IBM files for patent on offshoring jobs

Original Link: http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090330/BIZ/903300315

By Christine Young

As IBM was firing thousands of American workers last week, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published Big Blue's application to copyright a computerized system that calculates how to offshore jobs while maximizing government tax breaks.

Update: IBM withdraws its application, calling it an error.

In their application to patent a "method and system for strategic global resource sourcing," five Hudson Valley IBMers describe how it weighs such plans as "50 percent of resources in China by 2010," against such factors as labor costs, infrastructure and the "minimum head count to qualify for incentives."

The five Westchester County inventors, Ching-hua Chen-ritzo, Daniel Patrick Connors, Markus Ettl, Mayank Sharma, and Karthik Sourirajan, submitted the application to the patent office in September 2007, but it took a year and a half for that patent to be published online.

None could be reached by telephone Sunday except Ching-hua Chen-ritzo of Mahopac, who declined to comment, and attempts to reach IBM were unsuccessful.

Lee Conrad, national coordinator for Alliance@IBM, a group trying to unionize Big Blue, was stunned to learn of the application.

"This is obviously outrageous — a patent on how to offshore U.S. jobs," Conrad said. "IBM is obviously doing all it can to decimate the U.S. work force, and it is all the more reason why IBM should not get any tax breaks or stimulus money. They clearly are abandoning the U.S. work force."

The application says the system weighs moving into or out of a particular country against criteria such as wages, political systems, "incentive contracts" and the economic impact of "violating and/or satisfying those incentives."

In January, IBM reported that about 115,000, or 29 percent, of its global work force of about 400,000, is in the United States.