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Message |
Anonymous
| | Posted on Friday, June 7, 2002 - 12:36 am: | |
Proskauer Rose's Word Processing Dept. is being entirely outsourced to Pitney Bowes as of 6/28/2002. |
Admin (Admin)
| | Posted on Friday, June 7, 2002 - 11:36 am: | |
Christopher Paige
Thanks for the info. Pitney Bowes has been @ Proskauer for a year or so, and the orignal plan was always to outsource the whole thing. But these reject employees of Proskauer seemed to think that they could kick Pitney Bowes out and remain Proskauer employees.
Pitney Bowes deserves to have Proskauer's wp operators as employess, just as Pitney Bowes deserves to have Merrill's rejects as employees.
I think it is safe to now declare Pitney Bowes, the "HOME OF THE REJECTS". Pitney Bowes is not where companies turn to "manage their centers", Pitney Bowes is where companies turn to get rid of operators they don't want.
My feeling is that once Merrill and Proskauer feel that they have safely gotten rid of the reject workers they don't want, these companies will simply cancel their contracts with Pitney and hire new operators. However, Proskauer IS Pitney Bowes' lawyer and Proskauer has an interest in giving business to Pitney. AND, Merrill Lynch manages Pitney Bowes' employee benefits/401Ks, and Merrill also has an interest is giving business to Pitney. |
Anonymous
| | Posted on Thursday, June 20, 2002 - 10:24 pm: | |
You say that Proskauer's management thought all the center proofreaders and operators were worthless -- and apparently you agree. How do you know? Did you ever work there? Don't you think these outsourcing decisions are often based on all kinds of reasons besides staff quality? Like to please a client for instance -- and as you point out, Pitney Bowes is a client of Proskauer. If Proskauer wanted to fire people, they could have and would have. They didn't. For one thing, they're still a WordPerfect firm (WordPerfect 7.0, so they're two releases behind). There are almost no legal word operators out there who have a good working knowledge of WordPerfect 7.0. So maybe there's some positive reasons they want their staff to stick around. |
Admin (Admin)
| | Posted on Friday, June 21, 2002 - 2:28 pm: | |
Christopher Paige
I did work at Proskauer. I have no love for the people who worked in Proskauer's Center, I even sued one of them (I was planning to sue her again, but I got busy with other stuff).
I know for a fact, first hand, that the people in Proskauer's Center were at war with Pitney Bowes; trying everything they could to get Pitney Bowes kicked out.
I don't know why Proskauer finally decided to outsource, but here is what I do know.
Firing employees carries liability with it. Corporations may not see the full impact of firing an employee and being sued, but Partnerships do. In partnerships, all of the money spent defending a lawsuit comes out of the pockets of the partners in the law firms; the partners see it and feel it.
Firing a GROUP of people carries even more liability because it is easy and cheap for the Group to get together and hire one attorney. It is much safer to outsource a group of people you don't want as employees than to just fire them (although "outsourcing" results in their being fired anyway). When a company outsources a group of employees it does not want, even if the group sues and win, they have no damages because they did not lose any money (they still worked and made the same money). And get this, if the group did lose money because the outsourcer later fired them, then it is the outsourcer that would be liable not the company that outsourced them, pretty neat for the Company isn't it?).
Word Processing Centers are far too lucrative to outsource, no law firm needs to outsource word processing in order to save money. Law firms MAKE money on word processing centers, so, generally, there is no economic reason to outsource Word Processing. Law Firms add a mark-up to the rate of word processors (just as temp agencies do) and pass the bill on to their clients (just as temp agencies do).
The way Word Processing Centers can become a liability (and therefore give management good reason to outsource) is when the people working in the Centers do something or appear to be doing something which can cause "damages" to the firm which cannot be passed on to the clients (i.e, damages that could come out of the pockets of the partners in the firm), or when the employees are doing something which could damage the firm's public image. IMHO |
Anonymous
| | Posted on Friday, June 21, 2002 - 8:17 pm: | |
What kind of lawsuit would the Proskauer employees have had? They're a diverse group in terms of age, sex and ethnic/racial background. They're "at-will" employees, which means company can let you go & employee can leave company anytime, for any reason. Are you just assuming some kind of discrimination could be proved? That's the major exception to at-will employment. If the law allowed everybody who got fired in New York to sue their employers, there'd have to be 20 courthouses in Midtown just for that. By the way, why were you going to sue an individual at Proskauer -- and how much did you have to pay the attorney to take the case? Word processors have no money, so why bother? -- unless you sued Proskauer too. |
Anonymous
| | Posted on Friday, June 21, 2002 - 8:43 pm: | |
I do not know why Proskauer decided to outsource, either. One of the reasons cited for using them vs. temps was stability. The Proskauer employees realized immediately that having the same person back night after night when they don't know WordPerfect well (or don't know WordPerfect, period) and have no legal or word processing center isn't an improvement. There certainly were tensions but as far as Prokauer employees "trying everything they could to get Pitney Bowes kicked out" -- that's news to me. What could the Proskauer people have done to get rid of Pitney anyhow? Management brought them in, management knew very quickly (it was too obvious to hide) that almost none of the Pitney people met their job requirements, and yet management kept them. |
Anonymous
| | Posted on Friday, June 21, 2002 - 8:47 pm: | |
How did you know the "original plan" was to outsource the entire Word Processing and Proofreading depts. to Pitney? That's not what people were told when Pitney came in. Do you know someone in upper management at Proskauer or at Pitney? |
Admin (Admin)
| | Posted on Saturday, June 22, 2002 - 9:40 am: | |
Christopher Paige
Pitney Bowes stated in August 2001 that they had an agreement with Proskauer to "gradually" take over the word processing center to anyone who interviewed with Pitney in response to the ad Pitney was running back then for Operators. I interviewed with Pitney for one of the operators jobs at Proskauer and was told of the gradual takeover agreement in the interview. The Gradual take over started with third shift, then second shift and now all of it.
The "agreement" to take over the Center however, was not in a signed contract in August 2001 and Pitney Bowes was sweating over whether Proskauer would put the agreement in a signed contract.
The Proskauer Management (and employees) in Proskauer's Center in August 2001 appeared to me to know that the agreement was not in writing and that there was "still a chance" that Proskauer would sour on the outsourcing idea. The Proskauer people tried everything they could to get rid of Pitney and those Pitney Bowes Supervisors took all kinds of insults and attacks from Proskauer people. I heard one Proskauer operator tell a Pitney Bowes Supervisor that she was "a pain in the ass".
The simple fact is/was that Pitney had no legal operators of its own to take over Proskauer's Center in August 2001. So Pitney NEEDED/NEEDS the Proskauer operators to agree to be outsourced, this, in my opinion, was the reason for the "gradual thing" (time to convince the Proskauer operators to agree to be fired/outsourced).
If the Proskauer people did not agree to be outsourced, Pitney would have a contract to operate a law firm WP Center with no experienced legal operators. Pitney would have had to mount a huge effort to train its Merrill/investment banking (word/excel/powerpoint) people to work in Word Perfect (something most investment banking temps have no experience with). Or Pitney would have to try to find a lot of temps willing to work for less money than they could make through temp agencies.
I think the rate that Pitney paid its operators was $20.00/hr for second shift at Proskauer, while Jovan temps working at Proskauer could make $25/hr second shift.
I noted elsewhere here that Pitney has not run ads for operators in almost a year. So, where did/is Pitney going to get operators? I am getting this feeling that Pitney may know/have known that the Merrill contract might end. If the Merrill contract ends (and it is long over due to be ended IMHO, because Merrill hates the operators it outsourced to Pitney), Pitney would need to find another contract to transfer the Merrill Operators to or:
a) pay money out of its pocket to hold onto operators who had no Center to work in
b) let the Merrill Operators go and risk not having any operators to man any new contracts
It does seem that Pitney called on a favor from its attorney (Proskauer) for some reason.
on the bright side, those old Proskauer foggies should make a shit load of money from being fired. When you figure that Proskauer will cash out all of their Proskauer benefits and then throw some bucks at them just to get rid of them, the old folks should end up with a lot of money. They should hold onto the money though, as I hear it, Pitney's contracts are for about 5 years and I'm thinking it will be 5 and out and Proskauer will just elevate its "graphics center" to word processing center status. |
Anonymous
| | Posted on Saturday, June 22, 2002 - 10:16 pm: | |
So employers are powerless and passive money spigots to be turned on by any employee with a grievance? Well, somehow the Proskauer spigot got turned off and jammed with Crazy Glue because Proskauer's severance to its employees is $000,000,000,000,000,000.00. NOTHING. NADA. One person is leaving with 30+ days in the sick bank (which you can't tap into until the 6th consecutive day that you've been out sick). And guess what she'll get for that: nothing, because they only pay out UNUSED AND ACCRUED VACATION TIME when people leave. Proskauer does not allow vacation days to be carried over; maximum annual vacation time is 20 days, therefore the most anyone could take away when they leave is payment for 10 unused vacation days. That's it. Period. And no unemployment unless the worker applied to Pitney and Pitney didn't hire them (which happened to 3 people). Proskauer stated in writing that employees who didn't apply to Pitney would be considered to have resigned from Proskauer as of June 29. And of course resignation equals no unemployment. |
Anonymous
| | Posted on Saturday, June 22, 2002 - 10:42 pm: | |
When Pitney came in, current employees were told they'd keep their jobs and that Pitney would replace temps with their workers and fill new positions. There was never any "courtship" of Proskauer employees to get them to agree to be outsourced; it was presented to them on June 6, without warning, as a "done deal" effective as of June 29, that was that. You are correct that Pitney had no legal workers. For more than 6 months, one of their two 3rd shift operators has been a temp (yes, it turns out Pitney uses temps). Pitney's had job listings off and on at monster.com since they came in. Sad to say, I don't think most Pitney people on 2nd shift are getting $20/hr -- that's too close to market rate. Maybe the few who actually had legal experience, but not the rest. |
Admin (Admin)
| | Posted on Saturday, June 22, 2002 - 10:51 pm: | |
Christopher Paige
This is interesting because I thought that employers generally went out of their way to get the "to be outsouced" to waive any claims and to pay them "something" in exchange for agreeing to be outsourced.
Perhaps the Proskauer employees REFUSED to the end to agree to be outsourced and that the outsourcing is taking place anyway. This would explain what you describe. If Pitney has enough people now and doesn't need the Proskauer people any more, then its PAYBACK TIME for all the shit Pitney had to take from the Proskauer people.
The Proskauer people had to have had at least a HINT for almost two years what was going to happen. The Proskauer people could have TRIED to be civil with Pitney and accept the fact that they were going to be outsource, but the Proskauer people deliberately went out of their way to be difficult. It was just nuts to me, if I were Pitney I would not hire any Proskauer people.
How many Pitney people are on second shift? I thought that there was only one slot available on second shift for a Pitney person. |
Anonymous
| | Posted on Monday, June 24, 2002 - 12:52 am: | |
As I said before, Proskauer's own people never had a chance to say "YES" or "NO" to being outsourced. When Pitney's people first came, they were told their jobs would be unaffected. Not a word from management about the situation for over a year, then suddenly on June 9 they were told Proskauer would no longer be their employer, effective June 28. They could either work at Proskauer as Pitney Bowes employees or not at all. As for Proskauer people were difficult to work -- what can I say? -- being forced to serve as an Involuntary Trainer doesn't always bring out the best in people. The Pitney Bowes people should have been trained (if necessary) by their employer, don't you think? Pitney Bowes people should have gotten mad at Pitney, not at Proskauer employees. Actually, now that I think of it, those Proskauer Involuntary Trainers really let themselves be ripped of. They should have submitted a bill to Pitney for their services and then sued Pitney when they didn't pay it. |
Admin (Admin)
| | Posted on Monday, June 24, 2002 - 11:38 pm: | |
Well, you have your opinion, but I was there last year and the Proskauer people HAD to know what was going to happen, they just didn't want to believe it.
I personally know of other temps who were EXPOSED to those Proskauer Operators (especially on second shift) who also don't feel any sorry for them over their fate. AND, I know of at least one former Proskauer Supervisor of Proskauer's WP Center who ALSO hates the Proskauer Operators (and blames THEM for his decision to leave Proskauer).
There were maybe one or two SPECIAL TEMPS that the Prokauer WP Center People decided were OKAY and that they would ALLOW to temp in Proskauer's Center. Every other temp and every other Supervisor the Proskauer People DIDN'T LIKE met with unending abuse and complaints.
Well, it should now be clear to those WP CENTER PEOPLE that Proskauer and Pitney Bowes DON'T LIKE THEM. Even if Pitney actually hires someone of them, I doubt that it will be hiring them because it likes them. |
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