forcing them to compete for contracts with low-cost Chinese producers.

Rising overall incomes in China also affect American inflation indirectly. Higher incomes in this country contribute to soaring demand by Chinese for cars, air-conditioners and other energy-consuming products.

China is now the world’s second-largest oil importer after the United States. More demand will help push up global oil prices and inflation.