Outsourcing

At a luxury hotel conference center in Century City last week, "international hospitals" from Singapore to South America set up half an acre of colorful display booths in an attempt to attract more business from American insurers and employers. Glossy brochures and videos offered hip replacements, cancer treatments and cardiac care in Turkey, Thailand or Costa Rica. Send a patient and a companion on business class, the basic pitch went, and we'll give them deluxe private rooms, a concierge and a driver.

Gary Richardson left this boomtown-gone-bust in 1996 for a computer job in Dallas, the big city 60 miles north. "I didn't think I would ever come back," Richardson recalled recently, "because there were no jobs like mine here." Not until this year, when Northrop Grumman Corp. opened an information technology center in town and began recruiting IT specialists and software engineers.

On a warm May weekend in this Central Valley town, the irony was as thick as melting fudge. As usual, the annual Chocolate Festival was drawing hordes of fun-seekers. However, they were streaming in by the thousands just two weeks after Hershey Co. -- Oakdale's biggest employer and the nation's biggest candy company -- announced its plan to close its sprawling plant, eliminate all 575 jobs and open a new factory in Monterrey, Mexico.

After two years working nights at a U.S. company's computer call center, Vamsi knew it was time to quit when his 6-year-old son brought home a school portrait he'd drawn of his father, asleep in bed. "He was asked to draw a picture of his mom and dad, and he drew me sleeping. That's the only way he ever saw me," remembers Vamsi, 31, who like many southern Indians goes by only one name. "He never saw me doing anything else." Indians may have taken over three-quarters of the world's call-center jobs, but they've also taken on the stresses of those jobs: weight gain, depression, boredom and, often, relationship troubles.

At the National Counterterrorism Center -- the agency created two years ago to prevent another attack like Sept. 11 -- more than half of the employees are not U.S. government analysts or terrorism experts. Instead, they are outside contractors. At CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., senior officials say it is routine for career officers to look around the table during meetings on secret operations and be surrounded by so-called green-badgers -- nonagency employees who carry special-colored IDs.

In a sleek new office building, two dozen young Indians are studying the customs of a place none of them has ever seen. One by one, the students present their conclusions about this fabled land. "Americans eat a lot of junk food. Table manners are very casual," says Ritu Khanna. "People are quite self-centered. The average American has 13 credit cards," says Nerissa Dcosta. "Seventy-six percent of the people mistrust the government.

A dozen Boeing Co. machinists huddled over an oil-drum fire in the chilly morning drizzle, hooting as white trucks periodically cruised past them and into the gates of the massive airplane assembly plant. Belonging to a North Carolina contractor, the trucks carried parts for Boeing's new 787 Dreamliner -- which would be under construction inside were the union machinists not hurtling catcalls outside, locked in a seven-week-old strike that some estimate is costing Boeing $100 million a day.

Inside a glistening building in an otherwise gritty industrial zone near downtown Los Angeles, young men with trendy hair and tattooed arms sit in front of oversize computer screens and click to the low thump of a hip-hop tune. The place could pass for a video-gamer boot camp were it not for the piles of pricey jeans and T-shirts in every corner of the room.

The movement of American factory jobs and white-collar work to other countries is part of a positive transformation that will enrich the U.S. economy over time, even if it causes short-term pain and dislocation, the Bush administration said Monday. The embrace of foreign outsourcing, an accelerating trend that has contributed to U.S. job losses in recent years and has become an issue in the 2004 elections, is contained in the president's annual report to Congress on the health of the economy.

Brenda Pope sits at the kitchen table and stares sadly at her work-hardened hands. Inside one wrist is the purple welt of a surgical scar that runs halfway to her elbow. Twenty years at a sewing machine gave her the carpal tunnel injury. That scar and $15,000 in severance is what she has to show for those years. Near the edge of Blue Ridge, Ga., the Levi Strauss plant where she once worked now sits empty, a glass-and-brick shell overlooking acres of empty parking lot.

At a luxury hotel conference center in Century City last week, "international hospitals" from Singapore to South America set up half an acre of colorful display booths in an attempt to attract more business from American insurers and employers. Glossy brochures and videos offered hip replacements, cancer treatments and cardiac care in Turkey, Thailand or Costa Rica. Send a patient and a companion on business class, the basic pitch went, and we'll give them deluxe private rooms, a concierge and a driver.

Re: David Lazarus' consumer column "Proudly driving U.S. sock makers out of business," May 13: David Lazarus laments the job losses associated with outsourcing but ignores the benefits: lower prices, better goods and opportunities in new and different jobs. The pain he cites is real, but this is an argument for providing unemployment assistance and job retraining, not for prohibiting consenting adults from engaging in free exchange of goods and services. And if outsourcing is such a negative, would we be better off if BMW and Toyota closed down their assembly plants in South Carolina and Kentucky, fired all the workers and sent those "outsourced" jobs back to Germany and Japan?

Re " 'Nurse, call Asia, stat,' " April 20 I am one of those American transcriptionists who a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report cited by The Times declares outsourcing won't harm "because there is so much work to be done." In fact, medical-records outsourcing has caused the demise of many small American transcription groups. Now we have giant transcription corporations that treat their workers as cogs in a machine, demanding typing eight to 12 hours a day, seven days a week to earn that median $31,250 income -- without insurance or any other benefits.

It started out as just another Thanksgiving Day stomachache, a nagging pain that sharpened until it reverberated from California halfway around the world. When the ache in her lower right abdomen became excruciating, the twentysomething woman was rushed to a surgery center, where the doctor diagnosed a ruptured appendix. The woman needed an operation -- fast. But before the surgeon could wheel her into the operating theater, he had to find out whether the patient's insurance company would pay.

Warner Bros. Entertainment is eliminating 800 jobs, or about 10% of its global workforce, becoming the latest media company to take drastic cost-cutting measures amid a deepening recession. About 600 people will be laid off across all divisions of the studio's operations, and 200 cuts will come from open positions not being filled. Warner's studio headquarters in Burbank will take the brunt of the job losses, with about 450 people being terminated and 150 open positions being shed.

Warner Bros., following a trend that is now all too familiar among American companies, is preparing to outsource jobs to India and Poland as part of a studio-wide cost-cutting move. The Time Warner Inc.-owned studio will join other media companies, including NBC/Universal and Viacom Inc., that have initiated cutbacks and layoffs in the face of weakening entertainment industry revenue and the deepening recession.

As the alleged scourge of American journalism, James Macpherson cuts a rather disappointing figure. In a crisp blue blazer, with slicked-back gray hair, the onetime garment manufacturer looks like a prep school headmaster. He speaks with the polite self-control of PBS' Jim Lehrer. Macpherson drew headlines and hate mail last year when it was revealed that his Pasadena Now website intended to report the news from Pasadena using writers in Mumbai and Bangalore, India.

A dozen Boeing Co. machinists huddled over an oil-drum fire in the chilly morning drizzle, hooting as white trucks periodically cruised past them and into the gates of the massive airplane assembly plant. Belonging to a North Carolina contractor, the trucks carried parts for Boeing's new 787 Dreamliner -- which would be under construction inside were the union machinists not hurtling catcalls outside, locked in a seven-week-old strike that some estimate is costing Boeing $100 million a day.

With her flowing, hot-pink Indian suit, jangling silver bangles and perky voice, Bhumika Chaturvedi, 24, doesn't fit the stereotype of a thuggish, heard-it-all-before debt collector. But lately, she has had no problem making U.S. debtors cry. For the last three years, Chaturvedi has been a top collection agent at her call center, phoning hundreds of Americans a day and politely asking them to pay up. As the U.S.

After two years working nights at a U.S. company's computer call center, Vamsi knew it was time to quit when his 6-year-old son brought home a school portrait he'd drawn of his father, asleep in bed. "He was asked to draw a picture of his mom and dad, and he drew me sleeping. That's the only way he ever saw me," remembers Vamsi, 31, who like many southern Indians goes by only one name. "He never saw me doing anything else." Indians may have taken over three-quarters of the world's call-center jobs, but they've also taken on the stresses of those jobs: weight gain, depression, boredom and, often, relationship troubles.