“No Safety Net for Programmers”

Free trade seems to be moving forward, but the government hedges its bets — under the Trade Adjustment Assistance Reform Act of 2002, workers can get benefits if their jobs have been moved overseas. Unless you’re a programmer:

Under the Trade Adjustment Assistance Reform Act of 2002, workers whose jobs have moved overseas can be eligible for a battery of extra assistance, including income support, job training, tax credits for health insurance, and job search and relocation allowances. Some older workers can even receive a temporary income subsidy, a form of “wage insurance,” which helps cushion the financial blow when a new job pays much less than the old one. For instance, if you go from writing code for computers at $50 an hour to selling them retail at a computer superstore for $10 an hour.

But Fusco and his fellow IBM employees who petitioned for the benefits were repeatedly denied. The U.S. Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration determined that programmers like Fusco do not qualify, because of the nature of what they’d produced on their old jobs: software. The government cited commerce and trade rules that classify software as a “service” and “not a tangible commodity,” rather than an “article” as the trade act stipulates. […]

I’m not sure how I feel about this one. Sure, I have sympathy for workers whose jobs were offshored, but wouldn’t they be eligibile for unemployment benefits anyhow? That aside, I do find it a bit odd that programming is considered a service rather than a product — I’m not sure how they came to that conclusion :-/.