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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Boycott the Royal Bank - Part 3

RBC executives told managers: “You can only hire a Canadian if you can show that iGATE can’t supply the worker for you,” 

... a current RBC manager told CBC's Kathy Tomlinson.

This only confirms what Marjorie Mong, VP, head of Application Services at RBC, said back in 2008 : 

Originally, RBC viewed iGATE “as an added resource,” says Mong. Now the bank is pushing iGATE “to go out and earn the business from project managers.” The supplier has set up delivery managers for every RBC executive platform “to establish a relationship and get more business.”

Also Jason Trussell, vice president and regional manager responsible for iGATE’s buyers in Canada, again in 2008 :

RBC’s offshore projects have increased tenfold since signing a contract with iGATE [in 2005]. Originally we worked on offshoring projects for two groups in RBC applications. Today every department in the group sends us work.”

Two former iGate workers - who said they were brought in to work at RBC under the Temporary Foreign Worker Program but now have new jobs and permanent resident status in Canada  - told CBC they were among "200 Indian nationals shuttled back and forth between Canada and India between 2008 and 2012." 

In 2008, the U.S. Justice Department fined iGATE $45,000 for discriminating against US citizens by placing 30 ads for computer programmers that “expressly favoured” people holding a temporary foreign worker visa.

Up here in Canada, the Royal Bank evidently performs that service internally on behalf of iGATE.



Update : Table from the Progressive Economics Forum  in 2012: 
Nearly 30% of net new jobs in Canada from 2007 to 2011 were filled by temporary foreign workers.  
In 2012, nearly 200,000 temporary foreign worker positions were approved under 'positive labour market opinions' ; 22% of them went to the food and accommodation industry.

This is what Armine Yalnizyan from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives called The Economic McAction Plan.
[edited for clarity]
Boycott the Royal Bank of Canada - Part 1      Boycott the Royal Bank - Part 2
Boycott the Royal Bank ... and Amanda Lang
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Boycott the Royal Bank - Part 2

Shorter Gord Nixon : Look, they're not your jobs, they're our jobs, and if we choose to move our jobs offshore to another company without you because it's cheaper, that's just business. Besides, only one of the 13 dudes we brought in to RBC came under iGATE's temporary foreign worker application - the rest of them are house guests.

About that one iGATE dude : G&M : 

The federal government is investigating Royal Bank of Canada’s move to outsource technology jobs and reviewing paperwork submitted by its contractor to bring in temporary foreign workers. The probe centres on what the government sees as “apparent discrepancies” regarding RBC’s explanation of the events.
RBC came under fire on the weekend after allegations emerged that Canada’s largest bank contracted iGate Corp. to handle the outsourcing of certain technology jobs, and the firm was using temporary foreign workers to displace RBC technology staff. The bank denied those claims, and said it does not get involved in the hiring practices of the companies it hires. 

“An investigation is under way and Human Resources and Skills Development Canada officials are currently reviewing the labour market opinions submitted by iGate in great detail, based on apparent discrepancies between RBC’s public statement and information which has previously been provided to the government,” said Alyson Queen, a spokeswoman for Human Resources Minister Diane Finley. 

Meanwhile when CBC interviewed Diane Finley's parlsec Kellie Leitch about the bankster issue, Leitch went on and on and on about "very critical labour shortages in Canada". Way to entirely miss the effing point, Kellie. These people had jobs.

But it's not just RBC of course. Two minutes of statements from employees replaced by foreign workers at TD Canada Trust, Scotiabank, and RBC :



Yesterday CBC Go Public reporter Kathy Tomlinson, who broke the RBC offshoring in-and outsourcing jobs story, was on CBC BC Early Edition. She said she also heard the same stories from terminated employees at Bank of Montreal and CIBC. Excerpted transcript :

I'm getting emails from people who are management, that are high in this and who know how it works. It seems to me that the banks essentially have a template and these outsourcing companies have a template too - they know exactly how to present their case for bringing these workers in, and remember it's the outsourcing company that actually brings the workers in. They're the one that apply to the government for permission and they're the ones that get these workers the visas., right? 

But of course the banks are involved - they're a partnership. So it looks to me from what I'm hearing that there's a template that they've developed that's approved by the government." 

Anna Maria Tremonti's show today took on the larger issue of global outsourcing: 

The insourced foreign workers go home to do the work from their own countries where they are paid 50% of what the Canadians they replaced made.

We have had foreign temporary workers for over 40 years but since 2006 there's been an explosion of low skill temporary foreign workers who can stay here for up to four years and be paid 15% less. Not just low skill workers, this has now evolved to include engineers.

Armine Yalnizyan from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives : 

" Importing people to learn the skills so they can take the skills out - what kind of public policy is that? The Economic McAction Plan."

Alberta Federation of Labour, today, on guest worker permits provided by Human Resources and Skills Development Canada :

Between April 25 and December 18, 2012, more than 2,400 Accelerated Labour Market Opinion or ALMO guest-worker permits – which are supposed to be reserved for highly-skilled employment – have been granted to fast-food restaurants, convenience stores and gas stations. McDonalds, Tim Hortons, A&W, Subway Sandwiches. Are we supposed to believe that these are ‘high-skill’ employment opportunities? 

More than 54 per cent (2,640) of the ALMO approvals in the country were for Alberta-based employers.  ...  The list of businesses in Alberta who received ALMO approvals included 33 A&W restaurants. 

The ALMO stream, introduced in last year’s omnibus budget bill, is proving to be the latest evidence that the temporary foreign worker program is part of a low-wage agenda on the part of radical Tea-Party Tories.

How are young people supposed to compete for temporary low skill jobs to get the education they need in order to finally not be able to get the IT jobs they trained for because they've all gone offshore? Because the real news here is that good education and a relevant skill level is no longer enough to keep you off the unemployment line. 

Armine Yalnizan is right - this is terrible public policy on the government's part.

And finally, the Cons fundraiser/voter contact company, Xentel/RMG/iMarketing Solutions Group, announced yesterday that it is laying off its call centre workers. (h/t Holly Stick)

Will they be outsourcing those jobs offshore? I ask because the Conservative Party of Canada is currently trolling Creekside reading all the posts on Royal Bank and iMarketing Solutions/RMG.

Boycott the Royal Bank of Canada, Part 1

Boycott the Royal Bank - Part 3             Boycott the Royal Bank ... and Amanda Lang
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Boycott the Royal Bank of Canada

Royal Bank of Canada Chief Human Resources Officer Zabeen Hirji explains here that technically it's not RBC that has hired temporary foreign workers to replace RBC employees. No, rather it's that RBC has hired Indian offshore outsourcing company iGATE to do their own hiring as part of RBC's plan to transition RBC IT jobs overseas to India. 

What about government reaction that this is unacceptable?
Oh, says Hirji, we were already in conversation with relevant government departments last week and besides everybody is outsourcing overseas now.

Indeed.

At left we see iGATE receiving RBC's Outsourcing Excellence Award back in 2008 when RBC only had 500 iGATE employees working for them. 

A few months later, RBC itself received a $25 billion dollar government bailout, or 'backstop' as we prefer to call taxpayer bailouts of corps in Canada, amounting to 63% of the bank's total value. RBC CEO Gordon Nixon took home $10M+ in salary and compensation that same year.

At the time, RBC VP and head of Application Services Marjorie Mong explained :

"The key message to [RBC IT staff] was that offshoring was not about job cuts. It was about augmenting our workforce in a flexible way."

While Canadians were surprised and outraged over the weekend at news of RBC's parasitic behavior, Rochester Institute of Technology public policy professor Ron Hira has spent the last decade studying how "offshore-outsourcing consulting firms" work in the States. 

... consulting firms use temporary work visas to help American companies cut costs. He says they use the visas to supply cheaper workers here, but also to smooth the transfer of American jobs to information-technology centers overseas.

"What these firms have done is exploit the loopholes in the H-1B [foreign temporary tech workers] program to bring in on-site workers to learn the jobs [of] the Americans to then ship it back offshore."

As RBC's Hirji explained above, it was necessary to bring the offshore workers on-site to RBC in order to learn RBC procedures first hand.

The two companies have been working closely since 2005. There is an "RBC Offshore Development Centre" in the iGATE facility in Bangalore. 

RBC spokesperson Rina Cortese told Go Public several foreign workers from iGATE will be working in the bank’s Toronto offices until 2015. By then, she said, most of the work will be transferred abroad, but a few of the foreigners will remain indefinitely.

[RBC] workers said they were not offered jobs with iGATE and were told this "realignment" might expand to affect more of the bank’s 57,500 employees in Canada.

Citizenship and Immigration Minister and presumed PM-in-waiting Jason Kenney managed to express surprise that the temporary foreign worker program under his purview he has long touted as absolutely vital to Canadian interests would be so abused.

Boycott Royal Bank of Canada as first suggested by blogger Norm Farrell.   Do it.

Yes, that means your Visa card too. Outsource your money to a credit union in your own community instead.

Has anyone called this iGATE-gate yet? Allow me to be the first.

Boycott the Royal Bank - Part 2           Boycott the Royal Bank - Part 3

Boycott the Royal Bank ... and Amanda Lang
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DILBIT featuring Oily the Splot

 Yes it's a mashup rip from Dilbert.
You remember Oily the Splot, right? Korncob Kory Teneycke's little critter.
Oh crap. Reuters reports "a discharge of 700 barrels of crude oil from a 16-inch pipeline due to unknown reasons in Harris county, Texas" two days ago. 
How come we're getting this news from Bangalore?
Ok, one more ...

Ok, they get better :  MORE RECENT DILBITS
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Bad week for tarsands astroturf

"British Columbians for International Prosperity is an independent group of concerned citizens looking to promote practical resource development, international trade expansion, manufacturing development, and other initiatives bringing prosperity to British Columbia, Canada, and our Global partners."

Dear retired oil execs*: Don't run astroturf ads under the rubric "independent group of concerned citizens" unless you feel like disclosing who those other concerned citizens are and who made and paid for the glitzy ad you just shot in my back yard. 

Also, about your claim that Canada pipeline companies have a 99.9% safety record :

Exxon Confirms Ruptured Pipeline in Ark. Carried Canadian Dilbit

"A pipeline that ruptured and leaked at least 80,000 gallons of oil into central Arkansas on Friday was transporting a heavy form of crude from the Canadian tar sands region, ExxonMobil told InsideClimate News. 

Local police said the line gushed oil for 45 minutes before being stopped,according to media reports."

 A 2010 spill in Michigan, which released a million gallons of dilbit in the Kalamazoo River and has cost pipeline operator Enbridge more than $820 million, continues to challenge scientists and regulators as they work on removing submerged oil from the riverbed."

National Resources Defense Council :

"The [Arkansas] Pegasus tar sands pipeline rupture adds to growing evidence that tar sands poses additional risks to our nation’s pipelines and communities.… While U.S. regulators don’t differentiate between tar sands pipelines and conventional crude pipelines, states with pipelines that have moved the largest volumes of tar sands diluted bitumen for the longest period of time – North Dakota, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan – have spilled 3.6 times as much crude per pipeline mile as the national average.

Tar sands diluted bitumen is substantially different from the conventional crude historically moved on the U.S. pipeline system. It is a combination of heavier than water bitumen tar sands and light, toxic natural gas liquids or other petrochemical diluents. Together, this mix is called diluted bitumen, a substance that is fifty to seventy times thicker than conventional crudes like West Texas Intermediate (North America’s benchmark crude) and moves at higher pipeline temperatures "

British Columbians for International Prosperity Executive Director Bruce Lounds really is a concerned citizen of course. His concern is that approval of TransCanada Corp's Keystone XL pipeline running from the tarsands to Texas will cut BC out of Enbridge's proposed Northern Gateway pipeline action :

Keystone XL Environmental Approval Bad for BC

“B.C. stands to lose a lot should the project go ahead,” Lounds said. “If Keystone is approved, our province will be left on the sidelines, looking in on prosperity and job creation from the outside. Make no mistake, B.C. stands to be a big loser if this project goes ahead.”

A Bad Week for the Tarsands :  Shit Harper Did

* h/t Reddit for http://i.imgur.com/kbepooq.gif

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4 pm Update : Whoa! Aerial footage of Arkansas pipeline spill from videojournalist Adam Randall.
[h/t Toe at Bread and Roses] Go to full screen.



Well so much for keeping the dilbit out of the lake. Plus ...

Think Progress : "A technicality has spared Exxon from having to pay any money into the fund that will be covering most of the clean up costs of its Arkansas pipeline spill. ... A 1980 law ensures that diluted bitumen is not classified as oil, and companies transporting it in pipelines do not have to pay into the federal Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund. "
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Abortion and the robot revolt

How heartwarming it was to watch five brave Con backbenchers rise up to defend Langley Con MP Mark Warawa's right to independent Steve-free abortion speech in the House of Commons. After years of having to recite member statements on whatever idiotic repetitive talking points the 30-somethings in the PMO assigned to them every day, this week the robots are revolting.

Con MP Brent Rathgeber : I would submit that if the House does not jealously protect the rights of members to bring forward matters of concern to their constituents and if it does not strictly enforce those rules, the roles of the private member, Parliament and ultimately democracy have all been equally compromised.

Really. You're just noticing this now?
And just like that it's no longer a matter of keeping the abortion debate on a constant low simmer in the House until we all get used to hearing womens' rights questioned there  - no, indeed our very democracy has been compromised if Con MPs aren't allowed to bring it up on a regular basis. 

Andrew Coyne has written two impassioned columns in as many days defending Warawa' right to speak. 
His Backbench revolt isn’t pro-life vs. pro-choice, it’s for the freedom of all MPs repeats some of the arguments he put forth in his 2008 column :
It's time to talk about abortion : This is not about abortion. This is about democracy 
and another one from a year ago :
The idea we can’t debate abortion is unworthy of a democratic country. 

The five Con MPs bravely supporting Mark Warawa in his campaign to save the very soul of democracy are Brent Rathgeber, John Williamson, Stephen Woodworth, Kyle Seeback, and Leon Benoit.  And here, as a gentle reminder, are the answers three of them - Woodworth, Seeback, and Benoit - gave to the Campaign Life Coalition Candidate Evaluation election questionnaire in 2011 and 2008 :

Williamson, Steve's former communications director, and Rathgeber declined to answer the Campaign Life questionnaire but both voted in favor of Woodworth's alternative abortion ploy - Motion 312 - to study when life begins in the womb, along with 86 other Con MPs and one third of cabinet.

While there are principled reasons to support MPs' right to speak freely in the House, it is notable that of all the issues this government has made a point of muzzling of their MPs on, including this one in its various previous anti-choice disguises, suddenly we are being asked to put the right of MPs to speak their minds in the House ahead of women's rights as a point of principle, led by MPs who have already committed themselves to introducing anti-choice laws.

So are we looking at a Backbencher Spring here?             
Here's Warawa free speech supporter Con MP Leon Benoit immediately after the weekly caucus meeting with Steve the following day :

Nope, guess not. Looks like Steve muzzled the groundhogs for yet another spring.
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Monday, April 1 update :  Con MP Brent Rathgeber, after the same caucus meeting :

“I think it was a good meeting. The media have reported, and I think accurately, that many members who were upset for a variety of reasons, seem to be satisfied that the issues have either been resolved or the issues are not worth resolving.”

The 24 hour Con Backbencher Spring is over.

Canada's Economic Action Planda

Economic Action Panda Rental

Pandas are the new Con mascot.

Apparently pandas are short-sighted, ill- tempered, and not well-adapted to the world, but have nonetheless achieved a 40% increase in population over the last 20 years.

Perfect.




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Rebranding Canada as Harper Canada

Harper Canada ...
On a gc.ca website, no less. This is presumably what the HarperCons call our country amongst themselves - Stephen Joseph Canada being just a tad too informal I guess.
h/t David Akin

Update : Glen McGregor counts 449 press releases using "Harper Government" from crown or government departments from Sept 21 to Dec 11 2012. That's 8 per day, as Glen says - twice that number if you include the French version. 

Upperdate : Toronto Star, March 3, 2012 : Tories rebrand ‘Government of Canada’ as ‘Harper Government’

"A directive that went out to public servants says “Government of Canada” in federal communications should be replaced by “Harper Government.”

One year later, Global, Natty Post, and the G&M are all running the same CP story on this :

"It could have been a post-budget typo, or a cut-and-paste accident, but one government agency briefly rebranded the country “Harper Canada.”Agency spokesman Alex Smith said it was simply an editing error, and was promptly corrected — to read “Harper government.”

So we're all good now it's back to "Harper Government", are we?
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