Journalists at Fairfax Media have gone on a 36-hour strike over job outsourcing to New Zealand. Fairfax Media is the second largest publishing company in Australia, and is accused of making “easy instead of smart” decisions about cost-cutting.

This strike affects journalist staff in both print and online sections of several papers including The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian Financial Review, The Sunday Age, The Sun Herald, Newcastle Herald, and Wollongong’s Ilawarra Mercury.

The strike began at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday evening with staff walking out after hundreds of journalists met with media union officials from the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) that same day.

The cost-cutting, outsourcing plan is causing fear in the journalists for their job safety and will result in 66 jobs lost due to the relocation of the editorial staff.

Rallies were held May 31 in Australia by the striking journalists and the MEAA. Louise Connor, MEAA Victorian secretary, stood outside Fairfax’s Melbourne offices on Thursday with around 100 journalists.

“Our grave concern is that this company makes the easy decisions to cut costs instead of making the smart decisions to move this company into the new era,” Ms. Connor told reporters.

“This is a very dangerous step for Fairfax to be taking. There has been no experience in Australia of companies making the decision to offshore such a central part of the newspaper and this can only destroy the vital nexus between the newsroom and the community. Sub-editors are journalists and the heart of the newsroom.

They should always be embedded in the community to enable the newspaper to tell the local story accurately.” said Chris Warren, MEAA federal secretary. The MEAA said the outsourcing is just Fairfax’s way to finding cheap cuts in journalism.

The striking journalists risk the chance of being fined. To them, it is definitely worth it.

“We don’t think we’ll be fined. We understand the risk that we took in walking out, but there’s frustration at the decision to outsource jobs,” said Ben Schneiders, a journalist at The Age.

Fairfax Media management has expressed disappointment at the journalists’ strike action, but says the changes will put the company in a better position to take advantage of the numerous opportunities in digital media.

Senior staff and sub-editors from the involved newspapers are going to negotiate with Fairfax management over the next few days to find an alternative solution, the MEAA says.

The strike is due to end Friday morning.

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November President Obama signed into law the “Vow to Hire Heroes Act” designed to increase employment opportunities for America’s veterans. But a key provision in the act creating an expedited process for hiring returning soldiers for federal jobs is being undermined by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) – the very agency responsible for improving veterans’ lives.

The VA hires more veterans than any other federal agency except the Department of Defense. However, according to the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the AFL-CIO union that represents over 205,000 VA employees, the agency continues to violate federal law by contracting out work that has been traditionally performed by veterans. The outsourced jobs include many entry level jobs that disabled veterans rely on to get back on their feet after returning from the battlefield.

The process began during the Bush Administration, when the number of VA hospitals and cemeteries that outsourced work historically performed by veterans skyrocketed.  Jobs that embodied the tradition of “veterans helping veterans,” such as cemetery caretakers, laundry and food service workers, housekeepers, groundskeepers, and transportation assistants, disappeared as more and more contractors were handed the work without the required studies to show whether contracting out was cost-effective to taxpayers.

Unfortunately, under the Obama Administration, the illegal outsourcing of entry-level VA jobs has become more prevalent.  Recently, the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) entered into a $54 million, three-year contract with ACS Government Systems, a major contractor in the federal sector, for claims processing work currently performed by large numbers of veterans.

ACS will develop disability and pension claims, help VBA convert to a paperless system, and conduct outreach to encourage more veterans to file claims online.  To add insult to injury, the VBA employees are being asked to volunteer to train the contractors to do their work.

The excessive use of contract health care services also presents a serious dilemma for veterans receiving VA care and the many veterans who join the VA health care workforce after saving lives on the battlefield.

“Contract physicians and nurses lack the specialized skills and best practices of clinicians who dedicate their lives to serving the veteran population as VA employees,” said AFGE National VA Council President Alma Lee. “It’s the workforce’s commitment to veterans’ care that makes the VA a world-class and very cost effective health care system.  Excessive contracting out has put many medical centers in the red, without benefitting the patient. ”

“We all know who is hurt the most by these growing outsourcing practices,” said AFGE National President John Gage, “It’s the veteran on the receiving end of the agency’s services. Contract claims processors working for profit will now handle the most personal information of our veterans.”

Moreover, said AFGE, most of the VA’s contracts violate federal sourcing law that bans federal work from being given away to contractors without a fair competition between public and private employees. The requirement for agencies to conduct a cost-benefit analysis before awarding a contract was set in a 2009 Appropriations law passed by a bipartisan Congress.

Image Courtesy of   Cheryl Casey / Shutterstock.com

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The American definition of globalization or “outsourcing” is the action of “obtaining of goods or services needed by a business or organization under contract with an outside supplier”. This definition seems pretty clear and concise but what it fails to include are the countless other factors that this fad has introduced into American lives.

Some see outsourcing as a way to help other countries build their own society and economic wealth but this action causes more harm than good to those countries. Not only is outsourcing non beneficial to our country because it gives away countless jobs that we desperately need during these hard economic times, but we are also limiting the rights of the people within these deprived countries.

By outsourcing, the United States and its companies are stripping not only ourselves of our own culture by not influencing the output of products that read the label “ Made in USA” but also other countries of their own individual culture. Globalization is just another way for big companies to manufacture their products with cheaper labor, goods and services.

Over decades American families have helped build our nation to what it is today, and now we don’t even have the resources to support these workers that have helped make our country the “super power” it is.  Why should people overseas reap the benefits from our economic hardships? Is it because the government wants to keep the rich richer?

Is it because the government wants to keep the rich richer and the poor poorer? Or is it because companies don’t want to take on the accountability that comes with having American citizens working in their factories?

On the surface, globalization seems like a good idea to spread knowledge and technology to less fortunate countries but what we may not realize is that people in these countries suffer under safety and health violation and the possibility of discrimination and illegal behavior, since developing countries do not have the same level of labor rights making it easy for them to be exploited.

Thus safety hazards and unsafe labor conditions are created. Not all labor laws in the U.S. exist in these countries and if they do they are certainly not enforced the way they are in the United States, with that in mind companies can contract and make their own labor laws to which they feel are ethical.

Since these countries aren’t as well developed as the U.S. children and women are able to work long stressful hours, in an unsanitary environment for very little pay to help support their family. Companies are also exempt from paying as much for their workers health benefits.

Along with the disadvantages of the people in these undeveloped countries are the people in the hometown of these big corporate companies. According to an American Union report by AFL-CIO “Goldman Sachs estimates 400,000–600,000 professional services and information sector jobs moved overseas in the past few years, accounting for about half of the total net job loss in the sector over the period.”

The report also states “Forrester Research Inc. predicts U.S. employers will move 3.4 million white-collar jobs and $136 billion in wages overseas by 2015.” Not only are Americans struggling with looking for work during this almost Depression-esc time the work that we do have were giving away billions of dollars to countries at a cheaper price and cheaper value.

By not circulating the money within our own country, companies are benefitting to the economic hardship by not hiring Americans to run their businesses and work in their factories. Companies are at fault by not providing a solution to the country that are assisting the problem.

In reference to the loss of jobs due to globalization, according to the CRS Report for Congress both physical and emotional factors have begin to come into play within our society people are scared that they may eventually lose their job and this creates “worker anxiety”, “The current, highly publicized wave of offshore outsourcing has caused considerable anxiety among both unemployed and employed workers….

Domestic outsourcing and offshore outsourcing result in job losses for those employees who no longer are required to produce the goods and services that their employers decided to purchase. Some displaced workers must seek jobs in other fields because the domestic firms that specialize in providing outsourced functions do so more efficiently than their former employers.

Others who lose their jobs to domestic outsourcing can continue to perform similar work — perhaps for lower wages and fewer benefits,” the CRS Report for Congress states on page 5. Americans are taking pay cuts and receiving less health benefits due to outsourcing and are made to believe that globalization is good for the country, our America.

The question is who’s America we’re speaking off and if we really want to live in ‘that’ America. Outsourcing could be detrimental to our country especially during these financial times where companies need to promote as much revenue as possible. We cannot successfully help others if we cannot help ourselves.

As it was so eloquently put in the textbook The New World Reader “The essence of globalization is a subordination of human rights, of labor rights, consumer rights, environmental rights, democracy rights, to the imperatives of global trade and investments.”

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