New York, July 22; Two senior officials at IBM , the world's largest computer maker, said the company needs to speed its efforts to move white-collar jobs to India and elsewhere overseas, The New York Times reported on Tuesday. In a recording of a conference call given to The New York Times by a labour union, top employee relations executives said IBM needed to make the same moves its competitors made to save money by shifting service jobs away from the United States.
The article cited Forrester Research as estimating 450,000 US computer industry jobs could be transferred overseas in the next 12 years, representing eight per cent of US computer jobs.
Executives worried on the March IBM conference call that broader unionisation could arise as the trend strengthens, The Times said.

"Governments are going to find that they're fairly limited as to what they can do, so unionising becomes an attractive option," said IBM director for global employee relations Tom Lynch on the recording.
"You can see some of the fairly appealing arguments they're making as to why employees need to do some things like organising to help fight this." Bureau Report