Redundancy?
How can they be redundant, if they're having to train replacements? The person doesn't become redundant, the role does. If the role's being transferred overseas, this isn't redundancy.
Computer Science Corporation (CSC) workers heading for the chopping block in Britain have been asked to train their replacements in India and the Czech Republic. Some 750 staff in the UK have been threatened with redundancy under the IT giant's global workforce shakeup, and roughly 200 roles will be moved offshore. CSC - …
The change of location counts as redundancy for the role.
IIRC, if a company moved its office more than 15 miles from the original office location they have to offer redundancy to any staff member who doesn't want to move because the role in the original office is now redundant. Thats a good thing, because it forces the company to pay proper compensation instead of just firing people who wouldn't move and avoiding all compensation for it.
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No, it isn't. For example, how do you think universities get rid of postdocs whose external funding has expired?
Any research university will have many hundreds of postdocs; if you assume the average contract length is two years, and the likelihood of new funding is 50%, then an institution with 400 postdocs will be discarding 100 staff a year- and some large departments may have over 100 in themselves). If you assume that single-contract postdocs dont count as redundancies, that leaves 50 a year, and if you assume that 50% cant wait to leave, that's still 25/year. Making contract research staff redundant is a standard industrial process for higher education.
PS: No, I didn't want to leave, and, no, it wasn't hard for them to get rid of me. *shrug*
they become redundant as in "UK wage-level-redundant", and replacement will be cheeeeaaap (see those bonuses rolling for the "successful roll-out of cost optimisatin".
Of course, the good workers in Czech Republic, so delighted to be offered a job now, will themselves become "Czech-wage-level-redundant", in due course (but always sooner, than they would think), once their wage level becomes "unsustainable in the current, challenging, economic situation"
Czech IT wage level is not that far off from the UK and in some IT sectors is even higher than in the UK. In fact, the Germans have moved into Czech republic to the rescue their early experiments in outsourcing to warmer climate driving up demand/supply situation to a level UK IT bods can only envy. That move has resulted in starting salaries for some positions (f.e. Unix sysadmin, etc) that are in fact higher than their UK equivalents.
So I would not be so sure about "Czech-wage-level-redundant" and the "rightful indignation" manifested by unions that it is going somewhere cheaper. That may indeed be the case. Or maybe not. I would not jump to a conclusion without seeing actual pay brackets and positions.
Well said.
This isn't true redundancy, even for geographical reasons. The fact it is cheaper abroad does not mean the need for the job in a certain location has moved. It's one thing to need to move a factory or office, another just to move it to save money.
Not to mention the idiocy of moving money abroad. Taking money out of the economy you depend on for your income is monumentally retarded. Short term gain, long term trauma.
I don't know if it is illegal. A more interesting question is: should it be?
Firing a person and then hiring someone else who is willing to do the same job for less is just rational. Making that illegal is the opposite of freedom of association; makes it riskier to hire anyone; and is using the violence of law to correct voluntary interactions (agreeing to be hired on the basis that you may one day be fired if someone undercuts you) that you don't like (but maybe the people entering the voluntary interactions do like).
Someone said this company should be shamed. For acting rationally?
Instead of all the moralising (even business minister Matthew Hancock is at it), perhaps it would be better to reduce the cost of hiring people in the UK. Think employment law, regulations, tax and even unions.
"perhaps it would be better to reduce the cost of hiring people in the UK."
@Rob: that would have to be a big reduction to match current Indian wage rates, and still a very significant reduction to match Czech Republic wage rates.
I have no idea where we are going to get jobs that pay reasonable rates for the next few generations either, but cutting wages or employment protection does not strike me as a good road to go down.
@keithpeter "I have no idea where we are going to get jobs that pay reasonable rates for the next few generations either"
We differentiate. There are still things that are better done locally, or that local people are better skilled at. Not every kind of job suits outsourcing.
Also consider that places exporting their surplus supply of engineering talent will quicky get rich and start demanding that talent for themselves. Ultimately the more skilled people there are the more work gets done; skilled people do not go un-used, long term, given sensible economic policies.
"cutting wages or employment protection does not strike me as a good road to go down" -- such things might be unpleasant, but fighting the laws of economics (mathematics? nature?) won't work. Silly polices (e.g. you must employ only local people) will just make things worse.
You talk like a Thatcherite (free market etc) but this is Mrs Thatcher's chickens come home to roost. Ironically, she would have hated it.
Wrote :- "fighting the laws of economics .. won't work". To a large extent the "laws" of econimics are what you make them. Like the laws of a game - change the laws and you get a different game (eg Soccer --> Rugby) that still works but with different strategies.
For many years the UK had an economy in which, alongside a high degree of self-sufficiency we also imported raw materials, made stuff, and exported a proportion of it. We were doing rather well at that, far better than most of the world; even basic working families could manage a 3-bed house with a garden, such as the millions built around 1880-1939. In this, a high level of education, training, and company loyalty (both ways) were essential to make clever stuff from raw materials.
Then people like you thought of getting stuff made cheaper abroad. They claimed we would all be better-off. Transiently, this may be partly true. We can now buy absurdly cheap electronics, built by near-slave labour. However, it is going down a path that will lead the whole world to average out, economically. As the increasingly money shifts to them rather than re-circling in the UK (as in this news item), Indians, Chinese and Africans will become somewhat better off than now, but the UK and USA will be far worse (do the math) because there are only finite resources in the World (land area, food, energy, minerals). So those phone assembly "slaves" will soon be expecting to own cars and 3-bed houses themselves, and out-bidding us for the materials.
That may make you feel morally "good", but do not pretend this is good for the _UK_ economy.
I for one choose to make the laws about profit.
I've given my position over to an offshore team in the past and I did it gladly. It was the right decision for the business at that time. Why is it that people think a business has to be sustainable just because it employs people? What's wrong with a business existing only so a few at the top can make as much money as quickly as possible so they can retire and live a good life. It's what we are all really trying to do, some are just better at it than others. By 2100 the planet is going to go tits up from over population, I say make your fortunes now and enjoy it.
You sound like you have a job in management. Maybe at CSC.
Let me ask you one question : if you needed a heart transplant, what would you rather hear ;
"Don't worry sir, we have the most experienced surgeon in the country waiting for you, he's done six thousand operations just like yours, you'll be fine. Of course, your insurance is going to pay a hefty sum, but good health is priceless, is it not ?"
or
"Don't worry about your insurance premiums sir, we have a new surgeon fresh in from Tzeckoslowhateveria. He used to be a programmer but he passed an online certification and now he's itching to get some experience for only £1/hour. Of course, we'll need you to sign this waiver..."
Well CSC is going for option #2, do you know why ? Because the people who make the decision will be up & out as soon as they've cashed their bonus checks and won't have to deal with the fallout.
Now you tell me just how that is rational.
Or rather, don't bother. You are part of those who believe that money is the only criteria, so obviously you cannot understand just how wrong you are. Until the day comes when YOU are made redundant, of course. That day it'll be a whole other story, I'm sure.
I am just a programmer. I am under no illusion that my employer owes me a job. Nobody owes me anything. If I want goods and services, I have to exchange my services for them with those who voluntarily choose to make the exchange. I'd rather keep threats of violence (or fines, or imprisonment or whatever) out of it.
If CSC is being irrational, well, they should be free to dispose of their property as they see fit. I only said that it is rational to hire someone to do the same thing for less money. Maybe CSC is not getting the same thing; only they can judge whether it is worth it.
"money is the only criteria": not in life, generally. But when you are a company, largely, yes. Because someone else might undercut you. If you can run a company to do the same job and pay your employees double the going rate and promise never to fire them, then this would be very noble and I would hope you succeed. But this is not something that can be enforced from above.
Exactly. Never forget that the IT service companies in India and elsewhere are SELLING their services. The terminology used in their sales pitch is important. They tell management at some company investigating their service that they have 3,000 engineers. If the buyer assumes that the term engineer in the sales pitch means what it traditional has in his country, (ie. BS degree in engineering from an accredited university), then, well, let the buyer beware. The difference is that when hiring individual engineers, the educational background and previous employment of their workers is known. When hiring a service company, does management actually receive any info on the actual individuals performing their work? Or are they being snookered? Is an 18 month crash course at a company owned training center the same as a BS degree from a university? Put another way, if those same Indian engineers moved to the UK, would their 18 month crash course suffice to land an engineering job?
A flood of poor quality, but cheap, kitchen appliances eventually resulted in the old high quality appliances that lasted 30 years no longer being available at all for any price. Will the same be true of engineers?
You can only fire someone (or more accurately terminate their contract), if they did something wrong. i.e. broke their terms of employment. And only then after following an appropriate disciplinary process, unless it's something major, like hitting a customer or stealing from the company etc.
If you no longer need someone, as their role isn't required anymore. Then you don't fire them, you make them redundant, or ask them to take voluntary redundancy.
You can't fire someone just because you don't want them to work for you any more, irrespective of the reason. That would be classed as unfair dismissal, as they hadn't done anything wrong, as you need a valid contractual reason to be able to fire someone. It would leave you and your company open to court action for firing someone without a valid reason (as in valid for the individual themselves, not valid for the company). If the person was doing a good job, the company wouldn't have a legal leg to stand on.
To fire someone because you found someone else, who would do the job cheaper, IS ILLEGAL, (as well as immoral).
"To fire someone because you found someone else, who would do the job cheaper, IS ILLEGAL, (as well as immoral)."
It may well be illegal.
I think that forcing someone (as you say the law does) to pay a high price for something they can get for less elsewhere is immoral. Breaking agreements made voluntarily is certainly immoral. But making agreements to employ someone on the condition that you can then stop employing them after a mutually agreed notice period is not immoral.
Your ignorance is extraordinary.
1. one can not just reduce wages to the lowest common, international denominator if the employees are to be able to afford to live (eat, be housed, care for children, provide the market for your goods) in their country or area of residence. This is illogical, kills the local market that no longer has the wherewithal nor need to buy ever cheaper, usually inferior services.
2. this damages the firm's home country in terms of lost taxation and rising social costs for the support of the sacked workers.
3. in turn, the infrastructure that supports the company (legal, security, communications) is damaged as it becomes unsustainable with the loss of tax money to pay for it.
4. perceived savings are rarely realised overall as reduced service standards annoy customers; knowledge is lost; the overseas firms gain the knowledge and replace you; even overseas wages and infrastructure costs do rise, often faster and less predictably than in the home market; remote management is neither free, nor simple, nor fully effective. In every IT firm that I have worked, where "offshoring" is done, an amazing number of the "offshore" workers are brought "on shore" for various periods, each individual getting lower salary, but also needing airfares, accommodation, home leave, increased communications costs and still needing desks, insurance, space, equipment and still leaching knowledge away as they can not stay for ever, usually no longer than two years. Quality of documentation, service management and so on all drop, especially when different time zones are in play.
5. Most importantly, to me: business needs to cover its costs and make some profit; but its primary purpose in the larger scale of things is to be part of society, provide services and work for the inhabitants. A country with highly profitable business and poverty, disease and unemployment is a failed country, hardly indeed a country, and tends towards social collapse. Or of course, just replace us all with extremely profitable robots filling warehouses with goods for other robots and a tiny minority of "businessmen", wandering from (foreign) expensive bolt hole to bolt hole in transport systems insulated from the hoi polloi, like old fashioned, colonial expats. in HK and parts of Africa, neither knowing nor caring about the local inhabitants, culture, language nor even aware of where they are - a dying breed until resuscitated by modern, international "business", in a worse, more insidious, exploitative way than ever.
I wonder what sacrifices the senior managers of such firms are making, many of them getting bonuses, on top of generous salaries, that would cover the claimed savings.
Regrettably, in my experience most firms can make people redundant, notwithstanding the role is still very much required, by pretty easy redefinitions. e.g. sales manager becomes executive sales coordinator and the firm justifies a reshaped workforce with either or both of a) fewer people or b) cheaper people.
I heard anecdotally that Royal Bank of Scotland used that little ruse to cut through 100s of retail banking middle management jobs quite deftly.
"Firing a person and then hiring someone else who is willing to do the same job for less is just rational."
No, it looks rational if you think like a PHB and don't understand what the word really means.
Doing too much of this has consequences outside of individual departments/divisions.
Being rational means understanding those consequences. Anything less is counting beans, then being surprised when the farm burns down.
Well, I lost my technical team to the 'offshore team' in india. They even bought the chaps over for a month to get a knowledge transfer. They can write efficient code, but its untidy and they totally lack any kind of business knowledge needed to produce a quality deliverable. You have to write it down to the smallest thing. And its amazing how they miss key things in the document. You point it out, they re-work. and so on.
Problem is that each resource costs less than 10k each per year. You can't keep a contractor for a much more than a month or a permie for two for that kind of money. And companies think 6 employees for the price of one is a bargain.
Sad fact is - its a shit thing to do to UK staff - but it is how it is now. Technical staff may as well face facts, you either move up the chain and bridge the Gap between business and tech or live a life of the dole.
The irony of this outsourcing is - how many tech staff have been told they can't be based at home because "it just wouldn't work" - yet apparently it works from India.
I do entirely blame the government for this though - outsourcing outside of Europe should never have been allowed - you should heavily tax the work on the way in like any other goods you would import from outside the EU. But for some reason, the scum bag big consultancies that pay f**k all in tax anyway have been allowed to operate this outrageous practice.
My advice to the CMC staff - do the handover - train your replacements (remember - be nice to them - its not their fault - they are just trying to make an honest buck) - take the extra cash on offer for doing it- then do the dirty on your employer and go directly to the client if you can - I just did and it turns out that even though I breached my employment contract that as a contractor there is pretty much fuck all they can do about it.
I know several people who work at CSC, and they all work from home in the UK on a permanent basis. That is absolute fact.
I worked there myself on one of their first UK large contracts and watched he architects of the deal walk away rubbing their hands...the company whose business IT they claimed to provide tore their hair out after an initially promising start.... I bailed voluntarily after being stiffed by mgmt one too many times with empty promises of new experience, interesting work and career advancement, instead moved to grunt jobs way below my experience and role description. Since then several people who told me I was mad, have been severed by them. One friend (still there) set out his department's bonuses, typed up the letters, then was informed with 20 mins to go before handing them out, that all bonuses had been chopped. This news is depressing but familiar.
When I worked there it was starting to go this way, and it made me doubt whether a career in hands-on technical work (development) was feasible when it was all going offshore. But I left and 10+ years on I'm still happily writing code, and there's loads of developer jobs out there.
This shows a complete lack of respect for the workforce, and they obviously place no value on their people at all. To hell with them. The workforce should go on strike.
You seem to have things the wrong way round, it's the clients that ask for the off-shoring, that's why they go to CSC in the first place.
Sometimes a client doesn't want to off-shore at all, or they only want specific parts items off-shored, and those are included in the contracts as required.
But most clients specifically ask to off-shore, so their contracts tend to have a specific timetable for what parts of their business are to be off-shored, and when it needs to be completed by.
Basically the clients are paying CSC to do the dirty work for them. so that the clients don't have to manage the off-shoring themselves.
The only things CSC off-shores themselves are their internal, none client facing, processes. Such as their own HR and payroll departments, and their internal help desk etc. which are now off-shore.
Not saying I agree with any of this. I hate off-shoring with a passion. I think for the countries like the UK it's a terribly short sighted thing to do. Farming off skilled, well paid jobs overseas. Thus reducing the wealth in the country, (and tax income etc.), thus making the country and the people impacted poorer and poorer, all to save some client a few quid, most of which will go to shareholders rather than their own customers!
Personally, I'd love to see laws that basically state if you do business in the UK, and have people specifically providing those UK services, then the people providing those services must be UK nationals based within the UK, or at least a certain %. But somehow I suspect these laws would probably break a few World Trade rules etc.
*** Reason for AC!
For my sins, I work for CSC! Originally a developer TUPE'd across from a client into CSC who had specifically asked for a headcount reduction and for a % off all work to be sent off-shore. Hence why I know what goes on inside. I moved into Architecture, as that hasn't yet gone off-shore. (Clients tend to like having face to face workshops with the Architects on major projects!)
like a see-saw. Filled with liquid it flips from one state to another, then back again.
As we send work abroad, we increase the living standards of those countries. Meaning they start buying into consumerism. Demanding more so they can buy more. Thus raising wages. And this will be true in any country with a +ve inflation rate.
Eventually it will became *more* expensive to offshore than to inshore. And so the flow will reverse.
Now you need to ask yourself, cui bono from all this ....
FWIW, offshoring *increases* demand for project/programme management - particularly of a technical nature.
In the mean time, Joe and his wife haven't managed to keep their mortgage payments up and they're now living in council-provided accommodation and neither of them are able to get a job, so they live off benefits. Joe now smokes 40 a day, and his wife's mind is slowly being chewed away by the weed she constantly smokes, thinking that it's so much healthier than cigarettes.
Oh, and the rest of us are supporting poor Joe and his wife. We feel for them, but our resentment is steadily growing worse and worse as we start to wonder why both Joe and his wife aren't out doing more basic jobs to get by - but then we know that they won't be able to ever get back on the housing ladder with those types of shitty jobs.
'We estimate that up to 750 employees will be impacted in the UK, all of whom will be supported professionally, compassionately and with assistance, where necessary, in their transition from CSC. We continue to explore other opportunities within CSC to place our UK employees. A small number of CSC's UK employees are supporting the knowledge transfer for specific roles moving to other CSC locations, and they are being additionally compensated.'
Not a negative word in sight and certainly no mention of the 'r' word. Sadly this is all to common amongst the big US corporates.
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This happened in a place I was working while we were undergoing team-building sessions. One person was asked how the session would change what he did when he got back to his desk and the response was rather blunt...
'No difference, I have to train some offshore person who barely understands English how to do my job in 3 weeks then I get pushed out of the door'
That was the last of the team building sessions...
I worked on a contract a couple of years ago at an Australian fizzy beer manufacturer. They had outsourced all their IT to a low-cost offshore shop and made all their internal IT redundant. I could spend all morning listing examples of the laughably poor "service" that was being provided.
Suffice to say, every week I was there email or internet access or both was down for at least a full work day. We had a major production server problem we were working through and at 4:59pm all the Wipro guys put their coats on and left.
The Accenture consultants and former management who had made the decision to outsource had all moved on to their next victims and the company was left in a shambles because of it. I can't believe anyone still falls for it - but apparently those in the UK who procure services don't read or research others' experiences.
I'm one of the crowd who took VR 18 months ago, since then my life could not be any better. We went through all this shite, training offshore bods etc. I thought they would've learnt their lessons in the fact that this delayed response book cooking (which is what it boils down to) only harms functionality of affected departments in the long term. I saw service levels signifacntly plumet and in-house knowledge was pared back to a operational minimum or less.
Something to highlight the cultural differences between the current on-shore VS off-shore staff. On Inidan fellow (head coder) took a dump in a urinal in the office! Cultural differences aside, if you can't work that one out then why the hell are you head of dev implementation for a sodding NHS project!
To my ex colleagues, jump ship, let these arseholes rot in their own mess, you deserve so much more, and it is out there!
P.S I know exactly which spokeswoman you have quoted, lets just say I hope she runs into the BOFH one day.
I think leaving 18 months ago was the right move. Regardless of forced redundancies, there are a large number of people actively pursuing other interests as CSC isn't the company they once thought it was.
They always say that the grass is greener until you get there, but from what I'm hearing from a number of ex CSC employees, who were either made redundant or left voluntarily, their working lives are the better for it.
As for Lorenzo.. well... I'd hate to leave my ex-colleagues in a bit of a predicament if it all went 'tits-up'. The sad thing is, I've a feeling it will, despite the hard work on the ground that has been performed by some very dedicated staff. That commitment is gone. The troops are demoralised, left picking up pieces of work outside of their original roles due to previous 'cost cutting' exercises, and ultimately finding themselves doing an entirely different job.
There are several comments on here regarding the original outsourcing to Chennai as far as coding is concerned, and I fully agree with them... it not not only takes two bites at the cherry to get things right, it's 3, 4, and 5 until there's pretty much nothing left to bite at and we start again. The issues regarding it's development are becoming folklore.... there is obvious lack of trust in their ability to deliver, given the fact they continually have to fly people from the UK to tell them how to do it properly. I don't wish to leave too much criticism at the door of India, and I could go on much further. but even back in the UK, the efforts to reduce costs, whilst having to shoe-horn the product in, are having a seemingly evident impact on delivery.
I would never advocate the use of throwing as much resource as possible into a place thinking it will get the job done. Quicker or better! But by reducing their presence and headcount on site, it's clear from discussions with ex-colleagues and NHS staff, that CSC has opened the door for a number of contracting opportunities for those it's either managed to 'release', or in fact just simply 'piss-off'. It will get to a stage where CSC is just the brand of a product supported and delivered by many different entities, with little, if any real accountability.
Having been through redundancy once or twice myself. I have the following advice to anyone reading who may be affected:
Although your (soon to be ex) employer will most likely 'inform' you of all your rights/options via their HR dept, I implore you to seek independent advice on redundancy law as they are very unlikely to give you the whole story.
Don't make it too easy for them.
That is very good advice. Whilst everyone has their own jokes about lawyers, a good employment lawyer will bring a lot more experience to the table than a well meaning but often patchily trained union rep. Also HR will generally take a lawyer far more seriously than a union rep.
Obviously everyone has to make their own choice but in my experience you should use use your lawyer to negotiate the best financial package possible. A job is just the same as any other long term relationship. If one of the parties has made it clear they don't want to be part of it anymore, in the long term you are better off out of it.
Tell me, pray, where is this mint from which CSC gets its money? Just how successful would they be without employees? It is a mutual arrangement for mutual benefit, whereby employees earn the money from customers for the firm as a whole to exist (unless it is a one man firm). Get over it.
the answer to, at least some of, this problem is for the UK to vote with it's wallet on the issue.
for Govt contracts to only be awarded to companies who staff projects in the UK and for UK businesses to follow suit or at least insist on the equivalent standards - just because you can get three bodies for the price of 1 doesn't mean they're going to be as productive (or even capable of understanding the question they're being asked - ESL adds a layer of cognitive dissonance that can see things go horribly off the rails)
the problem is ... then you have to look at some of the historical mess that is employment legislation and taxation to try and help make it competitive to onshore and then it all starts to fall down... that's hard and politicians don't like to do anything that's either hard or going to upset the people who line their pockets for short term agendas...
If you've not read this... it's interesting reading http://www.businessinsider.com/business-and-the-economy-2013-7
I read with interest an article that, once upon a time, was never out of the news, but now is rarely mentioned.
The article happened to mention in passing, that the UK's balance of payments for the last financial year was over £100 Beeellion in the RED.
Or to put it more pertinently, UK plc, is trading at a ridiculously unsustainable loss, year in year out.
All we seem to have left are service industries and as this article makes clear, not for long!
Take your redundancy money, buy some land, seeds, a shovel and a pig while you can.
Rol wrote :- "I read with interest an article that, once upon a time, was never out of the news, but now is rarely mentioned. .... that the UK's balance of payments for the last financial year was over £100 Beeellion in the RED."
That has puzzled me too. Years ago (1970's ? Showing my age), the Balance of Payments was never out of the news. The UK exported £x million and imported £x+y million. We just HAD to do something about it,. Yet when Mrs Thatcher came along the media and politicians forgot all about Balance of Payments and instead we HAD to do something about unemployment (Mrs T was "good" at unemployment). Then the unemployment topic was superseded by inflation, now we HAD to drop everything else and do something about that.
Did we give up on Balance of Payments and unemployment then? Sounds like with outsourcing abroad that we have thrown in the towel in both those areas.
Rol wrote :- "All we seem to have left are service industries and as this article makes clear, not for long!"
Mrs T loved service industries and hated manufacturing because it was "smoky and dirty"; as you might expect from a shopkeeper's daughter. So she thought we should live by services and buy our manufactured stuff from abroad, made by foreigners who were probably dirty already, preferably on the far side of the world, as far away as possible. She assumed that no-one in the world could possibly better our finance industry and grocery shops. This has remained the UK's economic model ever since.
But Mrs T never anticipated the Internet, which makes it even easier to relocate a service job abroad than a manufacturing one. It is easier to import a website design than a car.
> Mrs T <snip> hated manufacturing because it was "smoky and dirty"
I think you'll generally hated it because she should see the way the future was going. Britain doesn't have any natural resources so everything must be shipped in, a small customer base so everything must be shipped out, and workers who are generally expensive to employ (for multiple reasons). It hardly stacks up to a competitive position v.s. most of the Asian economies ...
If you were in heavy industry and looking to open a factory, and had a choice of anywhere in the world, would you honestly open a factory in Britain?
It may come as a surprise but "the government" doesn't run the factories. Companies too. Companies also vote with their feet, and so far the message is "you lose". The only influence the government has over employment is (1) taxes and (2) cost of employment. Successive governments have been trying very hard to raise both, either directly via taxes or via additional costs (Health and Safety, increased red tape, mandatory pensions, minimum wage, etc) often at the behest of the masses. You can't have both great employment and all of the welfare tick boxes you want.
Choose.
Pete H wrote :-
"I think you'll [find Mrs T] generally hated [manufacturing] because she should see the way the future was going. "
You are claiming that Mrs T had little or no hand in the transformation of the UK from a manufacturing nation into a nation of service industries?! Then you cannot have been around during her time, nor awake during her funeral "tributes" more recently.
"Britain doesn't have any natural resources so everything must be shipped in"
You'd better go back to those geography and history classes. Britain has significant deposits of coal, iron ore (what did you think the industrial revolution was based on?), China clay, non-ferrous metals, gas and oil. One day soon we will need to re-open those mines that Mrs T hated so much.
"[Britain has] workers who are generally expensive to employ (for multiple reasons) ... would you honestly open a factory in Britain?"
How are we so different from Germany and France, who did not follow the Thatcherite route and from whom we now import so many of our cars, electrical and other manufactured goods? And does not "expensive workers" apply to service workers too?
My view of the UK today is close to the 'B' Ark in Hitchikers' Guide. But we cannot just keep taking in each other's washing, or sit on our arses and "not work" because we are "expensive". We will be like a man dying of thirst because he thinks that a drink is not "good value for money" (I'm sick of that Thatcherite meme). When the rest of the world won't sell us anything because we have nothing to sell them, we are going to have to roll our sleeves up and start mining, farming and making things for ourselves again, good "value for money" or not; or just die, like one of those Sub-Saharan nations.
"Britain doesn't have any natural resources"
So you did not study geography. Britain has rather a lot, still, including mineral, agricultural, marine and geographical. But the economics, of who can fall to the bottom first, made it "uneconomical" to modernise their extraction and "economical" to have large swathes of your people unemployed or in barely subsistence work. Simultaneously, the transport, health and educational infrastructure are neglected or, even worse, deliberately degraded in the name of short term "savings". As a part of Europe, it is actually very well placed.
Somebody forgot, it is not Great Britain PLC, an imaginary entity whose inhabitants can be made redundant and so lost from the population, that can be "offshored". A country is made up of its people, rich, poor, hopeless, retired, vigorous, productive. Note that in real emergency, e.g. all out war or epidemic, business is subordinated to the needs of the country, not the other way around.
> So you did not study geography. Britain has rather a lot, still, including mineral, agricultural, marine and geographical.
Agricultural: Really? Land area per head of population we have less than Germany, France, and Spain. Much of the UK land is hilly and hard to work and/or gets less sun each year than mainland Europe. Increasingly the only way for a farm to be commercially successful is to make larger and larger flat fields which can be worked by fewer people and bigger machines. UK planning law and geography make this difficult, so instead we pay tax (cost on the rest of the economy) to pay farmers to maintain empty fields and keep the hedgerows looking nice. We may get less than France but British agriculture is still subsidised, so not exactly a shining beacon of successful economics.
Marine. I'll ignore the fact that most of European fisheries have had reducing quotas, and fishing fleets in port for more and more weeks of the year. Yep, gotcha, huge reserves. Not. Or were you talking about North Sea gas, a supply so plentiful and abundant than in the last few years we have become a net importer of gas.
Mineral. UK coal production peaked in the late 1940s, years before competition from gas, nuclear, etc. Seams became harder to work, and so cost to extract went up. Assorted Tin, Lead, and Silver mines have existed on commercial scale, but mostly exhausted by the early 1900s. Scotland had aluminium with the Baco reservoir at Blacklake to power the hydro power, similarly exhausted in the first half of the 20th century.
Geographical. Well about the only thing "geography" is good for in the absence of minerals is walking holidays. If you think you can convince the rest of Europe to come here to go walking, and thus save your economy, then good luck.
In the absence of facts in your post, I suspect I know a lot more about geography than you do. The only way to commercially extract the minerals in this nation and make them competitive is either to pay the workers less, mass-scale automation (and so not employ people anyway), or subsidize them with money from other parts of the economy. I welcome counter arguments ...
P.S. In general I agree with your arguments - in an "ideal economy" (i.e. theoretical communism) everyone works for the greater good and everything is wonderful. Apart from the fact that it doesn't work, we don't live in a communist society, and companies are competitive little buggers.
The only thing "GB PLC" can do to work out of this is to make ourselves more attractive to outside investment, either through lower wages, lower taxes, ease of doing business, or more skilled and motivated workers. The evidence to date is that this is not happening, outside of cases where we do have established expertise (specialty steel, for example). Discussion welcome - but I see nothing in your post which is actually trying to propose a solution.
> A country is made up of its people, rich, poor, hopeless, retired, vigorous, productive.
The same buggers who bitch a lot and then refuse the buy British because it costs a few quid more?
... and for the previous posts w.r.t. unions in Germany and how come they still have a manufacturing base. Unions in Germany for the most part seem to be sensible. For example, there have been multiple instances in the last few years of the unions actually talking to the companies (car companies in this case) and negotiating when a site move was threatened. Cheaper to run a factory in Hungary you say, well how about we cut wages by a few percent and work a few extra hours?
British unions still seem to have the "our way or death, never surrender to the bastards" mentality, which both kills the existing businesses (hello Royal Mail) and is a huge discouragement for any large multinational looking at the UK.
The company I work for only exists because people outsource their IT to far flung places and they suddenly realise they have a need for UK hosted and run applications and services either due to regulatory obligations (Gas Industry) or due to the poor responsiveness of their new 'cheap' Outsource partner. Cost can't just be measure in £ saved per year on the service, lost productivity by the rest of the Business is a major issue and cost. Not all Outsourcing is bad but when it takes a week to get a new employee an account and they are sitting their twiddling their thumbs it is not helpful. About a year ago a client of ours outsourced to an Indian support centre, this one clients support cases to us increased over 400% ending up in us hosting the application for them. Great for us not so much for the balance sheet I'd imagine.
No, you probably won't get a rubbish reference. Most corporates these days will only provide basic information such as confirming employment, job title and length of service when asked for a reference; discussing anything useful like your performance led to too many problems for them.
Telling them to get stuffed could affect your redundancy package though...
Telling an employer to get stuffed can not affect your redundancy package. They can't customise the redundancy package to each individual on whether they like the individual.
If telling the employer involves doing something wrong of sufficient magnitude they invoke disciplinary proceedings which then results in termination of your employment contract, then they have fired you and your exit from the company is being fired and not being made redundant and hence you won't get the redundancy package.
'Telling an employer to get stuffed can not affect your redundancy package. They can't customise the redundancy package to each individual on whether they like the individual.'
True to a point but many redundancies are handled using Compromise Agreements which are customised to individuals. I suspect telling an employer to get stuffed could certainly affect what was offered under such an agreement.
You don't understand, a compromise agreement is not redundancy, both result in termination of the employment of the individual. There are only a few ways ( as far as i know, in law) to terminate the employment contract (if you have been with an employer for more than one year)
1) Redundancy
2) Compromise agreement
3) Dismissal through disciplinary proceedings.
Different rules and process apply to each. If an employer declares redundancies and announces the start of a minimum 45 day consultation period ( recently changed from 90) and they then select a preferred person (according to the selection criteria) then they are definitely going down the route of redundancy, and if they were then trying to diddle you out of money by then changing to a compromise agreement, that could well be illegal.
Once they have selected a mechanism to terminate your employment, I think they would be on unsafe ground to change it, unless they had a good lawful reason, such as the employee doing something grossly wrong and then necessitating the invocation of the disciplinary process.
Legally they cannot give you a rubbish reference, I think at best they can decline.
CSC is so risk averse of tribunals they will give a standard reference - worked here, blah blah for anyone even if performance poor....
SO you can tell them what you want....
But with your post on "get stuffed" I expect they will be glad to see the back of you...
A large part of the reason for the 'success' of the NHS project --- where we had to give back a billion to gov.uk, FFS --- is the poor quality of the offshore product. I have seen quite a lot of offshore code and most of that was utter cack which would have shamed any decent 1st year undergrad, let alone a self-styled 'Senior Software Architect'.
The thing is, however, that the cost of fixing it comes out of a different budget and therefore it still looks cheap. This is my problem with bean counters - most of them can't count beans. For a trivial reduction in the cleaning bill, we have fewer bins per floor - so tens of people who earn 5-10x minimum wage etc, spend time going further to the bin to save a single minimum wage worker a few minutes to empty it. Penny pinching on expenses, etc, drives down morale to such an extent that the loss of productivity is significant, but the person who saved that 1% gets a bonus and fucks off to the next company.
Managers should have long-tail liability insurance, like civil engineers. The latter cannot shave 1-2% off the cost of materials for a bridge and be nowhere to be found when it fails, but these goons sail in, slash a few short term costs, generate a huge, but somewhat hidden medium or long term liability and take their bonus, and their P45, before the latter becomes apparent. In a proper profession it would be considered criminal negligence.
That would be 2012, just a bit more recent than 2004.
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2012/08/13/csc_job_cuts/
an event I remember all to well. There were about, so it was said, 600 to go with 800 VR requests and CSC went for 300 VR and 300 CR, the unions wanted an 80/20 split not 50/50. 5 Years before, we also had redundancies at the same site.
Its a false economy. You get twice as many workers for your money, but it takes 5 times as long to get anything done. Even then its usually incorrect. And as people never hang around long enough to hand anything over, or document to any useful degree, you end up with a bunch of point solutions that don't integrate well into the overall estate.
But as long the arsehole who though it would be a great idea to outsource gets a golden wank-job from his manager, then they'll always get away with it because the chaos comes much later.
I'm in the middle of such a nightmare right now. The stories I could tell you would even make Dilbert shake his head and cry.
It is interesting to read the experiences of others here with Indian off shoring, which mirror mine. The quality of the Indian developers is generally not very good, I have come across a few exceptions.
One indian guy here in the UK told me, when an employer receives a bunch of CV's from potential Indian recruits, the only thing that is accurate on that CV is the name on the top ( the rest is lies).
I work on two major projects and the bean counters are trying to off shore it, of course the company is run by accountants that just see figures on a spreadsheet, the daily rate of an indian employee, but the bean counters don't understand the complexity of the systems, the higher turnover of indian staff ( not long after they are trained up, they go, so we don't train them properly to prevent that), they need greater supervision which takes more time away (and increased cost) from the English based staff.
They will off shore my job in time, but they will regret it, but the bean counters ignore what we tell them. What do we expect? They are accountants, not techies.
Some years ago, an Australian CSC employee dared mention on Full Disclosure that he was all about it. Until that is, I brought up the fact that their "TCE" (Training Center of Excellence), in Newport News, VA had their Domain Controller on the web with no FW (yes, that includes NetBIOS, Kerberos, DNS, etc), in which their CISSP (Joke) quickly contacted me and siphoned all the info without so much as a thanks.
So long suckers, as in you SUCK!!!! Computer suck-a$$ Corp. Nothing more.
we can all help here, a little at a time . . . refuse to accept . . .
our friends from Virgin Media came calling a couple of weeks ago, decent offer I guess at ~5x speed for 50p more than I am paying (mind you took these idiots 18 years to stuff fibre down the trunking they laid!!)
my answer "when it goes wrong (usually BT in India making a mistake in remote management of the frame in the exchange**) I call an ENGINEER in UK available 24x7, he doesn't have a script, he listens to me, checks it out, agrees with me, and opens a ticket with BT - can you match that?"
erm nup
bye then
** happened 3 times so far over last 7 years
If you leave one company, and come back to the same company as a freelance consultant without having another job/contract in between the two, you are classed as being a full time person and HAVE to pay the appropriate taxes! It's a stipulation that defines whether you, in the eyes of the taxman, are essentially a full time person working for a company, or working for yourself.
If we started refusing to do businesses (e.g. CSC's clients) who offshore their back-end IT and customer services jobs things might change.
For starters - here are two:
Barclays: Telephone banking mostly operated out of India (and have proved themselves to be less that useful on several occasions now)
3: Just about all customer support roles are based in India.
There is also a trend for off-shoring in local government - many of which in London get extra money from the central government because they are a deprived area and then outsource their customer facing roles elsewhere.
I used to work for CSC. I ran several off-shore test teams in CSC Noida, Chennai and Hyderabad. The Noida people were (and probably remain) excellent. They were all recruited by CSC directly however several years before the NHS fiasco.
CSC Hyderabad and CSC Chennai are however the relicts of Covansys and iSoft, two of Mike Laphen's less-clever purchases. (Laphen was the CEO they "let go" last year as the sacrificial lamb following the Ontario Teachers' settlement.) With honorable exceptions, the quality of testing of these two organisations was amateur and largely responsible for the NHS disaster. Noida supported other CSC accounts. SInce then CSC has bought up a (very good) testing company and hopes to do do better.
Conclusion: CSC has a mixed off-shore test management record. It may have turned things around.
This is all seeming remarkably familiar. Exactly the same thing happened to me a few years back, when the small company I worked for was swallowed up by Torex, and they in turn were consumed whole by iSoft. iSoft decided that we weren't required any more... except they needed us to hang around for six months to train our replacements, who'd been flown in from India.
iSoft, if you recall, were the company that subsequently did such an amazing job developing Lorenzo which, half a decade later, is still the NHS's leading spine-compliant vaporware.
Thankfully there are still some companies out there developing real healthcare software, and actively recruiting developers to do so. CSC employees should feel free to PM me if they'd like a job. :)
Ahh outsourcing and offshoring, purely a way of making as much money as possible, at the expense of 'customer service'. Forget IT for a moment. Our local train line used to have guards, who were by in large friendly, experienced decent sorts. Then in order to save money (and smash the unions) the guards were removed, and all functions transferred to the driver, leading to no customer service whatsoever, and no information on delays or problems except maybe the odd useless PA announcement 45 minutes into something going wrong - presumably because the bloke on his own has other safety duties to deal with, and I suspect they are advised not to leave their cabs, nor have any real authority to do anything much else other than drive / fix the thing, nor training on the myriad of tickets, customer rights and so forth.
Meanwhile the trains start to be overrun with idiots and fare dodgers due to no staff presence. The result being the company introduces the muppets that are G4S to try and sort it out, who generally seem to consist of people with extremely poor command of English, a poor wage, and evidently no proper training, and they generally cause more problems than they solve. Ditto with cleaning, all outsourced to the lowest bidder.
Of course if you make a formal complaint it is all dealt with in India by someone who has a theoretical knowledge of the railway map and thats about it. Make a complaint about the attitude of the security or the poor cleanliness of the service, and all they can say is 'it is an external contractor, nothing we can do'.
Now have fares gone down to reflect this absolute worsening of service? I think not. Outsourcing and offshoring benefit a few top people wanting to cream as much profit as possible and shafts both the customer and the native workers who are out of work, not to mention the local economy.
This is how CSC works in the UK...
People who have TUPEd in have own redundancy terms and conditions, in some cases the original company they TUPE in from will cover the redundancy costs... depends on contract when signing with CSC.
People on CSC terms have a basic package of 1 week pay for each year 1.5 weeks for every year over 40 years of old.
THEN if CSC terms take "voluntary" they get an extra £2500.. not great but if your heading for the door - MOST will take it. SO ANY RATES ON VOLUNTARY VERSUS COMPULSORY IN CSC IS A FIDDLE OF STATS. HOW MANY IF NO ADDITIONAL OFFER WOULD GO TO COMPULSORY RATHER THAN VOLUNTARY.
Also pay back terms.. if a person costs a lot of money and pay back is say less than six months.. they can be declined for VR or the ratings where people get compared for compulsory they come out as higher than others.. so not in scope...
CSC in the UK is looking to get rid of management, good I expect a few of you will say.
Level 3 experienced engineers as they cost to much. CSC India has level 1 and level 2 – not many senior Level 3. So lets make them more accountable and own more and remove the expensive level 3s senior in UK.
SO if you are a senior engineer – senior/leader level – work out redundancy and pay back for CSC is say less than 10 months – start worrying. Also you may survive this… enjoy working for a company who has exited over 2000 people in 2 years by the end 2013.
As for the clients - maybe no difference... time will tell. CSC was always quoted as a "safe pair of hands" - well lets see for UK clients if CSC India can catch the ball thousands of miles away....
CSC India also employs people when no roles actually available, they are then trained up waiting for assignments (cough cough) to become available. Whilst the rest of CSC globally struggle.
Unite – UK is scared of them, but over last few years have got round them by saying voluntary.. meetings and yes were trying to keep people… blah blah blah….. pathetic. Remember the Union in
Denmark – Union smashed by CSC – and what did the UK workers at CSC do for that? Scabbed and worked in Denmark covering work – well the loyalty they showed being paid back in full.
IF anyone is going to TUPE over to CSC – good luck, you will all need it. This is a company not to work for.
For those staying.. long slow lingering death……
I do wish that Unite or someone with the gravitas would use data protection action to see who took VR and ring them, did you want to go? Also compare why some people got "compromise" offers well above terms and conditions - surely this makes the people who took terms actually unfair offers? One rule for senior managers - than the rest of the plebs.
Also payments, some of the senior managers paid way above contracted terms and conditions to leave……
As for CSC India / Czech.. CSC has offices in Vietnam (very cheap), China...... give it a few years and India will be the next to start having cuts....
I dont blame CSC, blame UNITE!!!
CSC have got away with this for sooo many years, sometimes 2 times in a year.
What are UNITE doing about it? nothing is the answer. Have they ever managed to reduce CR numbers? maybe get a better settlement? offered a rep for advice? ever sent emails to its members keeping them upto date with progress? ever spoke to a CSC employee? ever threatened CSC with action? ever taken CSC to court? bottom line, they line their pockets with our 15 quid a month and in return you get nothing.
May as well put that money aside for a rainy day, lets face it, if CSC want you out there is nothing the union will do about it.