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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Greg Jung who wrote (22469)	2/4/1999 12:09:00 PM
From: DaveMG	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 152472

Greg, I suspect that no participants on this board are advocates of employers screwing their employees. What is a co like QCOM supposed to do under the circumstances? As has been mentioned they grew from a small co to a large one, in fits and starts, over a short period of time. Clearly, many of their employees ARE well taken care of. I recall their was a piece in Forbes last year denouncing QCOM for the most "egregious" options award policy in High Tech. You talk as if the co were making gobs of money, has 50% gross margins, and is running around taking food from babes.Sure it's perverse that Wall St runs up the price after the layoffs but I think you have to look at the whole picture. Apparently QCOM HAS CREATED a lot of jobs in the San D area, and what about Korea? I'm simply suggested that things don't just boil down to simplistic one liners...Dave

To: Greg Jung who wrote (22469)	2/4/1999 3:37:00 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 152472

Greg, you moan about the situation without saying what should be done. Please tell us what should be done! Few people enjoy seeing suffering though there are some perverted types who do, usually of an authoritative nature who like to have control over other people. Some of the more enthusiastic Nazis were the ultimate exemplars of this because they managed to pervert human society to their values. To some extent anyway. Fortunately, natural selection soon weeds out such ideas which conflict with the laws of nature and sure enough they were defeated. The same process is happening with GSM. It is not the best way to run a world and cdmaOne is taking over and WWeb will finish the job. Some of the GSM people ran their anti-cdmaOne position in the same propagandizing, lying, dishonest fashion as Goebbels ran his propaganda campaigns. Why, right here on this very thread from Tero we can read propaganda, which Michael Allard has clearly corrected, but Tero will not acknowledge his mistakes because his purpose is not truth - from what I can see anyway, though perhaps he'll correct where Michael went wrong. But your idea that Qualcomm has done something wrong needs to be considered. I think Qualcomm is doing an amazingly good job. So do the people giving them awards as best employer, those awarding the Presidential Technology Medal to Irwin Jacobs [or whatever it was], investors such as Gregg Powers who have got solid moral compasses [as far as I can tell] and express admiration for the Qualcomm people. All the Q! people I have had contact with I put clearly in the 'admirable people' part of humanity. Now onto the facts of the redundant temporary employees. They work within contracts, so there is no surprise. All is above board. There are bound to be peaks and troughs in how many people Q! needs to work for them. That's why they hire temporary people. Many of whom have become full-time employees over the years. They earn high pay rates, [which is why they choose to work there instead of picking apples or working in the Korean grocery] and have good working conditions and other reasons to choose Qualcomm. So Q! is offering them the best option they have. You complained that Q! gets things set up there then moves them over the border. I don't know that that's true, but if it is, I'm glad and wish they would do a lot more of it and soon. To me, a USA temporary worker is no more human than somebody driving a tuk-tuk in Bangalore. In India, most people work for a pittance. We can blame that on the Indian government and therefore on Indians themselves since they vote for their government and they presumably don't vote for a capitalist society. They can't blame it on the British, though many no doubt still try. In India, women sweep the side of the road in groups with pathetic brushes made from some twigs. People break stones by hand to make aggregate for roads. They earn very little money by working in Indian Shops [a Korean grocery in San Diego would be a dream job by comparison - apart from San Diegan culture shock which would perhaps make them wish for the poverty of India again]. So I would like to see Qualcomm transfer production lines to India and start electronics/photonics/software research, education and development facilities there. I'd like them to pump money from around the world to San Diego, use it and San Diegan temporary workers to set up production methods, then transfer them out to India. I'd like to see them set up schools for really bright Indian children to learn American, maths, physics and the ways of the world who might then go on to work in Q! I want money to flow downhill without the impedance of greedy, destructive, unions, whining well-off temporary employees in a rich country or greedy destructive governments who impede people and destroy capital. Q! can't change governments so they can only move over the border to countries where they will be allowed to provide a way forward. Brazil apparently is a place where they can do that. So Q! is setting up shop there. China is trying to figure out how to get foreign investment and technology, but seem a bit bound up in their desire for power. They are leaning in the cargo-cult direction. Rah! Rah! Rah! for Q! Mqurice

To: Greg Jung who wrote (22469)	2/4/1999 3:55:00 PM
From: Clarksterh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

Greg - What would you suggest a company do when they anticipate short term demand or uncertainty? Hire permanent employees and then fire them? What are temporaries for if not for this purpose? This is not like Microsoft which hires temps purely as permanent second class employees. Qualcomm hires temps precisely because they might well need the very quality for which they are named. Clark

To: Greg Jung who wrote (22469)	2/4/1999 9:06:00 PM
From: Asterisk	Respond to of 152472

Greg: I would like to apologize for the nastiness of my last note, I had a bad day. I am not a temp, actually I am gainfully employed and extremely happy where I work. Before I got this job I considered becoming a temp and working for contracts. That is the nature of the job, you work until your employer either offers you a permenant job or you are no longer needed, for whatever reason. Often times companies use the temp agencies as a recruitment tool. This gives an advantage to both prospective employee and employer. If one or the other decides that the fit is not right then they go their separate ways. What is wrong with that? When you are a temp that is the deal. Your point about moving south I really don't understand. Management has been pressed on this in the past and they have repeatedly said that their primary production plant will be in San Diego. They want to keep the production close to the engineers so that they can find and debug problems quickly and efficiently. They have set up a factory in Brazil but those products will only be for Brazil. The tariffs to import into there are restrictive so most companies just move their production there. There are also rumors of a plant going to Guadalajara. But that has not happened yet and from managements statements earlier I would tend to think that this plant would be to augment the San Diego production facility. As far as my comment about not wanting to hire the temps that I have seen that work there I am making a judgement call. Where I eat lunch I can talk to and interact with these people. Some have hit hard times and need an extra income for a short time, some don't have any real skills and have to pack boxes for a living, some I wouldn't want to hire into any company because I would rather not work with them for whatever reason, and some I would hope that Qualcomm makes permenant. I guess my point is that you shouldn't make blanket statements about things that you odviously know little about. If you are making all of your judgements based on that one PBS article I think that you need to do a little more research before you talk. Many people have lived the nightmare of temp work and many prefer it, to consider a company scum that employs temps is 19th century thinking and has no place in the modern economy.