:: Straight to the Source ::

While U.S. consumer confidence inched up a bit this month, consumers’ overall outlook is generally pretty “dismal,” according to the Conference Board’s director of consumer research.
A similar pessimism can be seen in a survey of IT professionals by staffing company Spherion, reports internetnews.com. Spherion’s monthly Employee Confidence Index, which measures confidence in respondents’ personal employment […]

Craig Barrett, chairman of Intel, minces few words in his opinion piece regarding the European Union’s so-called Blue Card.
In the piece, which was recently published in The Washington Post and other major newspapers, he lauds European leaders for advancing a plan to create a temporary but renewable two-year visa that should make it easier for […]

Much of the ire over American job losses is directed at U.S. companies that choose to outsource work to other countries or at companies that apparently use instruments like H-1B visas to employ foreign workers who are willing to work for less than their American counterparts.
In contrast, relatively few folks seem bothered by self-service technologies […]

I blogged back in September about the rise of Western-style ills like stress, depression and heart disease among workers in India’s outsourcing industry.
The problem is an increasingly serious one, reports the Washington Post. The Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations is projecting a possible 20-fold increase in lost productivity due to health issues […]

The U.S. market for outsourcing has been soft most of this year, as I blogged in April, and in August and again in October. Economic uncertainty is leading American companies to scale back their outsourcing initiatives, say some experts.
However, large Indian services providers like Wipro and Infosys seem more concerned about the rupee’s rise against […]