Monday, August 22, 2011

IBM and India

I grew up outside the "Triple Cities" of New York: Binghamton, Endicott, Johnson City.  The late '40's and 50's were a boom time for the International Business Machine Corporation, as IBM was then known. IBM was based in the area; the IBM country club was the place to go; because Thomas Watson had a profit-sharing plan "IBM millionaires" weren't that uncommon; people who had started back in the 30's and worked for 20 years or so had accumulated a tidy nest egg.  (This was a time when a million dollars was real money.)

Much has changed since then, but I was not prepared for this factoid in a Post article on how many of our international corporations keep secret the number of employees they have in other countries:
"Dave Finegold, dean of the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, estimates that 2009, when the company stopped sharing its U.S. employment figure, also marked the first time the company had more employees in India than the United States"

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