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The Growing Backlash of Offshoring IT Jobs

By Ben Worthen

September 01, 2003 — CIO — Longwood, Fla.—Mike Emmons’ home office doesn’t look like much: just a desk, some shelves littered with books, a couple of computers, a server, a printer and some other gadgets. But for the past 11 months, it’s been headquarters for a ferocious one-man campaign against the practice of offshore outsourcing and supplanting American workers with foreigners on temporary work visas. Emmons lost his programming job last winter when his entire IT department at Siemens Information Communication Networks (ICN) was outsourced to an Indian company. Until last year, the University of Florida graduate rarely voted; now he plans to run for Congress ("I’ll probably lose," he concedes). During the past year, Emmons has made himself an expert on labor policy. He has harassed corporate executives, gotten himself on television and is one of the main reasons that legislation reforming the L-1 visa was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives in May.

"They took my job; they took my livelihood," he says, with a crisp cadence that barely hides his anger. "You don’t do something like this to someone and expect them to turn a blind eye."

The radicalization of Mike Emmons provides a personal window on the growing backlash against the offshoring of IT jobs and importing of nonimmigrant temporary workers on H-1B or L-1 visas. (Read more about this trend in "Backlash" on Page 44.) This story could even be considered a wake-up call: CIOs beware; you might have a Mike Emmons on your staff.

Fighting Back

At age 41, Emmons is the type of programmer that companies used to dream about. Tireless and dedicated, he taught himself Cobol, 4GL, database design and Web programming as the times demanded. In January 1997 he started working as a contractor for Siemens Business Communication Systems in California, earning $90,000 a year. His office merged with the Lake Mary, Fla., division in 2000, forming Siemens ICN, in June, and Emmons and his family moved back to the state where he had grown up.

On April 19, 2002, Siemens ICN told employees it was going to outsource its IT department and that they would all be laid off once the transition was complete. While the news was bad, none of the 20 employees was devastated; the layoffs wouldn’t take place for a few months, and they figured that some of them would stick around as consultants. But in the last week of June, Siemens announced it had selected Tata Consulting Services, and by July 1 the office was filled with consultants—all from India—who would eventually take the Siemens employees’ jobs. The American workers were offered severance packages as high as $13,000 if they would train the Indians to do their jobs. (Siemens spokesman Bud Grebey says that only a handful of the company’s 70,000 U.S. employees have been affected. "Our customers are big telecommunications companies, and telecom has been hit hard," he says. "We need to do things to make the business more efficient.")

 

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