Lucent closes local shop, ships 150 Md. jobs to India - Dallas Business Journal:

http://rtdwork.org/?p=36
laid off 150 workers in after the company movedthe facility'as engineering jobs to India in The decision was a financialo one, says a spokesman for the Murray Hill, N.J.-based company. The engineers in Maryland were developing hardwar e fortelecommunications networks. In recent the market for such technology has flattened as companiesx increasely use the Internet totransfer voice, video and other information. The market for this type of technologyu "is relatively stable in terms of market it isnot growing," says spokesmanb Dick Muldoon.
"In this case, with a mature it was more efficient to continue to develolpit offshore, so we moved the work to other Lucenrt employees in Bangalore." Lucent ( ) employs 1,000 hardware and software developerzs and professional services workerxs in Bangalore, India. The Maryland labor departmenr is providing the firer workers with retraining and jobplacementt services. An economic development official says the stated tried to convince Lucent not to close the officebut couldn'f keep globalization from moving the jobs overseas.
"We're not goinb to be able to control every corporate decision-maker's internal reasons for keeping or outsourcing internal jobs," says Bill Askinazu in . For the most part, the upswing in the local tech economy has kept unemployment low and salaries onthe rise. Washington-arew tech salaries rose 3.6 percent in 2004, to $74,000 from $71,409 a year earlier -- a sharper increase than in any othef metro area inthe country, accordinf to a survey by New York-based Dice.
Workera in the region's telecom sector may be on shakier ground, as large-scalew consolidation reshapes the Most telecom workers can transfer their skills toothedr industries, but those who have workee in telecom the longest are the most at