Wachovia forcing employees to train Indian replacements

Date: Wednesday, April 01, 2009 6:20 AM

<<<<< JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER No. 1998 -- 4/01/2009 >>>>>

Wachovia joins the growing list of companies that pressure their American
employees to train their foreign replacements. A local TV station (WSOTV
Ch9 in Charlotte, North Carolina) did an excellent report on what is happening
at Wachovia. The television report can be viewed by going to the web page
linked below.

In the report a Wachovia employee named "Jeff" who is training his H-1B
replacement is interviewed. This is a dynamite story but so far it hasn't been
picked up by any other news agencies.

IBM and Pfizer are engaging in the same kind of un-American corporate behavior
and they are doing it on a far larger scale, and yet nobody has come forward
to publicize the horrors they are experiencing. There are other companies that
have been reported in this newsletter that are forcing their American
employees to train their replacements such as KLA-Tencor, Nielsen, HP, GE,
Dell, Agilent, and BofA, and yet the last brave American patriot to go public
with the story was Mike Emmons who worked at Siemens in 2002. If there is
outrage in this country over this type of corporate perfidy it's very hard to
find.

Reports of this nature aren't going to happen until more Americans are willing
to bring their story to the public. TV news in particular wants to interview
real people and if they can't the stories won't happen. The worker at Wachovia
was hidden in the video so he has very little to worry about in terms of
reprisals. Can't more Americans be at least brave enough to do this so we can
expose these companies? The passive suffering of American high-tech
professionals needs to end!

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

http://www.wsoctv.com/news/19047187/detail.html

Foreign Workers Could Be Replacing Charlotte Bank Employees

To comment on this story, e-mail Jim Bradley.
Posted: 3:26 pm EDT March 30, 2009
Updated: 6:18 pm EDT March 31, 2009

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- In the Queen City, thousands of people work at Wachovia and
Bank of America, but some of them are losing their jobs to foreign workers
brought in to replace them.

One Charlotte resident, who will be referred to as Jeff, said he'll lose his
job at Wachovia as soon as he finishes training his replacement -- who he says
was brought in from India at a lower salary.

"I don t think it should be a cheap option for the company to truck in
boatloads of workers and pay them a lot less than the local market would
bear," Jeff said.

Jeff is talking about "on-shoring", a process designed help companies find
specialized workers, like software engineers, if there aren't enough locally.

But Congresswoman Sue Myrick said it shouldn't be happening in Charlotte,
where she believes layoffs have produced a surplus of qualified workers for
local companies to choose from.

"They should be doing their part by hiring American workers," Myrick said.

Myrick supported a recent law that restricts banks that accepted bailout money
from hiring certain foreign workers over Americans. She thought it would
prevent on-shoring.

"And we tried to cover that when we did the bill. Unfortunately, like
everything else, there are loopholes," she said.

The loophole is that a Charlotte business can use third-party consultants to
find workers in other countries instead of hiring foreign workers directly.
Those consultants provide foreign workers their H-1B Visas, fly them to
Charlotte and pay for their apartments before sending them to work in a local
job. But because the Charlotte business is paying that contractor and not the
employee directly, it's not a violation of the bailout law.

Neither Wachovia nor Bank of America would tell Eyewitness News if they're
still using foreign workers hired by third-party vendors, but Eyewitness News
obtained internal Wachovia documents showing workers already on-shored to
Charlotte. An organizational chart shows a Wachovia work group where 12 of 22
software engineers were brought to Charlotte by a technology consulting
company called Synechron.

Jeff said it's common knowledge within Wachovia that Synechron brought all
12 of those workers from India to take Charlotte jobs.

"Within my department, it's mostly on-shored foreign resources, and the
software we built is basically being handed over to them," he said.

Synechron wouldn't comment on how many foreign workers it's brought to
Charlotte or what they're paid.

University of North Carolina at Charlotte labor economist Ron Madsen said
while federal law requires paying the "prevailing local wage" for on-shored
workers, that's often not the case.

"What I've looked at suggests that we're looking at about a 25 percent
discount between the total cost on-shore versus domestic," he said.

Still, Madsen said there aren't enough on-shored workers in Charlotte -- he
estimates fewer than 500 -- to significantly impact the local economy.

But Myrick believes the local workers they're replacing are significant to the
community. "They're part of the community, they're volunteering, they're
contributing, they're spending their money here," she said.

And in some cases, they re losing their jobs to foreign workers.

"I think it needs to be looked at," Myrick said.

She said she plans to talk with Bank of America and Wachovia to find out more
about who they're hiring.

Both Bank of America and Wachovia told Eyewitness News on Monday that they now
have policies against on-shoring workers directly. But when reporter Jim
Bradley asked about the loophole and whether they re still working with
consultants who on-shore foreign workers for local jobs, neither bank would
comment further.
Copyright 2009 by WSOCTV.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be
published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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