7 Articles Worth Reading
7 Articles Worth Reading
Date: Thursday, May 27, 2004 2:42 AM
JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER
by Rob Sanchez
May 27, 2004 - No. 1022
Article 1:
http://www.straitstimes.com/money/story/0,4386,252311,00.html?
22, 2004
Motorola adding 500 jobs in S'pore
Recruitment drive by US giant - as part of expansion plans - is among
biggest by a single firm here in past 12 months
MOBILE phone giant Motorola is halfway through an expansion that will
create as many as 1,100 blue-collar jobs in Singapore by year-end. This
will be one of the largest recruitment exercises by a single company
here in the past 12 months.
Article 2:
http://www.freep.com/money/business/offshore24e_20040524.htm
Offshore job use quickens
New figures on offshore outsourcing suggest that American companies are
sending even more white-collar jobs to low-wage countries such as
India, China and Russia than researchers originally estimated. Roughly
830,000 U.S. service-sector jobs -- ranging from telemarketers and
accountants to software engineers and chief technology officers -- will
move abroad by the end of 2005, a report this month by Forrester
Research Inc. says. But the Forrester report says a new wave of
white-collar offshoring among manufacturing companies -- automobile
parts suppliers and agribusineses, for example -- will bring the trend
to other parts of the country, particularly the Midwest.
Article 3:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2004/05/23/source_of_the_problem/
Source of the Problem
MIT students demand a new course on the hot subject of outsourcing jobs
-- and the school delivers.
Article 4:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/business/20040523-9999-1b23offshore.html
Outsourcing still growing, study finds
Public pressure does little to stem job losses
From San Diego, where telephone workers are striking partly because
they fear their jobs may be sent offshore, to Sacramento, where
legislators have been pushing new regulations on foreign work, there is
growing public pressure to staunch the flow of jobs overseas. Despite
the growing pressure, recent statistics show that U.S. companies are
exporting jobs at an even faster pace than they have in the past.
Article 5:
http://biz.yahoo.com/fo/040524/7f65dacb398e25ca31ca1637336a59db_2.html
Forbes Magazine
Preying On Human Cargo
The millions of illegal aliens working in the U.S. don't just happen
into jobs. Middlemen make it their very lucrative business to put them
there.
Article 6:
http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/story/9409782p-10334094c.html
Tax break would help woo filmmakers home
State's leaders team up in a fight to bring more film industry jobs
back from foreign locations.
Each week, dozens of "made for TV" movies are aired over American cable
networks that show Americans at play, at war, in love, committing crime
and fighting it. But the one trait common to these movies is that fewer
and fewer of them are being made in America. They are what the film
industry calls "runaway movies," and what they are running to is cheap
foreign labor and cheap foreign sets.
Article 7:
http://www.pressherald.com/business/stories/040520visas.shtml
8 Cape Cod firms sue over visa cap
Eight Cape Cod businesses, in an effort to meet their looming summer
employment needs, sued federal and state agencies in an effort to
increase the number of visas granted for temporary foreign workers. A
cap on visas has been met, sending tourism businesses on a scramble to
find workers.
http://www.straitstimes.com/money/story/0,4386,252311,00.html?
MAY 22, 2004
Motorola adding 500 jobs in S'pore
Recruitment drive by US giant - as part of expansion plans - is among
biggest by a single firm here in past 12 months
By Bryan Lee
MOBILE phone giant Motorola is halfway through an expansion that will
create as many as 1,100 blue-collar jobs in Singapore by year-end.
It is looking to employ up to 500 contract workers by the end of this
year, after already adding 600 such contractors to its factory
workforce over the past six months.
This will be one of the largest recruitment exercises by a single
company here in the past 12 months.
The positions, which require just Secondary 2-level education, will
mostly be for mobile phone assembly and test work.
The move by the United States-based company - the world's
second-largest mobile phone maker by sales volume after Nokia - bucks a
recent trend by multinational corporations (MNCs) in Singapore.
Lately, MNC investments have generally created fewer jobs per dollar,
and rarely in labour-intensive manufacturing operations.
Companies have been moving production activities to countries such as
China and India, lured by lower labour and land costs.
This has left Singapore to compete for investments in higher-level
operations, such as research and development (R&D), which often employ
fewer people while requiring more skills.
Motorola is itself heavily invested in China. It has a sprawling campus
in Tianjin employing 10,000 workers, with extensive manufacturing
capacity for phones, networking equipment and walkie-talkies.
Still, it sees reason to beef up its production lines here.
Singapore president Jeffrey Tan said in an interview: 'Cost is not the
only factor. Singapore continues to remain viable in the manufacturing
scene.'
Singapore's infrastructure and its logistics hub play an important
role. Motorola Singapore has also developed core competencies, enabling
it to manufacture different products and customise them for different
markets.
'Coupled with the presence of a strong R&D team, we are able to move a
product from the lab into the market in a quick turnaround,' Mr Tan
said.
And while production of printed circuit boards for mobile phones is
highly automated, back-end assembly and test work remains fairly
labour-intensive.
On a single production line, for example, Motorola needs one worker to
test the screen, another to test the key pad and yet another to test
the camera, and so on.
'We still find it cost-effective to do this manually. As new products
come in, we need our production lines to be flexible in switching
between models quickly and efficiently. We just need to do a five- to
10-minute briefing and the workers can start immediately on the new
lines,' said Mr Tan.
The company has been scrambling to ramp up production in Singapore to
cope with rising demand, thanks to a recovering global economy and a
wave of new handset models that has revitalised its product range.
In the first quarter of this year, global shipments for Motorola's
handsets surged 51 per cent from a year ago to 25.3 million.
'We are in a growth phase,' said Mr Tan. 'We've been adding staff over
the last six months, bringing the total number of factory operators to
1,600.'
Motorola declined to reveal how much it has invested in Singapore since
it first set up here in 1973. It has 2,300 employees here, including
600 permanent operators at the factory. The other 1,000 operators at
the factory are contract staff.
If sales continue to boom, 'we still have room to increase the total
number of operators at our factory by another 500 to over 2,000', Mr
Tan said.
The new staff will be employed on a contract basis as it gives the
company greater flexibility, he added.
Motorola has also leased an additional 80,000 sq ft at a building next
to its Ang Mo Kio plant for the expansion.
It also wants to increase its portfolio of R&D activities here this
year, Mr Tan said. Singapore is already its global design headquarters
for mass market phones, such as the recently launched C650. Motorola
employs over 400 R&D engineers here.
http://www.freep.com/money/business/offshore24e_20040524.htm
Offshore job use quickens
BY RACHEL KONRAD
ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 24, 2004
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- New figures on offshore outsourcing suggest that
American companies are sending even more white-collar jobs to low-wage
countries such as India, China and Russia than researchers originally
estimated.
Roughly 830,000 U.S. service-sector jobs -- ranging from telemarketers
and accountants to software engineers and chief technology officers --
will move abroad by the end of 2005, a report this month by Forrester
Research Inc. says.
The firm, based in Cambridge, Mass., projected in 2002 that 588,000
jobs would move overseas by the end of next year.
Forrester also increased its long-term job loss prediction, estimating
that 3.4 million jobs will leave the United States by 2015. The company
originally predicted long-term job loss of 3.3 million positions -- a
figure that members of Congress and labor activists said was cause for
great alarm. Researchers said the short-term losses surged as companies
began experimenting, but the long-term numbers will likely moderate.
Forrester analysts boosted their short-term job loss expectations by 40
percent, based on updated job data provided by the U.S. Department of
Labor.
Lead researcher John C. McCarthy said widespread publicity over the
cost savings associated with offshoring -- increasingly a topic of
partisan debate in the presidential campaign -- might have hastened the
trend. The average computer programmer in India is paid roughly $10 per
hour, compared to more than $60 per hour for the average American.
"People were reading about offshoring at their breakfast table,"
McCarthy said. "That made a lot of (chief information officers) who
were unaware of the cost savings consider moving in that direction."
Executives in the financial services and technology industries have
embraced the trend. Tech hubs such as Silicon Valley and Seattle have
higher unemployment than the nation at large.
But the Forrester report says a new wave of white-collar offshoring
among manufacturing companies -- automobile parts suppliers and
agribusineses, for example -- will bring the trend to other parts of
the country, particularly the Midwest. The region is reeling from
offshoring of blue-collar jobs to low-wage countries in eastern Europe,
Latin America and China. It's unclear what impact the loss of
accountants, programmers and business analysts would have in places
Detroit, Chicago and Cincinnati, McCarthy said.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2004/05/23/source_of_the_problem/
Source of the Problem
MIT students demand a new course on the hot subject of outsourcing jobs
-- and the school delivers.
By Laura Pappano, Globe Staff | May 23, 2004
SATURDAY, 10 A.M. Former US labor secretary and one-time
Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate Robert Reich is facing some 50
MIT Sloan School of Management students seated in swivel chairs. Who,
he wants to know, has patronized Wal-Mart? Ordered books from
Amazon.com? Traveled on a cut-rate airline?
Hands shoot up.
"How many of you are grief-stricken?" prods Reich, casually dressed in
worn brown cords, brown sweater, and sensible soft-soled shoes.
The hands hide. He has them.
"We have a split brain about this," says Reich. "We want the best deal,
but then the other part of us says, 'What about the social justice
costs of pursuing the best deals?'"
Reich is one of four guest speakers this day for the Sloan School's hot
new course on outsourcing. Taught by former dean and management guru
Lester Thurow and professor Amar Gupta, the course was created in
response to student demand. It aims, says Thurow, "to make students
more knowledgeable about a big contentious issue they will have to deal
with as managers." Outsourcing as an academic subject is so new that
there are few available readings, which has Thurow and Gupta instead
structuring the biweekly three-hour class as a series of guest
lectures, including hearing from entrepreneurs engaged in outsourcing.
Another guest speaker this day, Raj Malhotra, is CEO and president of
Spryance, a Maynard company that takes dictations required of doctors
after every patient visit and transcribes them into written records.
Malhotra says a shortage of transcriptionists here and an abundance of
well-educated men and women abroad -- including doctors and pharmacists
-- who want home-based work makes outsourcing ideal.
"Home in Bombay is no different than home in Boston," Malhotra
announces to the class during his slide presentation.
But when Americans fret about jobs, geographical distinctions do
matter, which is why outsourcing is a highly charged election issue.
Even so, Gupta and Thurow avoid politics, insisting that the class be a
forum for academic exploration. "We are not here to advocate any
opinions, pro or anti," Gupta says.
The approach resonates with Mira Sahney, 29, of Seattle, taking the
class precisely to bypass emotions and understand a critical subject.
Outsourcing, she says, "is obviously going to affect my own personal
life. Business is just global."
Classmate Rajeev Dubey, 32, of Lucknow, India, says the course has made
him view outsourcing as a means for companies to operate efficiently in
a global economy. "If you find a better price in Wal-Mart than Kmart,
you go there," says Dubey. "It's based on value. If you find more value
doing it offshore, you do it."
Reich's shopping questions feed into the outsourcing debate: Americans
want stuff cheap even while fretting about sending jobs overseas. But
Reich insists that public worries are a gut response to a slow economic
recovery. Jobs, he says, are not finite, and outsourcing can be used to
bring high-wage jobs here. But, he insists, it's critical to help
workers adapt skills and change jobs, providing training and such tools
as transferable health care benefits. We feel vulnerable, he says,
because we lack flexibility.
"I sympathize with many of the fears people have about outsourcing, but
it's an overexaggeration," says Reich. "A year from now we will not
hear about outsourcing. This is business-cycle related."
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/business/20040523-9999-1b23offshore.html
Outsourcing still growing, study finds
Public pressure does little to stem job losses
By Dean Calbreath
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
May 23, 2004
From San Diego, where telephone workers are striking partly because
they fear their jobs may be sent offshore, to Sacramento, where
legislators have been pushing new regulations on foreign work, there is
growing public pressure to staunch the flow of jobs overseas.
Despite the growing pressure, recent statistics show that U.S.
companies are exporting jobs at an even faster pace than they have in
the past.
By the end of next year, 830,000 service jobs, representing $36.7
billion in wages and 1.6 percent of U.S. employment in the sector, will
have moved offshore, according to a study released last week by
Forrester Research, a major corporate study center.
Those figures, which do not include manufacturing jobs, reflect a 40
percent jump from Forrester's previous projection made just 18
months ago that 588,000 service jobs would be exported by the end
of next year.
Forrester forecasts that in the next 10 years, 3.4 million service jobs
will have shifted overseas, representing 6.4 percent of employment in
the sector and $151.2 billion in lost wages.
Forrester, which based its conclusions on more than 1,800
questionnaires, 500 interviews and 300 briefings with businesses in the
United States and India, projects that the range of jobs moving
offshore also will change in the next decade, broadening far beyond
today's outsourcing, which is led by call centers and technology
services.
In the next few years, Forrester predicts, companies increasingly will
export back-office jobs such as accounting, claims and loan processing,
as well as high-tech research and development and clinical trials
processing for drug companies.
Forrester analyst John McCarthy, who led the team that compiled the
report, said the growth of offshoring is leading to a backlash in the
American work force.
"Job losses (caused by offshoring) will remain a political lightning
rod," he said. McCarthy said the potential for bad public relations
will force many companies to hide their offshoring. Some companies, he
said, have already banned the use of the words "offshoring" or
"outsourcing" in their corporate statements.
The issue of offshoring increasingly has shown up in labor disputes.
During the current strike by SBC telephone workers, for instance, many
employees say one reason for the walkout is they believe they need more
job-security protections, since they fear their jobs are in danger of
moving overseas.
"The biggest thing is to get people to realize that taking jobs out of
the U.S. is a bad thing not just for us but for everybody," said O.T.
Thomas, an SBC customer service representative.
But it's not just a labor issue. A poll last week showed that corporate
shareholders are increasingly becoming worried about offshoring.
Two out of three U.S. investors polled this month said they think
outsourcing is "bad for the economy," according to the UBS/Gallup Index
of Investor Optimism survey.
Nearly a quarter of the respondents in the survey adults with at
least $10,000 of investable assets said they were worried that they
or someone in their household might lose a job because of offshoring.
Vast majorities of the respondents thought that legislation could help
slow the flow of outsourcing:
76 percent believed that requiring all government-related jobs to be
performed within the United States would be effective;
72 percent thought tax penalties for companies that move jobs out of
the country would work;
67 percent said tariffs on goods produced overseas would work.
A dozen bills on outsourcing are now floating through Sacramento. One
would block companies from using foreign work sites to fulfill state
contracts. Another would require all privacy-related work to be
performed within the United States. A third would require all companies
doing business within California to reveal how many workers they employ
overseas.
Despite public support for such restrictions, however, corporate
analysts doubt that any major new regulations will be passed
especially on the national level thanks to the clout of corporate
lobbyists.
"Initially, businesses and their lobbyists were caught flat-footed, as
politicians, led by Sens. John Edwards and John Kerry turned up the
rhetoric on offshore services," said McCarthy, the Forrester analyst.
"However, groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Information
Technology Association of America are mobilizing to shift the debate
and blunt calls for regulation."
So far, the Bush administration's chief response to the wave of
outsourcing is to spend more money on vocational training, including $4
billion earmarked through the Workforce Investment Act.
President Bush told a conference on job training in Arkansas last month
that there are plenty of jobs available for displaced workers. "It's
just some people are used to working in different kinds of fields," he
said.
But critics say the jobs Bush wants to train workers for computer,
technical and math-related positions are those most susceptible to
being exported to foreign markets.
"This White House is clearly out of touch with America's work force,"
said Dawn Teo, public outreach director of Rescue American Jobs, a
labor-backed organization that wants to slow outsourcing. "They're
retraining workers who have held high-wage jobs to take low-wage jobs.
And some of the workers are being trained to take jobs that may not
even exist."
Ironically, some of the people who are being told they need to be
retrained to compete with workers overseas are the people who trained
the foreign workers how to do the jobs in the first place.
Jonathan Kisner, a software engineer in Fallbrook with 20 years
experience in the industry, notes that he lost his job at Motorola in
mid-2001 shortly after his manager asked him to fly to Taiwan and China
to train engineers in the work that he and other members of his
engineering group had been doing.
"In about a year, Motorola laid off 60,000 people in this country and
moved some, if not most of those jobs to China," he said. "I found
another software engineering job quickly but for less money. About a
year later, that company began to lay people off as projects got
canceled, and I got hit again."
Kisner was unemployed for more than a year and a half and did not
settle into a permanent job until late last year. He thinks some type
of government regulation is needed "to prevent companies from hurting
this country more than they already have."
Valerie Chau, a one-time software engineer in Rancho Peqasquitos who
works part-time as a mathematics teacher, said she bristles when she
hears people saying that retraining will provide a fix for offshoring.
Chau, whose software job was shipped to India in 1999, was told by
career counselors that she needed retraining, even though she had a
master's degree in finance, an MBA with an emphasis in mathematics and
fluency in several computer languages.
Despite taking a series of college classes to brush up her programming
skills, she says she could not vie against the competition from China,
Russia or Bulgaria. Instead, she took a part-time job teaching math.
After her experience, she questions where her math students will find
jobs in today's market. "But learning math is better than not having an
education at all," she said.
Dean Calbreath: (619) 293-1891; dean.calbreath@uniontrib.com
http://biz.yahoo.com/fo/040524/7f65dacb398e25ca31ca1637336a59db_2.html
Forbes Magazine
Preying On Human Cargo
Monday May 24, 1:25 pm ET
By Michael Maiello Susan Kitchens
The millions of illegal aliens working in the U.S. don't just happen
into jobs. Middlemen make it their very lucrative business to put them
there.
By the Numbers
$7 billion What human smugglers around the world pull in every year.
10,000 The annual number of people from China's Fujian province who
move to New York City illegally.
$1 million The per-month take in bribes by a border patrol agent at the
San Ysidro port in San Diego, for helping 1,000 illegals sneak into the
United States.
4% The fraction of illegal aliens apprehended crossing into Texas and
prosecuted.
$9,000 What a coyote can earn in 2 days leading 15 people.
Victor Zavala Sr. was in a panic. His sons and daughter-in-law had just
been arrested by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's immigration
division, part of a sweep last October of 250 illegals who held
cleaning jobs at Wal-Mart stores in 21 states. Zavala waited on a call
from Kenneth Clancy, who had put him and his family to work at the
giant retailer in Old Bridge, Piscataway and Toms River, N.J., and
would get them out of this horrendous scrape. Clancy did phone, says
Zavala. But it was to tell him to put together a new crew to clean that
evening.
The case has focused on Wal-Mart. A federal grand jury is trying to
determine how much executives knew about illegal aliens working in
their stores. What has grabbed little attention is a more pervasive
problem: the thousands of middlemen, sometimes illegals themselves, who
entice foreigners to come to America, hook them up with menial jobs and
take a substantial cut of their livelihoods, often for years, as the
immigrants work off their debts. Companies like Wal-Mart rarely deal
directly with such illegals--or with the shadowy contractors who hook
them up with service companies that offer cheap labor to corporate
America. (Wal-Mart says that these decisions were made by individual
store managers and that it has now given up outsourcing its cleaning
crews.)
In the U.S. there are an estimated 9 million to 11 million illegal
immigrants from all over the world, according to a Central Intelligence
Agency analysis of the 2000 Census. Many arrived on tourist visas and
simply stayed; others came smuggled in boats or hustled across the
border with Mexico. They're the very people President Bush had in mind
when, back in January, he outlined a plan to give this population legal
status as temporary workers, but not full citizenship--a plan quietly
shelved after noisy opposition from members of his own party.
Most undocumented laborers melt into society. They generally lead
anonymous lives, doing faceless jobs--janitorial work during the
midnight-to-8 a.m. shift at, say, a Target store or a Dunkin' Donuts;
making beds at a Best Western or Clarion hotel; washing dishes in a
Chinese restaurant. They are prey for the middlemen who sometimes
arrange their passage, find them cramped living quarters and low-paying
jobs and feed off their wages, siphoning off a large fraction for
themselves.
The system thrives partly because traffickers in human cargo are highly
mobile, relying on little more than a phone and an occasional office
front. They can set up shop one day, disappear the next and reappear in
an entirely new incarnation days later. They leave few traces or
paperwork, and deal mostly in cash. Many of them emerged during the
economic boom years of the 1990s, thanks to the plethora of low-wage
jobs, says David Kyle, a sociology professor at the University of
California at Davis and editor of the book Global Human Smuggling.
These underground entrepreneurs rarely come under federal scrutiny.
Authorities were seldom interested before Sept. 11. These days, the
Immigration & Naturalization Service (now known as Immigration &
Customs Enforcement) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are
focusing on smoking out terrorists. There are exceptions. A federal
indictment for trafficking in illegal aliens still stands against Petr
Pospisil, a Czech-born illegal immigrant who ran a job-placement ring
for mostly other eastern Europeans, and showed monthly profits of
$100,000. Then there is Cheng Chui Ping, known as Sister Ping, who is
cooling her heels in a cell in Brooklyn, N.Y. and facing charges of
smuggling illegal aliens into the U.S. Sister Ping is believed to have
earned more than $30 million over 15 years of shuttling thousands of
people from her native Fujian province in southern China to the
promised land, where she exacted extraordinary payments through a
series of New York gangs. (Pin g has pleaded not guilty to all
charges.) Extradited from Hong Kong last summer, she is due to appear
in court this summer.
The exploitation of illegal immigrants is a racket that takes on myriad
forms, according to region and tradition. The China connection relies
on human smugglers, who have feet in both continents and maintain
control of their clients through agents in the U.S. Hispanics have a
well-worn path into the U.S.--so-called coyotes conduct them across the
border, a $500 million-a-year business--and rely on other
intermediaries once they're in the States to find housing and jobs. The
situation for eastern Europeans is something of a combination of the
two: Agents there frequently place ads in the dailies of Prague,
Budapest and Sofia, say, and hook up illegals--who must find their own
way to America--with situations after they arrive.
Mexico/Latin America
Much of the Zavala family came to the U.S. from Sonora, Mexico after
hiring a coyote who led them on a daylong hike through the Arizona
desert in October 2000. Once they arrived at a Phoenix safe house the
Zavalas phoned a cousin in Red Bank, N.J., whom they identify only as
El Caballito ("The Rocking Horse"), who wired $4,000 to their coyote.
The two younger Zavalas, Victor Jr., 28, and Julio, 24, flew to Red
Bank and set to work as part of a cleaning crew at a Wal-Mart in
Manahawkin, 50 miles to the south.
Rocking Horse hadn't told the Zavalas everything about the Wal-Mart
job. At the Manahawkin store, the younger Zavala met a Colombian
national named Roberto who told him he worked for Facilities Solutions,
a janitorial contracting firm run by Kenneth Clancy, 53, and his wife,
Bonita, 51. Get together with the Clancys, Roberto suggested, and you
can become the head of a cleaning crew at a different store, making a
lot more money. The Zavalas met with Clancy and struck a deal. "No
applications, no Social Security numbers--it was great," the elder
Zavala recalls.
Crew chiefs make $500 a week, compared with $350 for most crew members.
That wasn't the only advantage. Under Clancy's system, crew chiefs
could pick their own crews, so the entire Zavala family could soon be
put to work. Soon Zavala padre y hijos were running separate cleaning
squads at Wal-Mart stores in Old Bridge, Piscataway and Toms River.
Victor Jr. hired his wife and his brother Arturo to work on his crew.
And what were the Clancys making? They aren't talking. According to a
government forfeiture complaint against a different contractor who
hired illegal workers for Wal-Mart Stores in Pennsylvania back in 2000,
cleaning contracts are worth about $100,000 a year, suggesting that
Clancy's five operations generated revenues of $500,000 annually. Based
on average salaries, wages for a four-person cleaning crew handling one
store come to $83,000 a year, leaving Clancy with an estimated profit
of $84,000 a year from his Wal-Mart contracts after paying wages.
Clancy's profits might have been higher--Wal-Mart says that it paid
$260,000 a year for such services at some of its stores. According to
the elder Zavala, Clancy usually paid with checks, but didn't scruple
about workers' compensation insurance, payroll taxes or overtime.
Clancy certainly had deals with firms other than Wal-Mart. In 2002 he
held a maintenance contract for the municipal building of Millstone
Township, N.J., wh ere he also served as chairman of the town planning
board.
Clancy apparently had advance warning of the raid on Wal-Mart.
According to the first complaint in a lawsuit filed against the chain
by its illegal workers, Clancy received word in August 2003 from a
Wal-Mart manager that the government might soon inquire about the
immigration status of its janitors. Clancy, the suit alleges, then
distanced himself from the potential problem by hiring Felipe Soto's
JWM Commercial Cleaning to manage the Zavalas and then Raul Tijerino's
RT Cleaning to manage Soto and handle weekly payments to the laborers.
Zavala the elder says he grew nervous after Soto and Tijerino told the
family they needed to buy fake identification documents in New York.
Clancy, Zavala alleges, even offered to drive him to the city in order
to procure papers, but Victor Sr. refused, fearing that he'd compound
any trouble he might get into.
After the raids, Zavala had what he thought was his last contact with
Clancy, who at one time made weekly visits to his rented home. He
gathered a new crew, as Clancy asked, after his family members had been
arrested (Zavala escaped detention because he'd taken the night off). A
few days later, Zavala says, he met with Felipe Soto to pick up the
family's final paychecks. He called Clancy numerous times after that,
asking his old boss for legal help in order to keep his family members
from being deported. Clancy, he says, never returned the calls.
Zavala's relatives are out of jail, and their deportations have been
stayed for a year. Meantime the family has supported itself by finding
day labor--raking leaves, cutting grass and the like. Victor Jr. is the
lead plaintiff in a class action that holds Wal-Mart responsible for
conspiring to hire illegal immigrants, denying them benefits and
overtime and creating hazardous working conditions. Desperate for work
earlier this year , Victor Sr. called a number for a cleaning job with
ShopRite. Who answered the phone? Zavala says it was Ken Clancy.
Asia
The Yeung Sun restaurant at 47 East Broadway, in New York City's
Chinatown, is indistinguishable from thousands of such eateries. That's
just as Sister Ping, 54, wanted it: Anything more high-profile, and
it's doubtful the grandmotherly woman could have carried out her
businesses for so long. A federal indictment alleges that she ran a
restaurant and travel agency, smuggled workers from China and operated
a money transfer service. The "mother of all snakeheads," as she is
known, got very rich as the organizer of trips in which hundreds of
undocumented Chinese immigrants entered this country, according to
court documents. Some 25,000 people make the trip by boat to the U.S.
from Fujian province every year, each illegal paying an average $60,000
for the illicit transit, says Ko-Lin Chin, a criminal justice professor
at Rutgers University. But the job could not have been done without the
help of subcontractors--often gang members--on the ground in New York
and other cities in America.
The subs act as protectors of the snakehead's newly landed human cargo,
doubling as guides and debt collectors. Often they are thugs--the
Vietnamese Born to Kill gang has frequently been tapped, says Peter
Kwong, professor of Asian-American studies at Hunter College in New
York City. Typically, "they only have to work a few times a month,"
earning $2,000 to $3,000 per immigrant, reports Steven Wong, head of
Lin Ze Xu Foundation USA, a Chinatown-based immigrant advocacy group.
Newly arrived illegals are herded into what veterans call "hell
houses." They're not allowed to leave until they pay off the snakehead.
For those who haven't brought the cash with them, it means a phone call
or two to relatives back in China who must raise the money and send it
immediately. Toughs do everything they can to get paid--threatening the
relatives of illegals back home and subjecting the migrants to torture
and interest rates of up to 5% a month. Immigrant rights activist Wong,
a former investigator with the U.S. Coast Guard who participated in
raids, recalls seeing people with burns from cigarettes. Some had
bloody bruises on their heads, apparently from hammer blows. But Wong
says these are extreme cases; 85% of illegals in these circumstances
pay up within three weeks, then spend years at below-minimum-wage jobs
as dishwashers and sweatshop workers to reimburse their relatives.
Chinese gangs sometimes participate in a cat-and-mouse game of
transporting illegals once they get to this country. One notorious
group, called the Fuk Ching, has admitted to the FBI that it has taken
part in extortion, robbery, gambling and the smuggling of undocumented
aliens. According to a complaint filed in support of a warrant for her
arrest, Sister Ping, in a $3.8 million smuggling deal, paid 20 or so
members of the Fuk Ching as much as $450,000 to carry human cargo from
Boston to New York. The deal was arranged in a ramshackle apartment
building on the edge of New York City's Chinatown and the Lower East
Side, when a high-ranking member of the Fuk Ching, who cooperated with
the FBI, met with Wang Kong Fu, a smuggling accomplice of Sister Ping.
Here, according to the complaint, is how it went down. A fellow gang
member traveled to Pensacola, Fla., and helped two Vietnamese
co-conspirators buy an 80-foot-long boat. On a 16-hour journey, they
sailed from Florida to Massachusetts, where they met another boat that
was carrying 130 or so illegal aliens. The immigrants had each agreed
to pay $29,500 upon arrival in the U.S. The gang member and the
Vietnamese conspirators ordered the aliens to jump from one boat into
the other. But when too many began jumping at once, the Fuk Ching
member brandished a .38-caliber handgun and fired into the air to
settle them down. When he ordered them to go below and hide in the
hull, some resisted--until he threatened to kill them. Once onshore
near Boston, several Fuk Ching members waited with three U-Haul trucks.
Gang members drove the immigrant-loaded trucks to the Yoan Wah
warehouse, at 365 Ten Eyck Street, in Brooklyn. Also as part of the
deal, the Fuk Ching members guarded the im migrants, whom they later
divided up, delivering some by van in front of the Sun Sing theater at
87 East Broadway in Chinatown. Fifteen who were supposed to be
delivered to an apartment in Woodside, Queens couldn't be packed in
there, so they were held hostage for four days in an undisclosed
location.
As Sister Ping sits in jail the Fuk Ching and other gangs are still
active in Chinatown. Often illegals themselves, these young men in
their late 20s and 30s have become slightly lower-profile these days.
"They're into big money," says Detective David Yat from New York City's
5th precinct in lower Manhattan. "So they stay more hidden."
Eastern Europe
Petr Pospisil built up a tidy business as a middleman, according to the
federal indictment against him. But his real business was in recruiting
people from his native Czech Republic on the promise of great jobs in
America, which he himself would provide. He cut the paychecks, but
neglected to tell his recruits that he took as much as $2 an hour from
every worker he placed.
How the undocumented illegals got here was their business. Many were
lured by ads placed by "travel agents" in newspapers like Annonce,
which promised contacts and employment in the U.S. Such agents helped
them get tourist visas. Some legitimate Czech agencies work as
freelancers for employment firms in the U.S., taking a flat fee of
about $1,000 a head, says Richard Krpac, the Czech Republic's chief
consul in Washington, D.C.
But many workers were met by Pospisil's partners after they landed in
the States. According to the indictment against him, when Monika
Zbrankova arrived in Miami in October 1999 she called Pospisil, who
told her to take a bus to St. Augustine, Fla. where, within days of her
arrival, she began work as a maid at the Clarion Hotel. Between October
1999 and June 2000 she did jobs at six companies, including a Best
Western motel and Dunkin' Donuts. (All three companies insist
contracting decisions are made by individual franchisees.) While these
companies contracted to pay $5 to $8 an hour, Pospisil handled her
wages, typically keeping $1.50 to $2 an hour for himself.
That didn't include the deductions he made for rent and utilities for
the cramped quarters he provided. "You might find yourself sharing a
two-bedroom apartment with 16 people," says Krpac of the Czech
consulate. Pospisil operated under a variety of names--Gulf Coast
Cleaning, South Proffi Cleaning and Emerald Coast Cleaning among them.
He kept overhead low: He didn't need to own or maintain equipment
(supplied by the businesses who bought his labor) and, according to the
indictment, he falsified documents that supported his contention that
he offered liability and workers' compensation insurance for his
employees. None of the restaurants or hotel chains he contracted with
inquired further. Nor, apparently, did they bat an eye at the
typo-ridden, ungrammatical bids he offered. His prices were right, and
his workers earned a reputation for reliability. Some were so fluent in
English, says FBI agent Terry M. Wetmore, that they were assigned to
the front desks of various hote ls.
That the FBI got wind of Pospisil's operations was a total fluke. In
1999 a bank manager in Jacksonville Beach, Fla. called the agency to
complain about large numbers of Czech workers showing up to cash their
paychecks. Complaints from other banks kept rolling in through the fall
of 2000. By the time Pospisil was indicted a year later he had
apparently disappeared, and couldn't be arrested. One bank manager
fingered an American, Matthew McKinney, who had asked that the
business' $120,000 account be frozen.
Wetmore started grilling McKinney, who had allowed his name to be used
on some of Pospisil's checking and cell phone accounts and rental
agreements. After months of interrogation McKinney revealed that
Pospisil had been murdered around July 30, 2000 by his business
partner, a man named Vladimir Janko, who also went under the alias
Larry Young and had been indicted alongside Pospisil. McKinney, who
says he was with Janko when the murder occurred, brought the FBI to
Pospisil's body, buried in Seminole, Ala. near the trailer of
McKinney's brother. McKinney ended up charged with the murder.
Maintaining his innocence throughout the trial, McKinney was convicted
in February and is serving 21 years in a Florida prison. As for Janko
and two other partners, they disappeared after the indictments with $1
million. They're all back in the Czech Republic, where the U.S.
government says it is pursuing their extradition.
Still, most middlemen don't have to pay much for their crimes. Miriam
Klackova Facemyer was originally recruited from the Slovak Republic in
1997 and worked as a low-wage janitor cleaning Wal-Mart and Target
stores in the Richmond, Va. region. But her recruiters quickly saw
better uses for the multilingual, quick-witted and ambitious worker.
First they put her in charge of the work crews. Then, thanks to her
family connections in the U.S., she was asked to provide temporary
housing to new illegals. Finally she took charge of cleaning crews and
four stores and began recruiting her own workers to fuel a growing
cleaning business. At one point, her contracts were worth as much as
$180,000 a year, involving 110 undocumented workers. She also extracted
$300 from each worker for phony driver's licenses and Social Security
cards. Pleading guilty to recruiting, harboring and employing illegals,
Facemyer served just three months in prison. Her attorney, John B.
Gately, says she was allowed to keep her six-figure earnings and to
remain in the country. She currently resides in Florida.
The middleman business is going to be hard to stop--or even to slow
down
http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/story/9409782p-10334094c.html
Tax break would help woo filmmakers home
State's leaders team up in a fight to bring more film industry jobs
back from foreign locations.
By David Whitney -- Bee Washington Bureau
Published 2:15 am PDT Monday, May 24, 2004
WASHINGTON - Each week, dozens of "made for TV" movies are aired over
American cable networks that show Americans at play, at war, in love,
committing crime and fighting it.
But the one trait common to these movies is that fewer and fewer of
them are being made in America. They are what the film industry calls
"runaway movies," and what they are running to is cheap foreign labor
and cheap foreign sets.
Spurred in part by the personal lobbying of California's leading
actor, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the U.S. Senate has taken a first
step toward stemming an escalating problem that has become a grim
bread-and-butter issue for Hollywood.
Tucked into a $170 billion corporate tax bill is a provision promoted
by the Republican governor and the state's two Democratic senators,
Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, that would give American movie
producers a tax credit of up to $15 million to do their filming at
home.
That amounts to roughly a quarter of the average cost of making a
feature film.
The issue is so important that, according to his press aide, Ashley
Snee, Schwarzenegger has been making calls to members of both the
Senate and the House.
"He has been working to ensure that the provision remains in the
legislation," she said, declining to say which members Schwarzenegger
has called.
According to a U.S. Commerce Department report issued two days before
President Clinton left office in 2001, the economic losses from runaway
film production had grown in less than a decade from a trickle to a
flood.
The department cited studies showing that foreign production of
U.S.-developed films had doubled in a decade to nearly a third of the
movies made, while the economic losses more than tripled, to $10
billion a year.
Among the House members who asked for the government report was
Sacramento Rep. Robert Matsui, a senior Democrat on the tax-writing
House Ways and Means Committee.
"This is a major issue for any state with motion picture production,
and for the United States there is no question runaway films have a
major negative impact," Matsui said.
Unless something is done to curb the trend, Matsui said, the country
could see its creative talents lured away and the hold Hollywood has on
movie production seriously weakened.
"That could have a profound impact on our international prestige,"
Matsui said. "It's a big issue that goes well beyond losing some
business or some jobs."
In the nearly four years since the Commerce Department report was
written, the problem has worsened.
"This is a huge problem, especially in California," said Pamm Fair,
deputy national director for policy and strategic planning for the
Screen Actors Guild. "We've seen an exodus in the crafts unions - the
grips, the drivers, and so on. In Los Angeles, especially, it's really
been grim. For 'movies of the week' made for cable TV, they are now
filmed almost completely outside the United States."
The economic impact and job losses are severe but hard to measure, said
Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles County Economic
Development Corp.
Kyser said that as of May 11, based on trade industry reports, the
major studios had 12 films under production in California, six
elsewhere in the country and 18 outside the country.
At an average cost of $58 million apiece, films under production
outside of the United States for that week represented an outflow of $1
billion. Not all of that money stays there, however.
Top-draw stars like Uma Thurman, who stars in Quentin Tarantino's
overseas-filmed "Kill Bill 2" thriller, are paid the same megabucks
regardless of where the movie is shot.
But for bit actors, set handlers, craftsmen, caterers and the myriad
others who make their jobs off Hollywood, runaway films are stealing
their livelihood.
"Journeyman actors and what we call below-the-line workers are the ones
who are feeling the pain of this, " Kyser said.
According to state statistics, 132,800 Californians were working in the
movie and video business in April. But Kyser thinks the actual number
is closer to 250,000, because much of the movie business is done under
contracts that aren't reflected in the state statistics.
While more movies than ever are being made, California employment in
the industry has fallen since its 1989 peak. Many of those jobs have
gone to Canada, Australia and other countries whose incentives and low
exchange rates have been a big lure to producers on a budget.
The legislation approved by the Senate is an effort to reverse that
trend. Introduced by Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., it would allow movie
and TV producers to deduct up to $15 million per movie as long as at
least 75 percent of the labor cost was spent in the United States.
There is no similar provision on a tax measure working its way through
the House. Matsui said a wage-based tax credit was yanked from the
House bill that will come to a vote in the next month or two.
While the film break could be added by amendment, the Senate's
inclusion of the deduction for domestic filming guarantees that it will
be an issue when the House and Senate meet later in the year to work
out a compromise on the tax package.
Matsui thinks the odds are good for the industry to get help.
"Other countries are offering tax incentives to the producers," he
said. "We either need to match them or find other ways to keep these
productions in the United States."
While the Senate provision could prove to be a boon for the domestic
film industry as a whole, it doesn't necessarily bode that well for
California.
Lincoln's interest in the legislation is not just saving U.S. film
jobs, but moving them to her region. The measure contains a sweetener
for filmmakers who film their movies in the poverty pockets of the
Mississippi River Delta, offering them deductions of up to $20 million.
The movie industry has no problem with that.
"We want to drive production to where the economy needs boosting," said
Fair of the Screen Actors Guild. "We just feel that that should be on
this side of the border."
The sweetener for Lincoln's impoverished constituents follows a growing
pattern among the states to adjust their own tax laws to lure movie
studios.
California is facing increasing threats from states offering tax deals
and rebates to film companies willing to make movies there. New Mexico,
Louisiana and Florida have such incentives in place. More may follow.
And over half the movies under production in the United States by
independent producers as of May 11, for example, were being filmed
outside of California.
Incentives to keep film production in California two years ago fell
victim to the state's worsening budget crisis. But Fair thinks that if
Schwarzenegger and the Legislature can get the state budget under
control, lawmakers will reconsider.
"Our timing wasn't right," she said of the failed 2002 legislation.
But with states learning from the example of other countries that
making movies can be lucrative on so many levels, Fair and many others
believe that California, too, will have to reinvest in the industry
that is responsible for so much of its glitter.
About the Writer
The Bee's David Whitney can be reached at (202) 383-0004 or
dwhitney@mcclatchydc.com.
http://www.pressherald.com/business/stories/040520visas.shtml
8 Cape Cod firms sue over visa cap
Eight Cape Cod businesses, in an effort to meet their looming summer
employment needs, sued federal and state agencies in an effort to
increase the number of visas granted for temporary foreign workers. A
cap on visas has been met, sending tourism businesses on a scramble to
find workers.
The lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Boston on Tuesday names the U.S.
Labor Department, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the
Massachusetts Department of Workforce Development. The suit alleges the
agencies unfairly prevented the businesses from obtaining the visas
they need to increase their staffs in the spring and summer.
The Cape firms that filed the suit are among hundreds nationwide
seeking unskilled foreign workers to handle a range of seasonal jobs.
They want to increase the number of work visas to more than 100,000
this year, from the cap of 66,000 that has been in place since 1991.
Greg Dugal, executive director of the Maine Innkeepers Association, has
called the labor shortage "dire" and predicted that under the
worst-case scenario, the industry will be 30 percent to 40 percent
understaffed this summer. Maine tourism businesses used about 2,400
workers under the program last year, he said.
In the new Massachusetts suit, businesses said the governmental
agencies required that some companies on Cape Cod and the Islands delay
their applications for H-2b work visas until fall 2003, four months
before they needed the workers. Other types of businesses were allowed
to apply in June 2003.
''The four and a half months lost between June 1, 2003, when others
could begin applying for the visas and November 15, 2003, when the
plaintiffs could begin applying, prevented them from obtaining visas
prior to the numerical cap being reached,'' the lawsuit said.
A bill introduced by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., and other members
of the Bay State congressional delegation remains in committee.
Comparable legislation has been introduced in the U.S. House by Rep.
William Delahunt, D-Mass., but no action has been taken on that bill.
On April 26, Delahunt headed a delegation from the Cape to the Virgin
Islands and met with local officials there to discuss ways to identify
workers who could fill seasonal jobs.
Since the Virgin Islands is a U.S. territory, workers do not need a
visa to travel and work in the United States. And, Cape Cod's tourism
season peaks when the Virgin Islands' season is tapering off.
Maine firms also have been looking toward the Virgin Islands for
employees, encouraging retired workers to take jobs this summer and
otherwise scouring labor markets for potential workers.
The eight firms who filed the federal suit are: Brewer Tree and Land
Co. Inc., Daylily Farms Inc., Cars Unlimited Inc., The Bagel Authority
Inc., Martha's Management Inc., MV Brothers Inc., Tropicana Inc. and
BBI Corp., all of Cape Cod and the Islands.
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