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posted by on Sunday March 05 2017, @10:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the surprised-there-was-not-a-gag-order dept.

At the University of California's San Francisco campus, 79 IT employees lost their jobs this week, some of them after explaining to their replacements at Indian outsourcing firm HCL how to do their jobs.

The union representing the employees, University Professional and Technical Employees CWA Local 9119, says it's the first time a public university has offshored American IT jobs.

In a statement sent yesterday, UPTE-CWA says the layoffs could spread, since the HCL contract can be utilized by any of the 10 campuses in the University of California system, the nation's largest public university. "US taxes should be used to create jobs in the US, not in other countries," said Kurt Ho, a systems administrator who was quoted in the union's press release. Ho was required to train his replacement as a condition of getting his severance pay.

In its statement on the matter, UCSF says that it was pushed to hire outside contractors due to "increased demand for information technology and escalating costs for these services." The university says it will save more than $30 million by hiring HCL, after seeing IT costs nearly triple between 2011 and 2016, "driven by the introduction of the electronic medical record and increased digital connectivity."

The university says 49 UCSF employees were laid off, and it will eliminate another 48 jobs that are currently vacant or filled by contractors. "UCSF will not replace UCSF IT employees with H-1B visa holders, nor will HCL," the university wrote in a statement e-mailed to Ars.

Of the 49 laid-off UCSF employees, 34 have either secured other employment or are retiring, the university said.

Source:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/public-university-lays-off-79-it-workers-after-they-train-h-1b-replacements/


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by archfeld on Monday March 06 2017, @04:49AM

    by archfeld (4650) <treboreel@live.com> on Monday March 06 2017, @04:49AM (#475489) Journal

    I trained my replacement who was an HB1 worker from India. He was actually a very nice hardworking and intelligent man. I almost felt sorry for him. I trained him which really just involved showing him the ropes he was a very well educated computer admin to start off. The only thing I did not give him was the DB I kept with all the passwords, IP's and router mapping. I kept that information on my personal PDA, a Compaq Ipaq at the time. Several weeks after I left the employer and was already on a contract I was contacted by him and the employer asking for help in recovering following a system failure which resulted in losing the configuration on the terminal server set up in the central lab which served more than 25 other locations. They were unwilling to meet my $500.00/hour request to work for them which I am told by friends still inside the company resulted in several weeks of downtime, many hours of travel time and a general rebuild of the entire lab structure. It seems info security failed to properly retain the passwords and that the network structure had been outsourced as well but never actually documented by them. The very large financial company has since closed the west coast DC I worked from and relocated to NC.

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