Apr
30
Ever heard of Metro Networks? It’s a company that started as a common source for traffic reports for broadcast stations in a given market. A roomful of people would gather traffic information, share it with each other, than each one would have one or more stations to broadcast on. A small radio station might share the same person reporting on two other stations. A big station might demand one person’s exclusive use. The reports would be transmitted from the central location on broadcast circuits to the various stations. Metro Traffic, as it was then called, would then sell 10-second commercials to be delivered live with the reports.
Then its managers thought, what else can we send over these lines that we already have? And they began marketing themselves as an outsource for news and sports.
I was working for a radio station in Washington, D.C., when its sportscasters suddenly began getting their paychecks from a company like Metro Networks — indeed, one that wound up merging with it — while continuing to do the same work they always did, on the same station.
For many office workers at Hawaii Medical Center, the former St. Francis hospital system, that is what could happen to them June 28.
Hawaii Medical has hired Nashville-based Perot Systems to take over most of its office functions, including admission. Almost 100 people have gotten layoff notices, but many if not most could wind up doing the same work as before, just getting paid by Perot instead of by Hawaii Medical.
This kind of thing is a good news-bad news story. Sometimes when this happens, the new employer offers less pay. On the other hand, if you’re going to outsource a lot of jobs, better to keep those jobs in Hawaii than to move them offshore.
The new company may increase productivity — i.e., make people work harder — but the old employer might have done the same thing. The new company could also offer transfer opportunities to other cities, though I suspect this is a bigger benefit in every other market they serve (”Hey, can I transfer to Hawaii? Pretty please?”)
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Ordinarily, the “Hawaii? Yay, transfer me!!”
thing is a valid point, but I’ve also seen firsthand that companies have a hard time filling positions once the prospective employee gets a nosefull of reality and realizes the cost of housing and living out here.