HOUSTON: In order to reduce costs, global oil major Royal Dutch Shell will soon transfer additional office jobs from Houston and elsewhere to India
and the Philippines. Shell has also announced that it would slash 5,000 jobs by year-end , including hundreds in Houston as part of a sweeping reorganisation new CEO Peter Voser said is needed to make the company more competitive.
According to internal Shell documents, the European oil giant has been transferring additional office jobs from Houston and elsewhere to India and the Philippines to reduce costs. The migration programmes affect employees in finance and other support functions, which are being consolidated in shared service centres in low-cost countries to fit the new company structure.

It’s unclear how many of Shell’s 13,000 employees in Houston will be affected by the migration plans. Partly, that’s because company officials are still deciding which jobs will stay or go abroad, and are rolling out the plans in phases that run into next year. But at least a few divisions in Houston are preparing to be downsized dramatically.

Major oil companies including Shell, ConocoPhillips and BP have been cutting jobs, capital spending budgets and other costs in response to the global economic downturn that has sapped demand for petroleum products like gasoline and diesel fuel. But Shell’s migration programmes could have broader implications for Houston .

Shell, which is based in The Hague, with US headquarters in Houston, has been involved in a major downsizing since Voser replaced Jeroen van der Veer as CEO in July. By year end, the company plans to cut 5,000 employees, or 10% of its global workforce, under a reorganisation he calls Transition 2009.

The process which merged the company’s three upstream businesses into two, expanded its downstream group and added a new projects and technology division trimmed management ranks by 20% and has forced 15,000 Shell employees to reapply for a smaller Read more…

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DUBAI|THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Dubai debt crisis fuelled fears of job cuts and its adverse fallout on remittance-dependent economy in Kerala but India on Sunday said there was no need to panic confident it will blow over. Kerala finance minister T M Thomas Isaac said he is very “anxious” about the possible slowdown in construction activity in the Gulf following the crisis which could badly affect workers from the state. Over two million migrants from Kerala are working in the Gulf. “A majority of workers in the construction sector in the Gulf are from Kerala. We are really anxious about their future,” Isaac told PTI in Thiruvananthapuram.

The Indian government said it was closely tracking the fall-out of the crisis in Dubai and directed its missions in the region to provide all necessary help the vulnerable section of the Indian workforce in the Gulf who may be affected by the crisis.

Overseas Indian affairs minister Vayalar Ravi calmed the anxieties in India saying Government was not anticipating a surge of returnees to the country from the region as it was confident that the current crisis will blow over because it was much lesser in magnitude compared to the worst period of the global financial meltdown.

“There is no need for undue panic. We are closely monitoring the situation. The crisis had actually started one year back,” Ravi told PTI. The Gulf Emirate’s $60 billion debt woes have sent shock waves around the world.
Ravi’s sentiments were shared by his colleague and Minister of state for Railways E Ahamed.

“There was no room for any panic on the fallout of Dubai’s trouble on India either as the country’s economy was robust as it had proved during the global recession last year,” he said.

Lakhs of workers from India are employed in realty and other sectors in Dubai and other Middle East cities and their families are dependent on remittances. Indians form 42.3% of the population of Dubai. Allaying fears of an exodus of migrant workforce and large scale job losses, India’s consulate in Dubai said the debt crisis had no direct impact on the country and there was no need to panic. “We are confident the government of Dubai and the UAE are fully capable of handling the short-term crisis faced by Dubai World,” India’s Consul General Venu Rajamony told PTI in Dubai.

Indian businessmen and analysts on the ground also said the world was overreacting to the crisis. Local Indian businessmen said it is too early to judge the impact on remittances, redundancies and Read more…

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BANGALORE: Indian IT service firms are looking to throw open their gates yet again to prospective employees as the gloom of the global recession lifts from the $60 billion industry and demand for outsourcing services improves.

This is in stark contrast to the scenario a few months back when most of them had frozen salaries, promotions and, in some cases, saw their first ever declines in quarterly headcount additions. The sector, which employs more than 2 million people, has been one of the biggest job creators in Asia’s third-largest economy and used to hire people by thousands every quarter, mostly engineering graduates.

India’s top two IT service firms Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys, each of which employ more than 100,000, used to shower employees with hefty pay hikes and perks not too long ago to keep their staff from being poached by bigger rivals such as IBM and Accenture.

“There is some confidence back in the system,” V. Balakrishnan, CFO of Infosys Technologies said at the Reuters India Investment Summit in Bangalore. “Most of the corporates are feeling much better about the economy now than they were some six to eight months back.”

Infosys, India’s second-largest software services exporter, last month raised its hiring target to 20,000 for the fiscal year that ends in March, up from its earlier forecast of 18,000, and Balakrishnan said it wanted to be well-oiled when growth returns.

Infosys, which had earlier put a hold on salary hikes and promotions for this fiscal year, said it would raise pay by an average of 8 percent this year for its employees in India. “In the beginning of the year, the environment was so challenging that we said we won’t give any wage increase for the year, and we also stopped all promotions. We had some buffer on the margins so we gave the wage increase,” Infosys’ Balakrishnan said.

Wipro Ltd, India’s No 3 software services firm, also said the IT industry was back to being bullish about its hiring outlook. “The recovery is still taking place. It’s still very slow. But I think customers have decided to move on and make things happen,” Wipro’s joint CEO of IT business Suresh Vaswani said. Wipro’s CFO of IT business Manish Dugar said there would be headcount growth going forward.

“But I don’t know if we’ll have proportionate increase in headcount to the revenue.” Wipro also said it will announce a decision on wage increases during the course of this quarter. Mahindra Satyam, earlier known as Satyam Computer Services that was rocked by India’s biggest corporate fraud, is also looking to hire people and reinstating various employee benefits.

The company currently has a “virtual pool” of about 5,000 employees, who are not actively involved on any outsourcing project and are on reduced salaries. On Monday, Tata Consultancy Services, India’s top outsourcing company, had said the company was likely to increase wages in the next fiscal year.

The change of sentiment in the Indian IT sector gives millions Read more…

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CHENNAI: On a day when labour strife in Manesar, the auto hub in North India took an ugly turn with a company official getting beaten up by workers, there is some positive news on the labour relations front coming in from the South.

Nokia India signed its first wage revision pact with the ruling DMK’s union in Tamil Nadu, the Labour Progressive Federation (LPF), as a result of which over 5,000 employees of the cell-phone maker here will see their salaries go up by Rs 1,500 to Rs 3,300 per month.

It is crucial for Nokia to ensure that its operations run smoothly in Tamil Nadu as its plant at Sriperambadur near Chennai is now the company’s largest manufacturing facility in the world.

The tripartite agreement ( 12( 3) reached last week between Nokia workers’ progressive union, affiliated to LPF and the management before the deputy commissioner of labour, provided for increasing the monthly canteen allowance to Rs 1000 from Rs 850 and paying a night shift allowance of Rs 20, which will fetch Rs 200 for 10 shifts in a month.

The revision has come a boon to employees, mainly hailing from nearby rural centres as they will get arrears for the last nine months. Nokia has also agreed to pay a bonus of 8.33 % ( one month wage) to employees. The Finnish mobile handset maker major has set up its largest electronic hardware manufacturing unit on 210.87 acres allotted at Sipcot industrial park, Sriperambadur. The State Government has also extended a structured package of assistance to the MNC.

LPF general secretary and Nokia union President, M Shanmugam told ET as the workers were keen on clinching an early revision, an intermediate or short term wage settlement was concluded covering the period April 1, 2009 to March 31, 2010.

“It is a big victory for the employees working in a multinational company and the wage revision has been concluded smoothly though a collective bargaining. While LPF affiliated unions are functioning in various public and private sector companies, this is the first time it is representing a large workforce in the Sriperambadur industrial corridor”, he said.

Prior to the revision, the employees, who joined Nokia in April 2007, were getting a consolidated pay of Rs 4400 to Rs 5800 per month. Now, the intermediate settlement has fetched a hike of Rs 1500 to Rs 1750 for those with an experience of 16 months and 24 months ( including the 15 month training period).
Those working with experience of above two years and upto 36 months, have secured an increase of Rs 2000 to Rs 2250 and above 36 months, Rs 3000 to Rs 3300.

As per the accord, the union and management will resume the talks in January to reach a long term settlement for revising the wages and allowances from April 1, 2010. It will provide for fixing DA and other allowances.

Responding to an e mail sent by ET, Nokia said, “Nokia employees, the factory management and the union met in the presence of Deputy Commissioner of Labour, Government of Tamil Nadu. The issue has been resolved through mutual dialogue and the work in Read more…

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BANGALORE: Jobs are slowly returning. Employers have started coming out of their bunkers after a long hibernation and lifting the freeze on hiring.A recovery was visible in July and it became more pronounced during August-September.

Ashok Reddy, MD of staffing firm TeamLease, says the rise in the stockmarket, the improvement in FII and FDI flows and the improvement in themonsoon situation have positively impacted sentiments in industry. Many employers are now back in touchwith their third party headhunters.

There is also a slight improvement in the recruitment ad space. The active job position numbers in TeamLease too are indicative: the firm used to handle as many as 10,000 active jobs a month before themarket crash last year. By June this year, it had dropped to 800 non-active positions. But now again it is up at 3,500 active positions.

Zubin Shroff,MDof TalentManagement Group, says Read more…

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BEIJING: Chinese investors should employ more Indians to run their projects in India instead of bringing large number of workers from China. This is New Delhi’s latest response to complaints concerning India’s reluctance to grant enough visas for Chinese workers.

An India-specific approach will have to be thought over by Chinese companies, S Jaishankar, India’s new ambassador in Beijing told a conference attended by Indian and Chinese businessmen and officials. He pointed out that companies from other foreign countries did not feel the need to bring their own workers to projects in India, which has a vast reservoir of skilled workmen and a long history of industry and entrepreneurship.

“I have personal experience in working with many of India’s other major economic partners. I cannot recall their investments and projects requiring such large manpower support from home,” Jaishankar, who was earlier ambassador in Singapore, said.

The statement comes at a time when several Indian companies have joined the chorus along with their Chinese partners about increasing the issuance of visas for Chinese workers. But the Indian Read more…

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