MP brands 1,600 CSC layoffs as the 'worst excesses of capitalism' The British government must wake up to service delivery implications of the latest mega-layoff scheming at CSC given the number of sensitive public sector contracts held, and work with the business and others to "root out the worst excesses of capitalism". Or so Toby Perkins, Labour MP for Chesterfield, argued during a House …
"I guess that slogan won, only slightly ahead of the second favourite, "Built on a foundation of loose sand and broken promises""
Yes, the PR department wouldn't let them use the original version:-
"Built on a foundation of trebles all round for the senior management team and a resounding 'Fuck You' to the workforce"...
"The spin merger of CSC and HPE ES can be seen as two failing businesses coming together to create an even bigger failing business."Now, where have we seen HP involved with something like that before?
Oh, yes.
The sound of two garbage trucks colliding. Compaq merger.
Some folks never learn.
Anymore, they're just a bunch of DX, C...
Great choice of name!
"O, I wish I was in the land of cotton
Old times there are not forgotten
Look away! Look away!
Look away! Dixie Land."
"Since the advent of the Civil Rights Movement, many have identified the lyrics of the song with the iconography and ideology of the Old South. Today, "Dixie" is sometimes considered offensive, and its critics link the act of singing it to sympathy for slavery or racial separation in the American South."
" its critics link the act of singing it to sympathy for slavery or racial separation in the American South."
No doubt - people say stupid things all the time.
I would say most the people who would sing that song now are just clueless. That's why everyone should carry shovels to add a little percussion to the tune - empty skulls give off a wonderful drum like tone.
Yeah, sure. And it was also written by a man from Ohio while he was in NYC. He eventually wrote the US Army's fife and drum manual and was rather pissed off about the Confederate States government and army using his song.
So yeah, real Southern there, huh?
And if you're going to rip off Wikipedia, at least link it or cite it.
Oh, I wish I wasn't in the land of the glutton,
Good old times they are forgotten.
Run away! Run away! Run away! From DXC Land
In DXC's Land, where I was merged in,
early on one April mornin'.
Run away! Run away! Run away! From DXC Land
I wish I wasn't in DXC, Hooray! Hooray!
In DXC's Land my career will turn to sand,
to live and die in DXC.
Away, away, away it all goes south in DXC!
Away, away, away it all goes south in DXC!
There's too many employees, ones that don't matter,
It makes Mike fat or a little fatter.
Run away! Run away! Run away! From DXC Land
To mandate that the service must be delivered using UK Based staff AND that those staff must be UK/EU Residents (add BREXIT Clause here) and that no less than 5% of the workforce engaged on the contract can come from outside the UK/EU (add BREXIT Clause here). That last one stops the Indian Body shoppers from bringing staff over on indentured contracts and paying them a pittance.
Then watch the likes of CSC, Crapita etc squirm as no one in their right minds would want to work for them ever again.
The usual answer is of course "But, but that will mean we can't make obscene profits off our customers the most cost effective deal"
I'd like to find out how an "NZ only" surcharge adds to the cost of the contract
My suspicion is "Not as much as the outsources would claim and not as much as the govt thinks."
Yes, that would be good and I agree. The problem though is people paying for the service. They will no doubt say (even if found to be untrue) that supplying the services will cost more that way. Then comes a price hike.
Will they pay the price hike or as seems the want of everything now-a-days go for the lowest price?
Yes there would be a price hike. The Wages (salary/NI) would go back to HMG so offsetting the cost of bringing back the service to the UK.
Didn't some call centres move back last year because it wasn't making economic sense?
If HMG mandated that the service had to be delivered here and the staff paying UK Taxes/NI then I'm sure the voters would accept a small price rise.
The big issue is the obscene salaries of those at the top. Even the NHS is not immune from this.
Shock and surprise here: The Government don't give a shit about it.
Why? Well why would they? 8 years of incompetence after a decade of further incompetence building and buillding on the shoulders of incompetence since around the early 1970's. The Government exists to serve itself. It doesn't serve the people. Oh no, we're only useful every 5 years when they need us to give them the same job they screwed up in the previous term.
@Tony Perkins
1. Most global gov contractors have taken the piss for years and will continue to do so
2. Gov civil servants hate change, so revert to 1.
3. Why on earth would you listen to anything Unite has to say?
4. Capitalism isn't bad in itself, but if you allow it to happen people will take you to the cleaners, as in 1. above
5. Gov when it changes comes up with the IR35 debacle, which mean more of 1. above
"Civil servants that think there should be change find it almost impossible to find anyone willing to sign it off or multiple parts of government in parallel responsibility."
Actually the converse is true. Govts keep changing what they want to do and after the contract's been awarded changes mean CASH.
"top management are going to walk away with even more millions of dollars in businesses when the merger completes."
I get increasingly left wing as I get older, but I'm not that pink really, a lot of Corbynism is way too left for me (last time I voted, it was for the blairite Liz Kendal : Didn't bother last time).
However, sentences like the one I pasted in at the to sum up a lot of the modern business world. Cuts are made, people get laid off, conditions get worse, cheap labour is sought. People work harder, get less and are generally more miserable. And the end result seems to be that the folks at the very top seem to run away with all the money.
@nick_rampant well said. Continually depressed at the fact there seems to be no credible party arguing for those of us in regular jobs who year-by-year are seeing our salaries eroded and our conditions made worse. Not that I'm too fussed about top folk making plenty of money, just that their position is whole lot more sustainable if (in percentage terms) we get lifted too.
Neither Corbyn Nor May but ..... [insert coherent ideology here.]
If you actually listen to what he says, rather than what the media says he says, he's not quite as extreme as you might think. And if you listen to what he's saying he will do (as distinct from his own personal beliefs) it makes even more sense: e.g. he is personally anti-nuclear but believes he should defer to the majority wishes of his party and retain both a nuclear deterrent and nuclear generation.
My hobby is chatting to random other dog walkers about politics on a very general level, without mentioning names or parties. More than half of people I have spoken to said that they think the NHS should get a massive boost and that the power and train companies should be re-nationalised. Then I tell them they should form a new party, because they are too left wing for Labour ... :-)
Yes that seems to be the key driving force for this merger as well.
Somewhere in time shareholders forgot 3 things.
1) They own the company.
2) The managers are (probably) their highest paid employees.
3) The business should be being run for the shareholders benefit, since they are its ultimate owners.
Somewhere in time those manager starting thinking it was run for their exclusive benefit and the shareholders could (frankly) go f**k themselves.
And without enforced laws and shareholders who give a s**t (probably not pension funds who in the UK are notorious for not giving a s**t) this will continue.
Perkins concluded: "Although the tale of CSC's recent past includes rounds of redundancies, lost contracts, service failures and missed profit targets, followed by further redundancies and the whole cycle repeating itself, one area of CSC's business has seemed to grow. Many government contracts paid for by UK tax money are now being serviced by huge offshoring operations in India.
I would have thought that anyone working with government data would need to be security vetted. Is this not the case? how good is the security vetting in India?
according to a guy I know who works on the nhs contract, they "scrub" the data then send it to india for processing... my contract isn't supposed to let india see the data, but they've been told to cut costs and nobody has kicked up a fuss... so its off to the factory of barely sentient drones
another government contract i know about, flies guys in from india for 90 days stints...cheaper than the local work force, i suspect this also gets around a no offshoring clause
the entire company right now is in a mad dash to make people vanish by the 1st of April... make up any bs excuse to rate people below the threshold to keep them... rinse and repeat until we have enough cash to make 15% profit
Just market forces and capitalism working as it should. British jobs must be part of the contract, but expect to pay more.
Never forget: the bitterness of poor quality is remembered long after the sweetness of low price has faded from memory. You get what you pay for.
I've never understood why Government contracts only (seem to) consider the money charged by the contractor, and not what would be recovered through taxation where those monies are paid to UK tax payers and residents.
I recall an estimate that monies paid as wages for UK jobs would circulate approximately four times through the local economy - so the treasure would collect four lots of income tax and VAT. If this is still accurate, then the government should be recovering approximately £80 for every £100 paid on a pure UK-based contract (naive calculation).
I assume I must be missing something here...?
"the bitterness of poor quality is remembered long after"
Yes, some of us with longer memories remember thats what you got asking the Uk workers to deliver.
People should not assume that if its delivered from the UK, that it will be of a better quality. The only thing you can be certain about is that it will cost more and there will be more industrial action.
Years ago I worked for CSC and, at the time, they had lots of posters like the alleged 'motivational' ones featuring inspirational phrases on pictures of landscapes etc, and they all had three-word phrases that started with C, S and C.
For some reason, the most accurate ones always disappeared when anyone from Head Office came to visit...
Comprehensively Screwing Customers
Cowboys Selling Computing
Can't Support (this was either Customers or Computers, depending on how let-down we were feeling)
Completely Stupid Cretins (this was on a meeting room image and someone had added the EMEA's head to the meeting's chairman).
Given how fast Managers with no IT or engineering skills were promoted and any technically-inclined managers were moved sideways and then down, I'm surprised there's anyone except trained monkeys and beancounters left...
The latest round of cost cutting isn't restricted to laying off all our best people. They have pretty much imposed a travel ban (about 3-5 layers of approval required for any travel whatsoever, which progresses at a rate of approximately a week per layer). As a result, my client has noted my general absence from site and I have charged only the hours I can absolutely justify (it's not very amenable to remote working).
So now it's "Why are you only billing part time? It's a full time project." I could have grossed several thousands of pounds more, had I been allowed to expense a few hundreds of pounds of travel. And here comes another self-congratulatory, frankly even masturbatory, email from on high saying how much money they are saving with travel restrictions, and how they should proceed with it. A return 2nd class train journey to London now requires sign off from the head of the UK company himself --- no wonder he's too busy to actually do any work.
It's the same in HPE (or whatever the small chunk of us that are merging with CSC shortly are currently called). no travel without major approval, not even allowed to purchase mice or keyboards (seriously, we were actually told that). and at the same time we have an all hands meeting saying how well our division is doing. a week after they completed yet another round of Voluntary Redundancies. El Reg is right about HPE standing for Helping People Exit.
as for contracts, anyone working on certain UK GOV contracts is supposed to be a UK national and have Security Clearance.
and considering how incredibly useless the internal IT is, and how hopeless the service is from our Indian call centres, it may as well not exist. if you run into a problem, just accept it, and hope it goes away on its own.
makes for a "fun and dynamic" working environment
There are similar travel restrictions at HPE. I recently needed to travel to a customer meeting. This needed 5 separate approvals, including a L3 Manager (i.e. two levels down from Meg). This was mileage only in my car, for which I get 11p a mile. The trip was 40 miles and so cost the grand total of £4.40...
The word "madness" doesn't really do this situation justice. Perhaps the people who think this stuff up should look up "opportunity cost" in the dictionary.
When CSC or whoever quote for a job, do you really think they pass on the full savings from offshoring? They just have to make the tender look cheaper up front than doing it locally in-house and pocket the rest.
Meanwhile the UK former staff are now claming benefits instead of paying taxes and spending in the wider economy, putting a deflationary pressure on wages and a heavier tax burden on those still in work.
So yes, I want CSC to use UK workers so I can pay less tax.
CSC are crap, I'm not sure what they do, "have you tried switching it off and on again".
Once in a while come round and make a big meal deal about installing some software. I work in a place that engineers use their own laptops to work on, because the crap given to them and maintained by CSC is really for the landfill.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
