Just a reminder, Bushs party to raise funds via Noida, Gurgaon (31 Jan 2003)
Bipin Chandran in New Delhi - Business Standard, January 31, 2003
The US Republican Party now has a band of young and enthusiastic fund-raisers in Noida and Gurgaon.
HCL eServe, the business process outsourcing arm of the Shiv Nadar-promoted HCL Technologies, has bagged a project to undertake a fund-raising campaign for the US Republican Party over the telephone.
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HCL eServe has put in place a team of 75 people to work on the project out of its call centres in Noida and Gurgaon. According to industry sources, the number of seats could be ramped up depending on the success of the campaign. These operators are required to call up people in the US seeking their support for President George W Bush and a donation for the Republican cause.
According to the sources, the calling process involves high degree of automation in order to limit human intervention. The process is designed in such a way as to limit human intervention. The company wants to complete the process using the integrated voice recording technology, which allows navigation using voice responses, said the source.
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The Republican contract comes on the heels of a successful anti-abortion campaign run by HCL eServe for a US politician.
HCL eServe is building additional capacity in view of an expected growth in business. It is giving final touches to two new facilities a 1,200-seat centre in Noida and a 700-seat centre in Chennai.
The company's board has approved an investment of $40 million for HCL eServe, which the company is expected to utilise to fund its various growth plans.
Noida is somewhere east of Delhi, India.
DUD! Why does the US Republican party HATE America? President Bush announced Monday he is creating a high-level government post to nurture the manufacturing sector, which is bleeding jobs in states crucial to his re-election. No Shit, Sherlock! The economy has been in the toilet for three years with 9 million jobless people, and Bush is just NOW concerned about creating some jobs in the red states crucial to his re-election.
Bush said the nation has lost "thousands of jobs in manufacturing." In fact, the losses have soared into the millions: Of the 2.7 million jobs the US economy has lost since the recession began in early 2001, 2.4 million were in manufacturing. The downturn has eliminated more than one in 10 of the nation's factory jobs.
Nearly 9 million Americans will have no job to return to after their three-day weekend," said Democratic contender Howard Dean. "We need a president who is creating jobs, instead of losing more jobs than any president has since the Great Depression."
Gene Lyons: "Bush's sheer incompetence is impossible to overstate. The bad news and the lies just keep on coming. Yesterday, we learned that the U.S. budget deficit will reach a record $480 billion for this fiscal year. 2001 Nobel Prize-winning economist George Akerloff told the German magazine Der Spiegel "this is the worst government the US has ever had in its more than 200 years of history." He described Bush's save-the-rich tax cuts as "is a form of looting" that will bankrupt the treasury. It was also recently revealed that the White House pressured the Environmental Protection Agency to suppress findings of deadly toxins in the atmosphere in lower Manhattan after 9/11 for fear public warnings would damage the economy. Between dollars and lives, Bush chose the bottom line.
Many workers feel pressure not to accept overtime pay By Diane E. Lewis, Globe Staff, 9/1/2003
The right to time-and-a-half pay for work beyond 40 hours a week is one of the hardest-won achievements of the American labor movement, finally enshrined in law in 1938 after a bitter and divisive struggle. Although some states had capped the workday at eight hours shortly after the Civil War, it wasn't until late in the New Deal that aggressive union leaders, including the legendary John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers, won congressional passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act that guaranteed overtime pay....
However, the overtime rules are headed for a drastic change. The Labor Department's proposed new regulations, due early next year, are intended to eliminate antiquated job descriptions and salary levels. The proposed rules would exclude professionals who earn $65,000 or more and perform one supervisory duty. Union workers with contracts providing for overtime would not be affected by the changes, nor would hourly employees who earn $65,000 or more per year. The Labor Department estimates that about 644,000 salaried professionals would lose overtime pay under the new rules.
But unions argue that many more workers would be made ineligible. A June 2003 study backed by the labor movement and released by the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C., estimates that as many as 8 million workers could lose the right to collect time-and-a-half when the new rules take effect.
Back in the 80's I had a Reagan Hood t-shirt. It had a cartoon of wrinkly old Ronbo in green tights & hat holding bags of coins. At the bottom it said, "From the needy to the greedy."
