Plantronics sending employees to Mexico

Jan. 14, 2013

By John Seiler

For 15 years I’ve used Plantronics’ great headsets with Dragon Naturallyspeaking and Skype.

The company will keep about 500 jobs in Santa Cruz, but is sending 41 to Mexico, where 2,000 already are located:

“SANTA CRUZ — Headset-maker Plantronics is making staff changes that affect 41 employees in Santa Cruz, including layoffs in engineering, vice president of global communications Genevieve Haldeman said Friday.

“‘The majority of those impacted were in operations or back office roles, although there were a handful in engineering,” she said.

“The operations roles are being moved to Plantronics’ existing facility in Mexico, which has about 2,000 employees, she added.

“About 550 people work in the Santa Cruz office.”

Santa Cruz is one of California’s more “progressive” cities, meaning it votes for socialism. So it’s worse there than in most places.

Santa Cruz was a nice beach community until the University of California opened up a campus there in 1965 just as student hippy radicals were turning into their Stalinist phase. Santa Cruz is by far the most left-wing UC campus, even more so than Berkeley, which at least has to keep up its international standing as America’s supposedly top public university.

They even have a History of Consciousness Department, even though most students spend a good part of college life, in Santa Cruz and elsewhere, getting unconscious.

One of the department’s courses — no joke — is “HISC 268A: Rethinking Capitalism…. Topics are: (1) financialization versus commodification (how options-theory has changed capitalism); (2) material markets (how this theory performs); and (3) valuation and contingency (how economies make worlds).”

Well, they should just walk over to Plantronics and ask why the company has been “Rethinking Capitalism” by moving 41 jobs to the more capitalist economy of Mexico.