Nielsen workers out, TCS workers in
Nielsen workers out, TCS workers in
Date: Sunday, September 21, 2008 6:23 PM
<<<<< JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER No. 1920 -- 9/21/2008 >>>>>
Nielsen's CEO Mitchell Habib made a statement that accurately describes the
attitude of U.S. employers in the age of globalism: "Any individual employee
in the macro sense is no better than any other employee."
We haven't heard much about Nielsen for awhile. If you recall, the Nielsen
ratings company in Oldsmar, Florida is replacing its American workers with
Indian contractors from TCS (Tata). Many of the Americans were told that in
order to receive severance they would have to train their replacements.
The article lacks specifics about how the TCS workers are coming to the U.S.;
referring to "various kinds of short- and longer-term work visas". In the past
the newpaper has mentioned H-1B visas, so more than likely combinations of H-
1B, L-1, and employment based green cards (EB) visas are being used.
A new article from the St. Petersburg Times gives an update on the situation
at Oldsmar. It's worth clicking the link to see the pictures that are included
with the article.
Habib earned the nickname of "the Prince of Darkness." You will learn why
after reading this one.
If you want to read more gossip on Nielsen and Habib, this forum thread spans
several months up to the present.
http://www.topix.com/forum/business/retail/TIH9E8VI09NJLSBBQ
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http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/article818379.ece
How Oldsmar got global influence
By Michael Kruse and Theresa Blackwell, Times Staff Writers In print: Sunday,
September 21, 2008
Published Friday, September 19, 2008 12:55 PM
OLDSMAR
In 2006, Nielsen, the company that does the TV ratings and has its global
operations center here, was bought by a group of six private equity firms
for just under $10-billion.
The new owners had taken on $8-billion in debt and wanted costs cut. Four
thousand layoffs were announced worldwide.
Not long after, Nielsen Web developer Duff Campbell, 34, of northwest
Hillsborough County, came to work and was laid off by his boss, who was
crying.
Within days, Nielsen signed an agreement with Tata Consultancy Services, a
huge Indian information technology firm. The deal was blinking-neon big: 10
years, $1.2-billion.
And a few months after that? Nikhil Asopa, 37, born and raised in Jodhpur,
India, began work in Oldsmar as a manager for TCS at Nielsen.
By spring, this sequence --- Nielsen workers out, TCS workers in --- had
reached a point of critical mass. People started to notice Indians standing
at a bus stop on Tampa Road, in a town that in the 2000 census was more
than 90 percent white. They had packs on their backs and iPods in their
ears.
This prompted an e-mail to the city from a woman complaining about "an
influx of foreigners."
"Come to find out," the woman wrote, "that they are here to train so that
American jobs can be sent over to India.
"This is an outrage."
The economy is listing. A presidential election looms. Globalization,
outsourcing, off-shoring: These terms come up a good bit. They conjure
hazy images of expensive sneakers being made on the cheap in some faraway
land most Americans couldn't find on a map.
But this is not the outsourcing story you've read before.
The woman who wrote the e-mail had it half-right.
The jobs aren't going over there. At least not right away.
The Indians are coming over here.
What we have in Oldsmar is a case study in what happens when the global
economy meets a local reality.
It's not a simple thing.
R.E. Olds, who started Olds-mobile, established this town in 1916 because
he sensed this piece of land was going to be at the center of something
big.
He thought Oldsmar could be a heck of a shipping port --- if not for the
low tide. He drilled for oil --- found saltwater. A hurricane blew through,
the Gandy Bridge was built, the land boom went bust, and Olds pulled out,
$3-million poorer, the town's population in the mid '20s somewhere between
80 and 200.
Oldsmar just kind of sat there for most of the rest of the 20th century. It
had plenty of dirt streets as recently as the 1990s.
Then Oldsmar began to grow, in a familiar, paved-over way. Tampa Road went
from two lanes to six. Cue the Wal-Mart Supercenter. Cue the Chili's, the
Sonic, the Chick-fil-A.
But Nielsen's arrival was growth of a different order. In 2003 the company
brought 1,200 jobs, many of them well-paying, to its new,
600,000-square-foot, hurricane-resistant, $120-million facility and in time
added some 600 more jobs.
Nielsen's arrival was such a big deal that Jerry Beverland, the town's
jeans-wearing mayor, put on a suit for the ribbon-cutting. He called it "a
match made in heaven" and a "gold mine."
Nielsen had moved from Chicago to Dunedin in 1972. You know Nielsen. Most
of us think of the TV ratings, but the company measures a lot of what we
consume, whether on TV, a computer monitor, a cell phone screen, or in the
aisles of a store. The information Nielsen gathers, crunches and sends to
clients is used to determine how billions of advertising dollars are spent
every year. The company itself brought in $2.5-billion in revenue in the
first half of 2008. Nielsen, a recent feature in Fortune magazine said, is
on "a quixotic-sounding mission to measure the world."
People in the Tampa Bay area might think of Nielsen as a local company, but
it has its head-quarters in New York. It has about 34,000 employees
working in more than 100 countries.
Nielsen can be everywhere because it deals in information, a commodity that
jumps political and national boundaries as if they're not even there.
This business of measuring the world has gotten more complex than you could
know, what with 11 broadcast networks, countless cable channels, DVR, TiVo,
the Web and cell phones. Nielsen executives say the past five years have
brought more change than the 25 that came before them.
The company has had a hard time keeping up. By February 2007 Nielsen's
delivery of its TV ratings was late often enough that the company sent a
letter to clients apologizing. But the new owners still wanted to cut
costs.
"We can't do it all by ourselves," Nielsen executive vice president Susan
Whiting said last month.
Enter Tata.
Imagine a company that is Volvo, Marriott, Rolex and IBM rolled into one.
That's the Tata Group. The conglomerate, based in Bombay, India, has been
around since 1868 but got gargantuan only last year, with the purchase of
Anglo-Dutch steel maker Corus for $12-billion.
Tata Consultancy Services, the Tata Group's sprawling IT outfit, has more
than 116,000 employees, who are everywhere. Mexico. Uruguay. Budapest. The
biggest North American "software delivery center" is in a new building off
an interstate loop road in suburban Cincinnati. Outside: the Clermont
County flag, the Ohio flag, the American flag, the Indian flag. Inside:
banners in an atrium that say hello in eight different languages.
Namaste is right.
The man who brought Nielsen and TCS together is Mitchell Habib.
Habib grew up in the non-glitzy end of North Miami Beach. A University of
Florida grad, he has been a chief information officer for divisions of
Ryder, General Electric and Citigroup. His office with Nielsen is in
Covington, Ky., across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, and his windows look
over onto the stadium where the Reds play. The Great American Ballpark.
One afternoon last month he sat on a leather couch. He had on a dark
pinstripe suit and wore shiny blue cuff links.
He said he has spent only 19 full week days in Cincinnati this year. He has
been married for 25 years and has two daughters with whom he iChats.
"In the old days, geography was king," he explained. But now: "We sell all
over the world. We generate income all over the world. So we're going to
leverage talent all over the world."
Habib speaks quickly and excitedly in a language that could be called
boardroom.
Leverage means use.
Talent means people.
He said negotiations for the $1.2-billion deal with TCS happened in
Covington, in New York, in Chicago, in Oldsmar. He had partnered with TCS
before. Five years ago, when he was at GE Medical Services, he was able to
"save 50 percent through outsourcing to TCS alone," he said then. This is
the kind of thing that makes people get on Internet message boards and call
him "the Prince of Darkness." To the Nielsen deal, TCS brings technical
experience but also "key-punching functions" --- data entry, software
testing, desktop support.
"I'm much more empathetic than people give me credit for," he said, "but at
the end of the day it's fairly generic work."
Last year, Nielsen laid off 117 employees in Oldsmar; an additional 120
have been let go in 2008, with 30 to come by the end of the year. More will
be laid off in early 2009. How many more? Hasn't been determined.
Nielsen says last year's layoffs were not directly related to the deal with
TCS. The employees, according to Gary Holmes, a Nielsen spokesman in New
York, were "severed" as part of the overall cost-cutting mandate.
At this point, though, there are approximately 220 TCS employees working
for Nielsen in Oldsmar. They are here on various kinds of short- and
longer-term work visas. About 50 of the 220 are former Nielsen employees
who were rehired by TCS.
"There were other people who were very knowledgeable and had made great
contributions to the company," Habib said in his office, "but that's not to
say they weren't replaceable."
Think of it this way: When TCS workers are in Oldsmar, they earn wages and
benefits similar to what Nielsen's American workers get. But some of the
TCS people don't stay for long. Right now, TCS workers are doing work for
Nielsen in Calcutta, Bombay, Chennai and Budapest. One day that could be
Guadalajara, Mexico, or Montevideo, Uruguay. It's cheaper to employ
somebody in those places than in Oldsmar.
This arrangement helps Nielsen save money.
"Which I'm not embarrassed by," Habib said.
How much money?
"It's significant," he said.
You could call this outsourcing, offshoring, or any number of other names,
but people like Mitchell Habib don't use these terms. They're "antiquated,"
he said, because they presuppose one center of business activity, one
central factory, one central country, from which business could be sent.
It's not like that anymore. The world is everywhere. There are no
boundaries because there is no center.
The authors of the recent book Globality posit that at this point everyone
is competing with everyone for everything everywhere.
"Any individual employee in the macro sense is no better than any other
employee," Habib said in his office. "That's not the issue. The issue is
the breadth and depth TCS gives us. Is it an individual at TCS that
makes a difference? No. It's that they have 110,000 engineers who can help
me do better."
"It's not about Jane Doe or John Doe," he said.
Or Duff Campbell.
Duff Campbell grew up in Palm Harbor. Parents of his classmates came in on
career days and talked about their jobs at Nielsen.
"At some point, in high school," he said, "I thought, 'I'll go out in the
world and get my experience and come back to work at Nielsen.' "
He majored in visual arts at Florida State. He interned at Universal
Studios in Hollywood. He worked on film production for documentaries and
movies with stars like Charlie Sheen and Kiefer Sutherland. Then he studied
Web development and design.
Nielsen hired him in May 2001. He developed Web applications to give
clients local TV ratings and information.
He and his wife bought a house in Hillsborough. They had two children. They
put an addition onto their house.
"I really saw a future with the company," he said.
Mitchell Habib was hired in March 2007.
He came to Oldsmar and was charismatic at his first meeting with employees.
Campbell said Habib told them he had been hired to find "redundant
processes" in the company. Employees were uneasy about Habib and what he
was going to do.
"He's definitely a numbers guy," Campbell said.
But Campbell figured he was safe. He got good reviews, he said, and made
$85,000 a year.
Last September, though, he noticed upper management had less to say to him.
One night he woke up with a bad feeling and went to work that morning,
braced for what he thought was coming.
When he got to the office, his supervisor, a man with whom he had been to
baby showers and birthday parties, was waiting for him, in tears.
"I think it hit him that this is really happening," Campbell said. "It's
going to affect a real family out there."
Mark Wasserman, 45, of Safety Harbor, a computer programmer who had been
with Nielsen for 15 years, left on his own. He couldn't take it anymore. He
said he began to feel like he was working in a foreign country.
"It got to the point that getting on the elevator or walking down the
hall," he said, "I didn't know anybody."
He was always wondering: Am I next? He found new work as a consultant and
said he was glad to get out.
"Mitchell was trying to deny that anyone has any knowledge or value at
all," Wasserman said. "Basically, he was saying, 'You are all faceless.' "
Two months after Campbell was laid off, Nikhil Asopa, the 37-year-old from
Jodhpur, India, started work for TCS in Oldsmar.
He has been with TCS since 1998.
He had gone to university in India, earning an undergraduate degree in
engineering and a graduate degree in business. At an interview with a firm
that was going to place him in one of India's many growing IT firms he was
asked if he had a location preference. He answered quickly:
None.
In his 10 years with TCS, Asopa has worked in Bombay, India; Salzbergen,
Germany; Schaumburg, Ill.; Schenectady, N.Y.; Richmond, Va.; Marietta, Ga.;
and now Oldsmar. He speaks English and Hindi and some German. Before
working for TCS for Nielsen, he was working for TCS for General Electric.
Now he is in charge of more than 100 people who work in the applications
development department for TCS at Nielsen.
He was in Georgia for two and a half years, Illinois for two and a half
years, New York for a year, Virginia for three months.
Asopa has seen a lot of this country. He likes it here. He didn't like the
cold in Chicago, he said the other day at a Starbucks, and he didn't like
the snow in Albany, but he has found the United States to be convenient and
cordial. Americans hold doors, he said. Americans say hello.
He lives in a second-floor apartment at Egret's Landing in Palm Harbor with
his wife, who's a homemaker, and his 7-year-old son, who is in the third
grade and wants to be a "space scientist" when he grows up. The family goes
to Clearwater Beach and Disney World and bowls at Countryside Lanes on U.S.
19. His wife likes the education system here.
"But as part of my job," he said, "I don't see any particular place as my
home. If my company asks me tomorrow to go to the Netherlands to work, I'll
go; if they ask me to go to India, I'll go.
"Mine," he said, "is a transferable job."
Campbell out, Asopa in --- that happened for months inside the walls of
Nielsen before any of it became apparent in Oldsmar. The bus stop at Tampa
Road started getting busier, people started talking because Oldsmar's still
that kind of place, the City Council members started getting phone calls,
and all this led to a tense April 15 City Council meeting.
"I'm furious," council member Sue Vale said. "I think it's disgusting."
"This is preposterous," council member Janice Miller said.
"I've seen a half-dozen examples of what Nielsen has done walking around
the street today," council member Greg Rublee said.
This led to letters to the editor about "alien workers" and how Nielsen had
"double-crossed" Oldsmar.
"I take great umbrage," one man wrote, "that our citizens should be
welcoming these Tata workers. I will not welcome anyone who affects my
family's security."
The city asked Nielsen to give up $3.1-million in future tax incentives.
The company agreed, not because it had violated the agreement, but because
of the bad press and to keep the peace.
The concession didn't prevent blustery CNN personality Lou Dobbs from
opining on his show:
"I got to tell you people --- you know what? --- if the people there in
Florida think this is fine, then they're going to be part of the reason
that the quality of life and the standard of living in this country
continues to decline because Nielsen doing this, shouldn't even be allowed
to rate U.S. television networks and broadcasts, period.
"I mean, how dare them?"
The Lou Dobbs bit spawned more e-vitriol. "Unpatriotic." "A TOTAL DISGRACE
TO THIS COUNTRY."
Then Mayor Jim Ronecker said something remarkable at a city workshop: "It's
not all about America anymore."
People could take all the umbrage they wanted, but the mayor had a city to
run.
Ronecker sent an e-mail to a man who had written an angry message.
"Here lies my dilemma," the mayor started.
He wrote that Nielsen was "extremely vital to the economic health of our
city." That the 1,300 "American" jobs that remained were good ones. That if
the city raised too much of a fuss, causing Nielsen to leave, that would
bring "a whole lot of misery" to even more families.
"I am really in a no-win situation it would seem," he wrote. "Do I pile on
along with everyone else or do I try and save 1,300 jobs and look like a
bad guy in the process?"
Nielsen is by far the biggest employer in town. Oldsmar doubled its
property tax revenue from 2001 to 2007, and Nielsen was a big part of that.
Down Shore Drive, Beverland, the jeans-wearing, ribbon-cutting former mayor
from 2003, sat at his kitchen table in a T-shirt that said THESE COLORS
DON'T RUN and said:
"Am I happy with Americans losing their jobs?
"No.
"Am I glad Nielsen is here?
"Damn right I am."
Is this good for Oldsmar?
Is this bad for Oldsmar?
Could it be both?
Here are a few things to consider:
Property taxes have gone down. Only by a little, but they did. That was
because of the tax incentives Nielsen gave up.
At the Abbey, the apartment complex where many of the TCS workers livers
live, crime has gone down, according to the Pinellas County Sheriff's
Office. It's hard to say whether that's because of the Indians.
Ridership on Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority bus Route 93, which goes
from the stop by the Abbey to the stop in front of Nielsen, has gone up 55
percent.
Over at Oldsmar Elementary, according to the principal, seven new students
this school year are from India. One father serves on the school's advisory
council.
Last month, a top TCS executive gave a presentation about his company at an
Upper Tampa Bay Chamber of Commerce lunch-eon. The chamber people ate
filet mignon and fudge cake and came away impressed. They had no idea TCS
was so big, or so charity-minded. Here, in the past few months, TCS workers
have volunteered with Habitat for Humanity, the American Cancer Society and
the SHARE Florida Food Network.
"We don't get upset about new buildings," said Jerry Custin, the chamber
boss, "so why do we get upset about new faces?"
Here, perhaps, is why.
In 2003, Oldsmar contributed to the tax incentives package that was
supposed to encourage Nielsen to create jobs at its new location. No one
ever said jobs for Americans, but they meant it.
"If you're going to have a factory in India, employ Indians," said Janice
Miller, the council member. "If you're going to have a factory in America,
employ Americans; if you're going to have a factory in France, employ
French.
"When in Rome, you know?"
Mitchell Habib said: "It shouldn't matter where you work. You shouldn't
care about where they come from or where they are."
Except people do care.
The financial equation works.
The human equation is always more complicated.
Campbell, the laid-off Nielsen Web developer, found work quickly, mostly
short-term contracts. He eventually started his own Web development
company. It took him nearly a year to get back to his original income.
He had interviewed for jobs in other cities, but he has family ties here
and he didn't want to be a weekend husband and father.
"My family and my kids mean too much to me," he said.
One evening earlier this month, Asopa, the TCS worker who runs the
applications develop-ment department in Oldsmar, drove from work home to
his apartment in Egret's Landing.
He sat down on the couch. His wife prepared fresh ginger tea with milk. He
asked his son how school was.
"Was your teacher happy with you?" he said.
"Yes," his son said.
They ate Indian pistachio pastries and Frito-Lay Stax cheddar-flavored
chips. The walls were bare save for a framed collage of pictures of his son
at preschool outside Atlanta, a poster of dolphins that said HARMONY and a
silver and black plaque Nielsen had given Asopa.
"Thank you for your drive, delivery, and outstanding client service," it
said.
Sometimes, said Asopa and his wife, it's hard to keep moving to new places.
But still.
"If you don't have that flexibility," he said, "there's a constraint.
"I have seen people leaving their jobs because they cannot move. It's a
global competition. Everyone has to do something new to prove his worth.
Geographic boundaries should not be a reason you're not able to prove your
capabilities."
There has always been an unspoken social contract between an American
worker, that worker's company and that worker's place. Work hard, be
rewarded, know your neighbor.
Campbell was loyal to Nielsen. He expected Nielsen to be loyal to him.
Movement means instability.
Asopa is loyal to TCS. What he expects in return is a chance to keep
working. Movement means opportunity.
John McCain said this in his speech at the Republican National Convention:
"We're going to help workers who've lost a job that won't come back find a
new one that won't go away."
At the Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama said "business should
live up to their responsibilities to create American jobs, to look out for
American workers."
Scott Wilson, a partner at Clearwater's Brown-Wilson Group, which puts out
The Black Book of Outsourcing, hears these things and has to remind himself
that "they're just talking politics. They're not telling you what's really
going to have to happen.''
"We as a society are going into this outsourcing kicking and screaming,"
Wilson said. "But we live in a global society, and that's all there is to
it."
That doesn't make losing a job any easier. Last month some laid-off workers
from Nielsen and some workers who were expecting to get laid off got
together at Eddie's Bar and Grill in Dunedin. Many of the 30 couldn't give
their names because of the terms of their severance packages.
One woman said she thought she was going to work at Nielsen until she died,
or retired, whichever came first.
"It's profits over patriotism," retired Nielsen employee Walter Patt of
Pinellas Park said.
Mitchell Habib doesn't apologize for making money for his company. Nielsen
reported revenues in the second quarter of this year that were 12 percent
higher than the revenues for the second quarter of last year. The work, he
said, is also getting done better: Overnight ratings delivery has improved
72 percent.
So the deal is working, at least for the bottom line.
How that feels inside Nielsen is another question.
Habib came to Oldsmar one day this month for three global teleconferences
with Nielsen employees. That evening Nielsen organized an NFL game-watching
party meant as a morale boost for employees. "We haven't done enough of
this kind of thing," spokeswoman Amy Rettig said.
It had been a hard day for 40 employees in the department called Software
Quality Assurance. They had been told they might get laid off in the coming
weeks or months, and that they --- like others before them --- might have
to train their TCS replacements.
Now, in the evening, the cafeteria inside the building was decorated with
Mylar balloons shaped like footballs. Outside there was a
13-foot-by-10-foot LCD screen with the game about to start.
Habib got up on a stage in front of the TV. He had on jeans and a blue
blazer and loafers.
"Good evening!" he said into the microphone.
Some clapping.
About 500 people had RSVP'd. The crowd didn't look that big.
"GOOD EVENING!"
More clapping.
People sat at tables and ate hamburgers and potato salad out of Styrofoam
clam shells. They drank Bud Light and Michelob Ultra and chardonnay.
Two-drink limit.
At halftime Habib gave out free Bucs tickets. Then the big prize: tickets
to this year's Super Bowl in Tampa. He held them up.
He paused.
The crowd was silent.
"This is the easiest way to get you guys quiet," Habib said. "We just
figured it out."
Some laughs. Some groans.
Habib gave the tickets to the winner and then walked off the stage and into
an elevator. He had talked to European employees in the morning and
employees in the Americas midday. Now it was time to talk to Asia.
Over there it was already tomorrow.
Times photojournalist Douglas R. Clifford, multimedia reporter Catriona
Stuart and researchers Caryn Baird and Shirl Kennedy contributed to this
report. Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com. Theresa
Blackwell can be reached at tblackwell@sptimes.com.
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