D.C. Awards Obamacare IT Work To Offshore Outsourcer 402
dcblogs writes "Infosys, an India-based offshore IT outsourcing firm, recently announced that it had won a $49.5 million contract to develop a health benefit exchange for the District of Columbia. The contract was awarded to a U.S.-based Infosys subsidiary, Infosys Public Services. That's one of the larger government contracts won by an offshore outsourcing firm, but it's unclear whether any of the work will be done overseas. The District isn't disclosing any contract details. An FOIA request for the contract has been submitted. Infosys is one of the largest users of H-1B visas, and has been under a grand jury investigation for its use of B1 visitor visas."
Re:Why? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, but it will cost 20 times more to be burdened by and the be forced to fix a shitty first implementation.
Do it right the first time or you're going to pay even more to do it right the second.
Re:Yet another great argument... (Score:5, Informative)
Including falsely inflated skills listings designed to keep anyone from successfully applying for the jobs later salted to H-1Bs with far less than the originally advertised qualifications.
Actually, they don't have to go through that rigamarole any longer: they quietly dropped the requirement that jobs be offered to citizens before hiring an H-1B the last time the various tech kingpins called up their patsies in Congress to ask for a change.
Re:Yet another great argument... (Score:0, Informative)
n the world we live in, yes, the rich become wealthier, but the poor also become wealthier. In fact, the poor are wealthier than they've ever been at any point in history.
The issue is that there are more poor people in the United States than at any point in recent history. You carefully choose your metric to paint a rosy picture, but the fact is that for the average American worker, real wages have been declining for decades. The reason for this decline is in no small part due to the uplifting effects of global trade in labor.
Re:Yet another great argument... (Score:3, Informative)
Protectionism is why sugar prices are so high in America that we use high fructose corn syrup whereas the rest of the world uses ordinary sugar
Incorrect. Sugar prices may be artificially inflated some due to import/export taxes; but the real reason HFC is used is that corn is so cheap because (i) it is highly subsidized, and (ii) we (the federal gov't) pay a lot of farmers to plan corn just to give them work. Both of these are due to Agricultural Lobbying done on behalf the farmers and their unions.
Of course, now HFC is getting to be more expansive than regular sugar thanks to corn-based ethanol production.
Re:Yet another great argument... (Score:5, Informative)
Your rhetoric doesn't align well with reality. Imports of sugar from Mexico grew under NAFTA. HFCS has more to do with profit margins and "Big Food's" ability to squeeze as much merchantable material from its raw materials.
If a large food corporation purchase corn and process it for food, the corporation would rather process the by-products into a useable/sellable ingredient than having to pay for disposal. They can undercut sugar as much as they want since break even or a little loss is still less of an expenditure than disposal.
Infosys will always do a lowball bid. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Yet another great argument... (Score:2, Informative)
Typical liberal response is to assume anyone who disagrees is one of those damn republicans. I don't happen to be a republican. I'm one of those even worse libertarians who doesn't make any damn sense applying freedom across the board. The standard of living IS increasing. You have to choose where you spend your money on the items I mentioned failing to realize that 50 years ago, you didn't have that choice, few of those items existed and they weren't as useful back then. People coming into the library to use a computer wouldn't have that opportunity 10-20 years ago. Are they really worse off because they can't afford an iPad and use it at home?