Tag: Outsourcing

Monday Wake Up Call – May 10, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Lone Juniper, Black Canyon, Gunnison NP, CO – 2020 photo by Mattbnet

Isn’t it time that corporations paid decent wages?

After the Labor Department released its April jobs report, the US Chamber of Commerce blamed last month’s weak employment growth on the $300 weekly supplemental jobless benefit. They then urged lawmakers to eliminate the enhanced unemployment payments that were extended through early September by Biden’s American Rescue Plan.

This, from the dudes who willingly spend $300 on a lunch.

According to the US Chamber’s analysis, the extra $300 unemployment insurance (UI) benefit results in roughly one in four recipients taking home more pay than they earned working. But, if one in four recipients are making more not working than they did working, that’s not an indictment of $300 a week in UI benefits. It’s an indictment of corporations who pay less-than-living wages.

We could blame Asia for this, or we can blame our managerial and ownership class who engineered the outsourcing deals that made it possible. They built factories in Asia as an economic-production-economic-aggression platform to disintermediate American workers by sending higher wage jobs to lower wage locations in the Far East. And in many cases, the same companies who closed the American plants owned the Asian factories.

It’s sickening to hear these big business types complain that raising wages will destroy the economy! That’s the same argument which was used in the South against ending slavery (it would hurt the economy).

The US Chamber isn’t alone. South Carolina is cutting off extended unemployment benefits starting on June 30. From the SC governor:

“South Carolina’s businesses have borne the brunt of the financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Those businesses that have survived — both large and small, and including those in the hospitality, tourism, manufacturing, and healthcare sectors — now face an unprecedented labor shortage,”

South Carolina’s unemployment rate was 12.8% in April of last year. But this March, it was down to 5.1%, significantly below the 6.1% national rate. Still, these Governors (Montana has done this too) are simply acting as shills on behalf of corporations to force workers back into low wage jobs.

Many studies have shown that the employees of big box stores like Walmart and Target cannot meet their basic economic needs on the money they make at their minimum wage job. Many turn to community social services just to feed their families.

It’s not China (or other Asian countries) that are to blame. We demand ever-lower prices, so something had to give. That something was middle-class American jobs. The American public was never part of the discussion about the pros and cons of offshoring manufacturing to lower wage countries, or how that would both lower costs for goods, but also destroy American jobs.

A lot of the people who now shop at Walmart and Target lost their jobs to Mexico, China, or Bangladesh. At which point, they needed some form of welfare, and/or another part time job at Walmart-type wages. And now that they’re on Walmart wages, Walmart prices are all they can afford.

Time to wake up America! We should be asking how can it be that food banks are overwhelmed while the Dow Jones Industrial Average hits an all-time high? Simply, the stock market isn’t the whole economy. The stock market is about corporate profits, while food banks are about minimum wage jobs and unemployment.

We should be asking: Why do these corporations (the small as well as the large) persist with business models that don’t allow them to pay living wages?

We could also ask whether more red states will try to “solve” the employment problem by hurting the unemployed rather than treating the root cause: paying living wages.

To help you wake up, listen to Rag’n’Bone Man and P!nk on Rag’n’Bone Man’s new release, “Anywhere Away from Here”. We often feature music to have fun with, or to dance to. And then there are tunes like this, music for the heart and soul:

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Monday Wake Up Call – July 1, 2019

The Daily Escape:

East Inlet Pond, Pittsburgh NH – photo by Wes Lavin. The East Inlet area has one of the few remaining virgin stands of forest in the east.

How did Boeing, a company known for meticulous design and manufacturing, screw up the 737 Max so badly? Bloomberg is reporting that Boeing outsourced software development for some of the 737 Max’s software to Indian companies. There are concerns that decision may have contributed to Boeing’s two deadly crashes.

Bloomberg says that starting in 2010, Boeing began relying on Indian software engineers making as little as $9 an hour in their design program. The software engineers were supplied by the Indian software developer HCL Technologies, which now has annual sales of $8.6 billion. The coders from HCL designed to specifications set by Boeing but, according to Mark Rabin, a former Boeing software engineer:

“It was controversial because it was far less efficient than Boeing engineers just writing the code.”

It turns out that the HCL engineers were brought on at a point when Boeing was laying off its own experienced software developers. In posts on social media, an HCL engineer who helped develop and test the Max’s flight-display software, summarized his duties:

“Provided quick workaround to resolve production issue which resulted in not delaying flight test of 737-Max (delay in each flight test will cost very big amount for Boeing).”

This may be resume inflation. Boeing insists that HCL had nothing to do with the Max’s Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) software. HCL said that it:

“…has a strong and long-standing business relationship with The Boeing Company, and we take pride in the work we do for all our customers. However, HCL does not comment on specific work we do for our customers. HCL is not associated with any ongoing issues with 737 Max”.

It isn’t unusual for US companies to use outsourced talent. Prior to his dynamic blogging career, Wrongo was CEO of an outsourcing firm. Our clients were the US government, and several big tech and office product companies, including Dell, Microsoft, and Xerox.

But managing outsourcing is tricky, both for the company moving the work out-of-house, as well as for the outsourcer. Unless the parties develop detailed plans, procedures, and follow strict quality control, even top people can produce work that fails to meet design standards.

The typical jetliner has millions of lines of code. From Rick Ludtke, a former Boeing flight controls engineer:

“Boeing was doing all kinds of things, everything you can imagine, to reduce cost, including moving work from Puget Sound, because we’d become very expensive here….All that’s very understandable if you think of it from a business perspective.”

More profits over people.

In 2010, HCL and Boeing opened a “Center of Excellence” in Chennai, saying the companies would partner to create software used in flight testing. Ultimately, there is no denying that testing software plays a huge role in ascertaining safety standards. You can find further information and resources related to software testing and a guide to IEC 61508 Compliance by checking out the Parasoft website. Generally speaking, this type of testing is typical for big companies. Boeing also has a design center in Moscow. From Cynthia Cole a former Boeing engineer who headed the Engineer’s Union from 2006-2010: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“At a meeting with a chief 787 engineer in 2008, one staffer complained about sending drawings back to a team in Russia 18 times before they understood that the smoke detectors needed to be connected to the electrical system…”

A big reason for offshoring is price. Engineers in India make about $9 – $10/hour, compared with $35 to $40 for Indians in the US on an H1B visa, and higher for a US engineer. Anyone who understands offshoring knows that the cost of rework needs to be added to the apparent hourly cost, and in some cases, that can push the real price closer to $80/hour.

For the 787 Dreamliner, much of Boeing’s work was outsourced. It is well-known that the 787 entered service three years late, and billions of dollars over budget, in 2011. That was due in part to confusion caused by their outsourcing strategy.

Was another globalist lesson learned by Boeing with the 787? Not really, if the 737 Max troubles are any indication.

So this cheap labor story is another black eye for Boeing. It goes along with the Justice Department’s criminal probe, and the FAA’s continuing concern about the Max software. Boeing also has disclosed that the company didn’t inform regulators of the MCAS problems when they first learned about them, because engineers had determined it wasn’t a safety issue.

This is more of the crapification of America’s best companies as they chase lower costs. This time, people died.

Wake up Boeing! The high-value, high-risk elements in your product must be sourced at home.

If America had a real Justice Department, Boeing’s management would be in jail.

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100% of Jobs Created Since 2005 Were For Contractors or Temps

And that’s why so many Americans are scared. Neil Irwin in the NYT’s Upshot brought us the bad news that 9.4 million new jobs created during the period from 2005-2015 were temp jobs or contracting jobs.

What’s worse is that those jobs add up to more than 100% of the jobs created by the US economy during that period. That means there was an overall decline of about 400,000 in people working as employees for an American corporation during those 10 years.

The news is based on a study by labor economists Lawrence F. Katz of Harvard and Alan B. Krueger of Princeton that found that the percentage of workers in “alternative work arrangements” — including working for temporary help agencies, as independent contractors, for contract firms, or on-call — was 15.8% of total employment in 2015, up from 10.1% a decade earlier. More from Irwin:

By contrast, from 1995 to 2005, the proportion had edged up only slightly, to 10.1% from 9.3%. (The data are based on a person’s main job, so someone with a full-time position who does freelance work on the side would count as a conventional employee.)

This raises bigger questions about how employers managed to shift much the burden of providing our social safety net to workers, and about the economic and technological forces driving the shift.

The change has profound implications for social insurance. More so than in many advanced countries, corporations in the US carry a large share of the burden of providing their workers with health insurance and paid medical leave when employees are sick. US corporate employers pay for workers’ compensation insurance, and for unemployment insurance benefits for those who are laid off.

These are part of the government-sponsored safety net in other countries.

In addition, US employers help fund their workers’ retirement, formerly, through pensions, but now more commonly, through 401(k) plans. These are also part of the government safety net elsewhere.

While the Affordable Care Act has made it easier for independent contractors to get insurance, there’s little doubt that these workers are now carrying more of the financial burden of protecting themselves from misfortune than they would have shouldered with a more traditional company-employee relationship.

Perhaps most significant, the implicit contract between an employer and an employee is that there is a relatively high bar for firing employees. If the economy turns down or business slows, a contract worker is far more likely to be out of a job or out of the job faster, than a conventional employee.

This is a large factor in the growing job insecurity we see since the Great Recession.

Moreover, the study shows it was likely that companies caused this shift in terms of employment, not employees who were looking for more freedom and flexibility. If 2005 to 2015 had been a period when workers had a lot of power in the job market that might have been plausible, but it wasn’t. More from Irwin:

The unemployment rate was above 7% for nearly half of the period, from the end of 2008 to late 2013. Employers had the upper hand. That suggests it’s more likely that employers were driving the shift to these alternate arrangements.

So, companies took advantage of the weak job market since the Great Recession. In addition, improvements in technology have enabled the shift. New technology allows remote measurement of how successful each worker is, regardless of their location, and it allows the employer to monitor contractor progress, giving the company the power it needs to move to contracting, or to a temp workforce.

Making employees into contractors benefits only the employers, not the workers, and it may help explain the disconnect between the anger and insecurity we see on the 2016 presidential campaign trail, and the clearly positive employment and economic news we’ve seen each month for the past few years.

Both are true, and that has profound implications, both politically and economically, for the next 10 years. A big question for the next decade is whether the rise in temp employment was a one-time shift, or whether it will continue in the years ahead, even in a tightening labor market.

At risk is whether employer-provided social insurance that has been a backbone of the 20th-century American middle class economy will still be with us in the 21st century.

And if the shift to contracting continues,and we become more of a 1099 nation,  it is a certainty that we will see a growing populist, anti-corporate electorate.

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Union-Busting at Pantex

Never heard of Pantex? It is the nation’s only nuclear weapons plant. The full name of the company is Consolidated Nuclear Security (CNS) Pantex. CNS is a combination of a who’s who of major defense contractors, including Lockheed Martin, Bechtel, and Booz Allen Hamilton. CNS took over Pantex in March, 2014.

The company assembles, disassembles, and tests nuclear weapon components for the US military. They also manage the storage and surveillance of plutonium pits. (Plutonium Pits? In Texas?)

Pantex is a union shop, and on August 29, more than 1,100 workers went on strike over CNS Pantex’ demand for health care concessions. CNS is also seeking the elimination of defined benefit pensions for new union members. In a statement, Council President Clarence Rashada said:

Wages are not the issue. Benefits, sick leave, medical coverage, prescription drugs, those are the issues.

Since work at Pantex involves exposure to dangerous chemicals and substances, the union is pushing back hard against CNS who is also seeking to shift greater health care costs onto its retirees.

The strike is the first in 45 years at Pantex, and it comes 18 months after CNS took over.

Let’s remember that Texas is a right-to-work state, so the union left one entry gate to Pantex free of picketers to allow managers and other employees to enter the plant without any commotion.

This is right up Scott Walker’s alley. The union-busting Republican governor of Wisconsin is on the campaign trail talking about preventing federal workers from collectively bargaining, creating a national right-to-work law and eliminating the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

And the Pantex union-busting is abetted by the Department of Energy (DOE). The union blames the DOE, arguing that a DOE rule capping worker benefits has put CNS and Pantex employees in untenable positions. By rule, CNS can’t offer employee benefits that would exceed the industry average by 5%. However, the industry baseline also includes manufacturers of cell phones and car parts, so the DOE is comparing labor costs on consumer goods and nuclear weapons, probably an Apple™ to warheads comparison.

Effectively shutting down Pantex over a labor rule that only affects 10% of DOE contractors also speaks volumes about leadership and priorities at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which supervises Pantex and CNS.

The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) reports that in the run-up to the government’s award of the Pantex contract to CNS, CNS claimed it could save taxpayers over $3 billion by cutting redundancies and consolidating management, but NNSA never validated the claim. POGO quotes from a GAO report about the NNSA’s evaluation of the CNS bid:

Did not clearly or completely describe expected benefits and costs…lacked key analyses and assumptions for cost savings estimates…[and] was also missing a description of the unquantified benefits CNS management might or might not offer.

So, maybe it’s a matter of “screw the government” by contractors big and experienced enough to know better. POGO says a series of recent reports have found that NNSA is skimping on upkeep for old buildings, using obsolete fire safety equipment at weapons sites, and relying on broken security sensors to protect uranium stockpiles.

CNS also runs the Y-12 facility at Oak Ridge TN, former home of the Manhattan Project. Y-12’s primary mission today is providing secure storage of nuclear material for both the US and other governments. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists calls Y-12 a “Poster child for a dysfunctional nuclear weapons complex”, noting that although Y-12 has not produced weapons for 25 years, its annual budgets have increased by nearly 50% since 1997, to more than $1 billion a year.

POGO reported that the NNSA spent $50 million on new security systems at Y-12 but couldn’t find a way to get security guards and security sensors working in sync. The overhaul was a result of a July 2012 incident in which a then-82-year-old nun and two others broke into Y-12 to protest the production of nuclear weapons. They made it into the building where most of the US stockpile of highly enriched uranium is stored. The DOE Inspector General found:

Troubling displays of ineptitude in responding to alarms, failures to maintain critical security equipment, over reliance on compensatory measures, misunderstanding of security protocols, poor communications, and weaknesses in contract and resource management.

Follow-on security tests found that the guard force at Y-12 was cheating on evaluations.

You would think that if there’s one place where this cutting corners on safety and security would not be tolerated, it’s with nuclear weapons. CNS has demonstrated in its Y-12 and Pantex situations that competent nuclear weapons handling and security at nuclear weapons facilities should be governmental functions.

They are far too important to be left to a private contractor’s business decision.

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