Governor General plants an outsourcing tree

Yesterday on his state visit to India, Governor General David Johnston, along with High Commissioner of Canada to India Stewart Beck, visited software and outsourcing giant Infosys. He planted a tree and participated in a panel discussion on simplifying rules of cross border trade.

Last fall, Infosys was investigated for circumventing immigration laws in an alleged visa scam that brought thousands of workers into the US to be paid at Indian wages - giving them an advantage in underbidding local competitors - and "building a system to teach applicants how to deceive immigration authorities". 

"Infosys was also accused of making errors on thousands of I-9 forms that are required to determine a person's work eligibility. Agents from Homeland Security Investigations who reviewed about 9,000 I-9 forms as part of the federal probe found more than 80 per cent of them had errors."

Infosys avoided a criminal court case by paying a $34-million settlement fee instead. 
Infosys : "Those claims are untrue and are assertions that remain unproven."

Canada Revives Infosys' North America Dream

The meeting of the Governor General of Canada with IT behemoth Infosys is likely to raise hope for the sector and its North American aspirations amid visa uncertainty.

On concerns around temporary foreign workers and stricter visa requirements, Commissioner Stewart Beck:

"so they will be moving people back and forth and we see Canada, because we have a North American Free Trade Agreement, as an excellent location for Indian as well as other companies to locate and to capitalise on the North American market."

Canada’s location is near ideal for Indian IT companies due to the close proximity of the US, which is their biggest software export market. With the US all set to tighten their visa norms with the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill, close locations for client servicing and other operations will be an option Indian IT companies will consider carefully.

On the cap on visas, Beck said that there are policies that the companies were expected to meet. “There are some sensitivities in the country that have to be recognised,” he said

Awesome. 
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Fast-tracking fucking over Canadian workers

Fort McMurray Today reports that 270 unionized welders and pipefitters contracted to the Husky Sunrise tarsands project were laid off and replaced by cheaper temporary foreign workers from Mexico, Ireland, Portugal and Italy.

Husky says their work was over but a commenter under another article who was a worker on the site disputes this :

"The work contracted to Black and McDonald was no where near complete. We had to conduct a handover to Saipem (a mostly Italian workforce), detailing to them where we had stopped work so that they may continue. In the final week, Saipem foreign workers were actually in the facility working side by side with us; a very uncomfortable situation for those of us about to be laid off."

Six months ago, we learned that employees of Royal Bank - and all the other banks - were being forced to train and work alongside the outsourced foreign temporary workers who were to replace them at their jobs, while HD Mining, a BC mining company based in China, imported 201 Chinese workers after their ad to hire Mandarin-speaking miners in BC failed to turn up any candidates. ***

CitImm Min Jason Kenney promised a fix, the Accelerated Labour Market Opinion process was temporarily cancelled, and Kellie Leitch, then parlsec for Diane Finley of Human Resources, did such a bang-up job on Power and Politics saying they'd already fixed this  - repeating talking points about Canadian jobs for Canadian workers five times in as many minutes - that Steve made her Minister of Labour.

PostMedia Oct 10, 2013 : Program for foreign workers could be restored

Employment Minister Jason Kenney says the government could soon resurrect a fast-track scheme that allows companies to bring temporary foreign workers to Canada more quickly.  

"highpaying, high-skill jobs, not fast-food franchises in booming Alberta that need foreigners to peddle burgers and doughnuts to oil workers.

Of course not everyone has to apply for a ALMO first :

For example, the federal government has an agreement with Alberta to exempt welders, heavy-duty mechanics and iron workers from the process due to a shortage of skilled workers in those fields.

A point I'm sure was not much comfort to the the welders and pipefitters at Husky Sunrise who were laid off this past Labour Day.


So what changed in the intervening six months?

Nothing. Kenney is right on schedule.

A Wall St Journal article in July reported corps were just waiting for the public backlash to blow over : 

 "To be sure, the halt in outsourcing is expected to be temporary, with experts and IT service providers expecting outsourcing projects to resume after six to eight months. 

CGI Group signed $12 billion in outsourcing contracts with various Canadian corporations, and IBM - $7 billion.

" 'After the RBC controversy, companies are waiting for things to die down. Banks are slowing down projects—they are keeping a low profile, while the tension over offshoring jobs blows over," said an executive from an outsourcing advisory firm who requested anonymity.'  "

And how is iGATE, the company that kicked off the Royal Bank controversy, faring ? 
"Strong Second Quarter Results; Profits Up 136% " and they're planning on opening a new centre in Halifax.


*** Meanwhile the BC Liberals' love affair with HD Mining, the Mandarin-only-speaking Chinese mining company in BC, continues unabated.
Jody Shimkus, former BC assistant deputy minister of mining and "the main point person for the Chinese mining companies in B.C.",  left her government job in January 2012 to join HD Mining. 

Blair Lekstrom, former BC Minister of Energy, Mines, and Petroleum Resources, joined her there two months ago.

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Royal Bank and iGATE : "Business as usual"

A LiveMint/Wall Street Journal article reported three weeks ago that Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), Bank of Nova Scotia, Bank of Montreal and CIBC have temporarily halted their hiring of workers from outsourcing firms like iGate, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS), and Infosys Ltd, while they wait for the public backlash to blow over   :

"The backlash against outsourcing jobs comes at a time when the unemployment rate in Canada stands at 7.2% and remains above the levels that were seen before the 2008 recession. The Canadian banking and financial services (BFS) outsourcing market is estimated to be worth more than $5 billion. "

The article also mentions that IT services provider CGI Group has signed $12 billion in outsourcing contracts with various Canadian corporations, and IBM - $7 billion.

"To be sure, the halt in outsourcing is expected to be temporary, with experts and IT service providers expecting outsourcing projects to resume after six-eight months. 

'After the RBC controversy, companies are waiting for things to die down. Banks are slowing down projects—they are keeping a low profile, while the tension over offshoring jobs blows over," said an executive from an outsourcing advisory firm who requested anonymity.'  "

You're shocked, I'm sure.

So how's poor old iGATE managing this difficult temporary tension in offshoring?

Aside from reporting "Strong Second Quarter Results; Profits Up 136% ", I mean.
July 17, 2013 :

On Wednesday, during a post-earnings conference call, iGate said it did not anticipate any impact on its business due to the immigration laws in Canada and it had not seen any pull-back from any of its Canadian clients after the government probe.

“It’s pretty much been business as usual since we got a clean bill after the audit,” said interim CEO Gerhard Watzinger, an iGate veteran. 

An RBC spokeswoman declined to comment on whether the bank had started shifting work away from iGate and said it would continue to work with iGate if it complied with RBC’s policies on outsourcing.
“IGate is a long-standing supplier and we will continue to work with them provided that they comply, like all our suppliers have to, with our supplier code of conduct,” the spokeswoman said in an emailed reply.

And here's a job posting from a search of the last 30 days at WowJobs iGATE Canada Jobs page :


Apparently the supposed temporary rollback of outsourcing jobs for a few months till the public backlash blows over isn't really all that after all. 
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Fakers and Cons

Still adding to the list of Con fakery below, if you have more suggestions.
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Fakers

Fake F-35 mock up cockpit from Lockheed Martin for DefMin Peter Airshow MacKay to hold $47,000 presser in to announce purchase of 65 Lockheed Martin stealth fighters in 2010.
Tony Gazebo and Rona Ambrose attending.



Fake citizenship ceremony in which half of the participants were actually Citizenship and Immigration Canada staff passed off as new Canadians on Sun News Network





Fake lake, the $57,000 part of a $1.9 million display for the 2010 G8/20 summit, concerning which I asked some more questions earlier today.

Fake G8 border infrastructure slush fund that splashed $50M around Tony Gazebo's riding for gazebos and flower pots miles away from the border, and incidentally increased his vote margin win from 26 votes in 2006 to almost 11,000 in 2010.

Fake protesters made up of Conservative party interns and staff sent out by the PMO to heckle Justin Trudeau on the lawn of the House of Commons as he gave a presser announcing "new measures to increase transparency in the HoC." 

Fake apology to First Nations

Fake election phone calls, live and automated, presumably originating from the Cons' CIMS data base, either being obnoxious while pretending to be from an opposing party or advising voters their polling station had moved or closed.

Fake Jobs Grant from the same people who thought it was a super idea to grant businesses a 15% wage reduction pass NOT to hire Canadians. This new idea, which doesn't exist yet despite a recent Hockey Night in Canada ad blitz at $95,000 a pop, would again subsidize business while rolling back $300M from the provinces should they agree to hell freezing over.

Fake Commander-in-Chief shtick while surveying Alberta flood damage, and good lord, he's wearing fucking wings.
Unsurprisingly reminiscent of Bush photo op surveying Katrina.  Mr. Dress Up's spox explained it was "in tribute to the military".  
See Boris : last paragraph.

Fake CIDA "not", crayoled in at Bev Oda's request above the signatures of CIDA dept heads, making it look as if they, not she, had gutted KAIROS' funding from CIDA. After initially fudging about it, eventually she fessed up.
Meanwhile over in Israel, Jason Kenney told the Israelis he'd done it for them, then retracted it when he got back to Canada.

Fake security at the G20. $1-billion and 19,000 police unable to prevent a few black bloc from rioting but as protests wind down on the last day, kettling without first giving the crowd a chance to disperse nets many shoppers, media, and people returning home from work in the largest police bust in Canadian history. Public Safety Min refuses to divulge origin of command for police state crowd control exercise.

Fake 'red menace' scare. 
Steve, Airshow, MacKay, and PMO staffers make ridiculous remarks about bravely staring down Russian bombers in the Arctic. Meanwhile Canadian Forces are participating with those same Russian bombers in a Canada/US/Russia exercise in joint air traffic coordination in the Arctic. 
aka Fake justification for purchase of 65 F-35s.

 Fake "Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act", which made no mention at all of child pornography because up to an hour earlier this bid to require internet service providers to give police your name, unlisted phone #, and IP address without a warrant was called the Lawful Access Act.

Steve's fake outrage at Lib/NDP/Bloc coalition proposal - with separatists! and socialists! - following the 2011 election.
Following the 2004 election, Harper himself proposed a Con/NDP/Bloc 'cooperation' with those same separatists and socialists to unseat the minority Libs.
In 2000, a proposed coalition of the Bloc, Alliance, and PC parties sought to make Stockwell Day Prime Minister of Canada.

Fake 'grassroots' website Ethical Oil
Alykhan Velshi left a six figure job with Steve's gov to relaunch Ezra Levant's Ethical Oil  -"mooching off free Wi-Fi at coffeehouses and wearing flip-flops” - after which he returned to the PMO fold. Con Resource Bureau-connected webserver Go New Clear hosts Ethical Oil, Jason Kenney, Joe Oliver, Kathryn Marshall, etc.

Faked support for abolishing StatsCan long census. 
MP Maxime Bernier claimed "thousands" of complaint emails per day during 2006 census, all unfortunately deleted, vs. the 22 recorded "expressions of concern" sent to StatsCan. 
When Tony Gazebo falsely claimed StatsCan support for abolishing long census, StatsCan chief Munir Sheikh at left resigned in protest.

Fake smaller government

The Cons' 2012 budget proposed slashing 19,000 positions from the federal public service over five years, but added more than 34,000 between 2006 and 2012 - a 14% increase.                                                                                            Additionally, a 2011 CCPA study discovered a shadow public service: "Over the past five years, federal personnel outsourcing costs have risen 79% ... and remain above $1 billion a year."

Fake emergency preparedness
"It's really just posing," Alberta Fire Chiefs Assoc. Pres. said, singling out fed politicians like SafetyMin Vic Toews showing up to "help out" Alberta flood victims after Cons' 2012 budget slashed federal funding for the Joint Emergency Preparedness Program. "They can just stay in Ottawa. They got in the way."

Fake "cooperation" with Elections Canada, including stonewalling on EC reports of election fraud 3 days before election,  'reviewing' Poutine logs at Responsive Marketing Group before EC, cutting their budget, taking 3 months to not provide EC with witnesses, delaying promised election reforms, and in the words of Judge Richard Mosley : generally engaging in "trench warfare". 


Dr. Dawg sees much of this as Conservative theatre.

I think they're just fakers always hoping not to get caught.

Feel free to add your own "faker" suggestions and links in comments - updating as they come in.

Video version on Youtube 
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The invisible hand of the market outsourcing

CBC Go Public's Kathy Tomlinson on The Current :

 "A single mom, an experienced IT worker, couldn't find work for seven months. She heard one of the Indian firms had a project going at one of the banks here so she asked the manager who she knew who was here from India to hire her to oversee it. He said he'd think about it. Then she says he called back to say he would give her the job if she would agree to kickback $8 an hour from her salary to him - a cash commission, he called it. She took the deal because she says she'd rather pay him to work than not have the job."

So Canadians are now having to pay off the insourced scam artists who cost them their jobs to get work at all, even as foreign temporary workers have increased 700% since 2001 and Ottawa is currently inking a trade deal with India to increase labour mobility.

Jason Kenney : 

"Intra-company transfers in the vast majority of cases are a completely normal part of international commerce ... The obligations we have have for intra-company transfars are often hard-wired into trade agreements."

Conspokesbot Kellie Leitch, parlsec for Diane Finley of Human Resources, responds to Anna Maria Tremonti's specific question about companies bypassing government labour market opinions to get fast-tracked on international intra-company transfers :

"The program's intent is not to replace Canadian workers ... We had concerns with respect to what was happening with iGATE and the government acted extremely quickly to begin an investigation to make sure that those labour market opinions were being used appropriately."

which of course entirely bypassed Tremonti's question about employers bypassing LMOs.

Meanwhile in February this year the BC Government Labour Market and Immigration Division was holding classes on how to do it :
(italics mine)

"Is your business experiencing a labour or skills shortage?

If you are an employer interested in learning how to use an alternative approach than the LMO process to recruit and retain foreign workers, this is your chance to find out directly from program staff. "

I guess the BC gov program staff is pretty good at it.
At the now cancelled April 2013 CORE-Outsourcing's 8th Annual Conference : Fast Forward - What's Next for Outsourcing? sponsored by IBM, HP, and iGATE, one of the listed presenters was 
C.J. Ritchie, Asst Deputy Minister, 
Strategic Partnerships Office, Government of British Columbia, 
whose CORE bio advertized provided "leadership to BC’s $5.8-billion portfolio of outsourcing contracts".

And a year ago, the Ontario Ministry of Transportation finalized a $22-million deal with iGATE to provide IT workers for its Road User Safety Modernization Initiative, the department in charge of "road user safety, provincial highways management, and transportation policy and planning including transit." 

Last month iGATE hired a lobbyist to lobby :

• Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA)
• Canada Revenue Agency (CRA)
• Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC)
• Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC)
• Industry Canada (IC)
• Prime Minister's Office (PMO)
• Privy Council Office (PCO

on "the Temporary Foreign Workers Program and proposed government changes to the program."

We'll see how well they do with that.

Northern Reflections : One May Smile  and Smile

with files from : Boycott Royal Bank of Canada and Outsource Canada
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Update : Wednesday, May 8 :

Star investigation: Millions in taxpayer-funded consulting work kept secret

A Star investigation has found 90 per cent of the $2.4 billion paid out in the past decade comes with no description of the work done — and more than a dozen departments refuse to provide details when pressed.

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CORE-outsourcing/Amanda Lang/iGATE - on the milk carton

On Saturday I posted a screencap of CBC's 'senior business correspondent' Amanda Lang as keynote speaker at the upcoming CORE-Outsourcing's 8th Annual Conference : Fast Forward - What's Next for Outsourcing?.
CORE displayed Lang's bio above the logos of their 'Corporate Sponsors' - which unhappily included iGATE.  My link to that page subsequently went down over the weekend:








"Oops! The page you are looking for cannot be found."

This seemed most unlikely for an "annual global conference" about to open in 6 days so I fixed it. It went down again. Go ahead - try it yourself. It's gone.

CORE's helpful Oops! advice to try looking for the page in their menu links brings up no mention of the conference at all.                                                                                                                                                                 
    
                                                                         


Their most recent twitter entry on March 13 which provided a link to the conference is also "Oops", while links to it from various conference participants like Everest Group are also pining for the fjords.





The whole CORE-outsourcing April 23 conference page is all just one great big Oops now apparently.

In the course of looking for it, I ran into a CORE page from their 2011 conference advertizing Lang as the Conference Moderator :

as well as iGATE's proud corporate  sponsorship there in presumably happier days :

But the page at CORE-Outsourcing's 8th Annual Conference : Fast Forward - What's Next for Outsourcing? , featuring Lang and C.J. Ritchie "Assistant Deputy Minister of the Strategic Partnerships Office, Government of British Columbia, which provides leadership to BC’s $5.8-billion portfolio of strategic outsourcing contracts" is nowhere to be found.

Did they just go indoors?  Are they making corrections?  
All I know is that CBC has visited that Creekside page upwards of 20 times in the last 24 hours.

If anyone knows what happened, please let me know. After all - it's CORE's 8th Annual Outsourcing Conference - practically a Canadian tradition now.

2pm Update : Frank at Back of the Book found another way in :
http://www.core-outsourcing.org/events/event-directory/Archive/Conferenc2013/index.php

Thursday update from comments below :
Saskboy said : Ombudsman tweeted me that Lang is off the CORE event.

Mystery Solved !          CBC Ombudsman, May 3, 2013
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Boycott the Royal Bank ... and Amanda Lang - Part 4

 "Information technology workers displaced in Canada are being replaced not by cheap Indian workers but by better ones." 

So says CBC's Amanda Lang, senior business correspondent for CBC News and good cop to Kevin O'Leary's bad cop on the Lang and O'Leary Exchange, in yesterday's Globe and Mail.

She wonders if Canadians have returned to 1990 or perhaps to "campaign trail rhetoric in America" - so aghast is she that people are angry about the Royal Bank in-and-outsourcing of Canadian jobs to iGATE in India.  

In her rousing paeon to globalization and "the natural forces of capitalism", she explains :

"a job moved from Canada to India creates a new kind of prosperity. It creates a job in a country we sell goods and services to, increasing the opportunity for our businesses to flourish even more."

If you have $699.00 you can hear more of Amanda's thoughts when she gives the keynote address on April 23 at CORE-Outsourcing's 8th Annual Conference : Fast Forward - What's Next for Outsourcing? sponsored by IBM, HP, and iGATE :

"CORE's mandate is to help member organizations maximize the value of outsourcing by providing independent and unbiased information ... "

Also presenting will be 
C.J. Ritchie, Asst Deputy Minister, Strategic Partnerships Office, Government of British Columbia, providing "leadership to BC’s $5.8-billion portfolio of outsourcing contracts".

A list of CORE's extensive corp members here, and no, Royal Bank isn't on that list including RBC Financial Group and you'll recognize the rest of them.  
In May, CORE is running a course focusing on "the transition from insourced service delivery to outsourced service delivery and through to steady-state operations".

About that...

Walkom : Former outsourcer describes how job destruction works.
Informative interview with a 10 year veteran of doing it in Canada.

But here's what I don't get, Amanda. If you bring in foreign workers in order to save money and drive down wages in Canada by paying those indentured foreign workers 15% less in a market that just lost 54,500 jobs last month, who is going to be able to to afford to buy the stuff and pay for the services you sent offshore?  

And who is going to look into fixing this for us? The same guy who set it up for us.

Boycott the Royal Bank of Canada - Part 1.  


Boycott the Royal Bank - Part 2


Boycott the Royal Bank - Part 3


Sunday update : Great post from Laura K @ wmtc on related issues :
Unpaid labour used to be called slavery. Now it's an internship
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Wednesday update : CORE-outsourcing/Amanda Lang/ iGATE - on the milk carton
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Thursday update :
Saskboy said : Ombudsman tweeted me that Lang is off the CORE event.

May 3, 2013   CBC Ombudsman

March 5, 2014 CBC issues no foul no harm report :
Conflict of Interest and CBC News coverage of RBC and the Temporary Foreign Worker Program
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