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IBM considers job shift to India

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CIOL Bureau
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NEW YORK: Two senior officials at IBM said the company needs to speed its efforts to move white-collar jobs to India and elsewhere overseas, the New York Times reported.

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In a recording of a conference call given to The New York Times by a labor union, top employee relations executives said IBM needed to make the same moves its competitors made to save money by shifting service jobs away from the United States.

The article cited Forrester Research as estimating 450,000 U.S. computer industry jobs could be transferred overseas in the next 12 years, representing eight percent of U.S. computer jobs. Executives worried on the March IBM conference call that broader unionization could arise as the trend strengthens, The Times said.

"Governments are going to find that they're fairly limited as to what they can do, so unionizing becomes an attractive option," said IBM director for global employee relations Tom Lynch on the recording. "You can see some of the fairly appealing arguments they're making as to why employees need to do some things like organizing to help fight this."

The Seattle-based Washington Alliance of Technology Workers gave the recording, which was placed on an internal company Web site, to the newspaper after receiving it from a company employee who was upset about its content, The Times said.

© Reuters

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