The New IT Worker: Angry and Proactive

Computerworld - When IT specialist Jim Mangi decided to help form a union at IBM in 1999 after the company changed its pension plan, the worst part was telling his father, a Big Blue retiree. "What's he going to think? What's he going to say to his son ... who is going to start union organizing?" Mangi recalls. But as it turned out, his father was all for it. "He knows it's just not what it was," says Mangi, secretary of Alliance@IBM, which is affiliated with the Communications Workers of America (CWA).

Many high-tech workers are feeling under siege, and Mangi is among those who are fighting back. Job losses from the dot-com bust, benefits cutbacks, offshore development and foreign workers brought in on H-1B visas are fueling activism, lobbying and education efforts.

Much of what union organizers do is educate IT workers, who largely remain reluctant to join unions. Indeed, the CWA, which represents about 700,000 workers in technical areas, estimates that only about 5,000 of its members are in IT.

Mangi lets employees know when IBM is hiring H-1B visa holders by posting on a Web site copies of the federal form that employers must file when hiring workers from overseas. He says he does it to make people aware that even though IBM may be going through layoffs in the U.S., the company may also be applying to hire foreign laborers.

"It's a turning point in this industry," says Marcus Courtney, president of the Seattle-based Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, a high-tech workers' union that's also affiliated with the CWA. Offshore outsourcing and increased use of foreign workers are practices that were inconceivable in the 1990s, he says.

"To sell this workforce out after they helped create one of the most successful economies in the world—that should not be an agenda that workers need to embrace," Courtney adds.

A legislative offensive is beginning to build at the state level. A bill pending in the Washington Statehouse would require employers to give employees at least 60 days notice of a layoff of 50 or more employees. And a New Jersey lawmaker wants state contracts to prohibit offshore work.

The offshore trend can be compared to the overseas job exodus in manufacturing. The loss of relatively well-paying, blue-collar jobs hurt that segment of the workforce, and real wages for the bottom 25% of the workforce never recovered, says Josh Bivens, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.

Dave Cooper, former CIO at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a U.S. nuclear weapons lab, says the social costs of offshore development will exceed the corporate bottom-line benefits. Offshore work will discourage young people from studying IT in college, Cooper argues. What has "kept this country strong, both financially and physically, is the fact that we have been able to develop these technologies and lead the rest of the world," he says. "If we no longer have U.S. citizens who are willing to [study IT in college], it's going to hurt us socially in an economic sense."