Remember a couple of decades ago, when they told us if we all re-trained for IT jobs, we'd always have work? [insert ironic laugh here...] And just to add insult to injury, exactly how much of our bailout money are they using to make our jobs go away?

BANGALORE: The second-biggest bank of the US, JP Morgan Chase, which acquired Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns recently, will increase its outsourcing to India by 25% this year to nearly $400 million. It will also manage the integration of the acquired companies from India to bring down the cost of integrating different information technology (IT) systems.

Right now, JP Morgan outsources $250-300 million worth of IT and back-office projects every year to Cognizant, TCS and Accenture, apart from to its own captive centre in Mumbai.

“JP Morgan CIO Guy Chiarello said last week that he will increase outsourcing to India, and will drive several integration projects from there,” a New York-based expert, familiar with JP Morgan’s outsourcing plans, told ET last week, on conditions of anonymity. A spokeswoman for JP Morgan India could not reply to an email query sent by ET on Friday, and the bank’s spokesperson in the US too did not reply.

“JP Morgan is one of the first banks in the US to have fleshed out its outsourcing strategy ever since the banking meltdown happened. Many others are still undecided about their IT spend,” said a senior official at one of the technology firms, who did not wish to be quoted.

This has been going on for so long, yet no one would do anything about it. It's about damned time:

February 13, 2009 (Computerworld) Federal agents on Thursday said they arrested 11 people in six states in a crackdown on H-1B visa fraud and unsealed documents that detail how the visa process was used to undercut the salaries of U.S. workers.

Federal authorities allege that in some cases, H-1B workers were paid the prevailing wages of low-cost regions and not necessarily the higher salaries paid in the locations where they worked. By doing this, the companies were "displacing qualified American workers and violating prevailing wage laws," said federal authorities in a statement announcing the indictments.

Employers are required to pay H-1B workers prevailing wages, but those wage rates can vary significantly -- by tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the region. How many U.S. workers may have been displaced was not detailed by federal authorities.

The arrests were carried out by federal, state and local agents working in Iowa, California, Massachusetts, Texas, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and New Jersey. The government's action "is the result of an extensive, ongoing investigation into suspected H-1B visa fraud, mail fraud and conspiracy," said Matthew Whitaker, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Iowa, in a statement. The investigation was dubbed Operation Pacific Vision.

The H-1B workers were also victims, according to the federal indictments. Some were hired for jobs that didn't exist. One worker from Pakistan who arrived in the U.S. for a programming job, for instance, ended up with a job pumping gas.