The Writing on the Wall

Right now, they have removed desks and are building a wall in the middle of the room where I work. It is not every day that you literally get to see the writing on the wall.

This room is being converted into a server farm. This room where I work used to be filled with hundreds of people talking to customers. Those jobs are now being done by people in India that this company employs.

For a while, people were fooling themselves into thinking that all the jobs that went to India would be replaced with new accounts or new jobs here. Not so. The Americans sell the jobs, then they hire people in India to do them. They can live well in India on $4 an hour, but you can't afford to live in America on $4 an hour.

The fact that this construction is happening is a naked truth.

And all of this brings great profits to the greedy execs at the top who are constantly congratulating themselves on these moves. Naked greed.

Recently they sent a corporate spokesman around to try and indoctrinate us with their propaganda about how wonderful the global economy is, how wonderful that people in places like India, Brazil, Argentina and China can all do the same jobs that we do.

As long as they made me go to the meeting, I decided to say exactly what I thought. The corporate mouthpiece started to stutter as soon as I mentioned what shame it was that the company was offshoring so many American jobs, and hurting the American economy.

She actually said that the new global initiative was not about offshoring. I reminded her that within the last couple months people were laid off in the US and at the same time people were hired in India to take our jobs. She is so full of company happy crap she cannot even see the naked truth. Or perhaps she can.

One of my co-workers just looked at me and said "Can you believe that she gets paid to go around and tell lies like this?"

Corporate ventriloquists get these puppets to say outlandish things. Things that imply that the contracting firms are responsible for all of this naked greed behavior. As if the company whose name is on the building does not pull the strings on the contractors.

Earlier this week I wrote about another interpretation of Naked City. This is a different kind of Naked City. Naked ambition. Naked greed. The emperor of this company has no clothes.

The purveyor of corporate happy crap babbled on about how wonderful it would be that we would all be cross trained so that we could all do multiple jobs at the same time.

The naked truth goes like this: "We will pay you less money to do more work. But that is only a temporary measure because even if you do everything we ask you to, we will still hire somebody halfway around the world who will work cheaper than you as soon as we can arrange it."

Within the last year and a half, we were also given the good corporate news that "due to current economic conditions," we all needed to be happy with pay cuts. The company doesn't see it as dishonest that they promised us one amount of money when they hired us, then after we were here doing the job, they simply paid us less. They even told us that were doing an excellent job and gave us cute little certificates to hang over our desks that told us so. That was just before the second pay cut. The naked truth is that "current economic conditions" did not cause this company to lose money. Their own website revealed that the same quarter they lied and pulled this crappy move on us, they declared record profits.

The writing is on the wall. The wall they are building.

All of my energy is now directed to making the transition to becoming a full time reader, a full time self employed person. When you can read the writing on the wall, it is time.