BofA: Train your replacement, or no severance pay for you

This is the most disgusting thing I've ever read. From a few years back, the SFGate exposes what has been going on for over a decade in high-tech America.  I cam across this after Googling "Bank of America Outsourcing", looking for amunition to send my BofA rep who is handling my mortgage:

"Bank of America has been steadily moving thousands of tech jobs to India. The latest to go are about 100 positions that handle BofA's internal tech support. While many of the bank's Bay Area techies accept the inevitability of their jobs heading abroad, what rankles them is the fact that, in many cases, they're being told they have to first train the Indians who are getting their gigs.

"If people want their severance packages, they have to train their replacements," a senior engineer at one of BofA's Bay Area facilities told me. "There's nothing in writing that says this -- the bank's been careful about that. But it's made clear at meetings what we're supposed to do."

...

"Barbara Desoer, BofA's chief technology exec, told BusinessWeek magazine in January that she was aware how much grumbling it caused when workers at the bank's Concord technology center were told they'd have to bring their Indian replacements up to speed before being shown the door.

"It caused us to make a greater commitment to our associates," she said. "It caused us to make a larger commitment to explaining the context of changes happening in the marketplace in advance of (changes) happening."

But it apparently didn't cause BofA to stop doing it.

"We've seen a bunch of Indians come through (the Bay Area)," the senior engineer said. He asked that his name be withheld because he's seeking another position within the bank.

"They're very open about it," he said. "They're here to learn our jobs and then leave. Some go back to India, and some settle in Charlotte, where the headquarters is."

Why would BofA hire Indians to work in the United States?

"Because they don't actually work for Bank of America," the engineer replied. "They work for Infosys Technologies and Tata Consultancy Services, which are both in India. They do the work at half the cost of what a U.S. worker gets paid."

...

BofA's increasing reliance on Indian workers was made evident in a 40-minute presentation given last year to some of the bank's U.S. tech employees. BofA distributed DVDs of the presentation to managers companywide in April as part of a new program called Culture Connections.

 

One of the DVDs made its way into my hands this week, along with supporting materials provided to managers.

The DVD shows a roomful of about a dozen bank employees being told by a blond-haired American manager (who is wearing purple, Indian-looking clothes) that the presentation will assist them in "understanding the Indian culture and who the Indian is."

This is important, the manager continues, because of "the dependency we have on our teammates who are either here in the U.S. who come from India, or who we interact with on a daily basis who reside in India."

She then introduces the presenter, Shiva Subramaniam, who has traveled from India to give an overview of India's culture, including how the country has "specific gods for specific concepts," and how "it's almost impossible to look at an Indian and not associate him with the game of cricket."

He shows a series of slides during the presentation. Clearly visible at the bottom of the screen are the words "Tata Consultancy Services."


...BofA employees were summoned to "team huddles" last month to learn more about working with Indians. The meeting leader's guide for the get-togethers said the goal is "to build a diverse and inclusive workplace and to prepare associates to meet the challenge of working globally."

A "manager message map" for the presentation on India says that "all associates will be expected to participate in this learning experience" by the end of June.

Norton confirmed that nearly all of BofA's 200,000 workers are expected to sit through the presentation.

"We're dealing with a global customer base and a global employee base," she said. "So we've started a program for people to understand international business cultures."

www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi

Comments

yup, most of the TARP banks

also offshore outsourced all of the I.T. or any back office related, technical related jobs during 2001 especially.

Citigroup, while receiving TARP funds made a $1.2 billion dollar deal to offshore outsource the rest of their I.T.

It's all of them, not just BoA.

 

Yep. This is an old, old

Yep. This is an old, old practice. I first heard about it in the IT industry about 4 years ago.

 

more like 1999 or so

but when they in mass really started offshore outsourcing, displacing Americans, and used the Internet bubble collapse as an excuse, it became quite a standard practice.

Welcome to NS rebornindendent!

 
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