By: Giovanni8
Obtained from: Yahoo! Hotjobs community
The process started more than 50 years ago. The concerted off-shoring and domestic out-sourcing kicked up nearly 25 years ago.
Compare it to a rocket launch. You hear the count-down, they start the engines, ignite the rockets, fire bursts out, a great cloud of vapor, and it sits there, just kind of vibrating for a few seconds. Then it slowly slowly slowly begins to rise. Then faster, and faster, and faster it accelerates.
It's a geometric curve with (more or less) constant acceleration.
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We got warning signs all through the 1990s. The lay-off, RIFs, down-sizings kept increasing. In 1998 there were significatn up-ticks, again.
We knew, years before the Y2K bust, that that would happen, and it did, right on schedule. But the dot-coms crashed at the same time, as investors realized they were betting on vapor rather than substance. The Nasdaq crash started 2000 March. Lay-offs ticked up again in July, and then exploded in December.
Guest-worker abuse and off-shoring and body shopping had been building through the 1980s, noticeably steepened in 1990, 1996, 1998, and 2000.
1999 Winter
"Manufacturing workers had reason to fear the worst in late 1998 as the ax man eliminated some 574,629 jobs... By year's end, the number of lay-offs reached a record high, and are still growing..." --- _Industrial Out-Look_
Manufacturing Blues (with graphs)
www.walkerco.com/infoBoard/filestorage/Winter_1999.pdf
2000 March
"American information technology workers are concerned about their future job prospects. Too often, industry considers them expendable by the age of 30, and too expensive to re-train when cheaper foreign workers on H-1B visas are readily available. Sometimes they have seen their colleagues laid off and replaced by these foreign workers. The unemployment rate for computer programmers over 50 years old is 17%... The Department of Labor estimates that over the next few years there will be 138K job openings a year in information technology occupations. At the same time, 162K students will graduate each year with associate, bachelor, and graduate degrees in computer science, engineering, and mathematics... [sponsors include] Lamar Smith, Tom Campbell, Chris Cannon, and Bob Goodlatte" --- Allan Wernick _US Immigration and Citizenship: Your Complete Guide_
Technology Worker Temporary Relief Act
http://www.allanwernick.com/updates/mar00.htm
2000-06-01
"Linda Kilcrease has never been a political activist. Even when she lost her software-engineering job at an insurance company in 1994, she didn't protest. It was when the company asked her to train her replacement - a foreign worker brought in under a government visa program - that she became a weekend warrior. 'None of us realized what H-1B was.', she says of the guest-worker program..." --- Gail Russell Chaddock _Christian Science Monitor_
USA: The New Economy: Lament of the pocket-protector set: As Congress considers letting more foreigners fill high-tech jobs, software engineers rebel.
http://csmweb2.emcweb.com/durable/2000/06/01/p1s2.htm
2001-01-03
"In the most extraordinary job-cut month in more than 8 years, U.S. employers in December announced plans to cut 133,713 jobs. Led by the retail sector, which accounted for a whopping 30% of all cuts in December, in 20 business days employers slashed jobs at a rate of 6,685 per 8-hour day or 418 job cuts every 30 minutes. December's was the largest job-cut month since 1993, when Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. began keeping detailed monthly records. It marked only the fourth time in those 8 years that monthly job cuts surpassed 100K. Despite the December deluge, the year-end job cut total of 613,960 was 9% below 1999 (675,132). December was 203% higher than November (44,152) and 199% higher than 1999 December (44,682)." --- _Detroit News_
Retail Leads Severe Job-Loss Month
http://www.detnews.com/2001/careers/0103/09/n01-172260.htm