Irish Examiner view: Irish workers affected by a downside of global capitalism

Jobs being lost in Cork may be relocated to parts of the world where the work can be done more cheaply

Blizzard Entertainment's home at the Atrium Business Centre in Blackpool, Cork. Some say the layoffs are occurring due to a 'rush to the bottom' to employ staff to do the same job more cheaply elsewhere. Picture: Larry Cummins

News of layoffs among technical staff at Blizzard in Cork, the video game company owned by Microsoft, is a telling reminder that it is not only digital experts who can be nomadic. The jobs themselves can be peripatetic too.

The firm is part of the Activision Blizzard group whose premier product is Call of Duty, the best-selling first-person shooter game series with hundreds of millions of copies sold worldwide. 

Activision Blizzard was bought by Microsoft for around €70bn last year and plans to cut nearly two thirds of its staff in Cork. Other redundancies are taking place at its sister company, Activision, in Dublin. 

Workers have been told that many of their roles are being replaced by contractors in Egypt and Portugal as part of a strategy to rely more heavily on outsourcing to third parties, a process which is being managed by the French firm Teleperformance. Some 136 out of 198 jobs will be lost in Cork and parts of the Blizzard office in Blackpool will be sublet.

Cork Chamber of Commerce correctly points out that there is demand for skilled employees across the region but the business thinking behind Activision Blizzard’s changes is increasingly common in technical industries.

The opportunity to calibrate employment costs with surges and declines in product demand makes sense when viewed from the desk of a chief financial officer, but feeds great instabilities into the lives of workers.

The accusation exists that many of the outsourced functions currently being performed by Cork-based workers are moving simply because they can be delivered more cheaply elsewhere in a kind of insidious race to the bottom. What can be justified in business terms is another marker against what people discern as the downside of global capitalism.

Ireland, of course, is perceived as a kind of European caravanserai along the worldwide networks traversed by digital companies and the goods they trade. And it was interesting to see an inaugural event on behalf of Open AI and ChatGPT, who have announced plans to establish an operation in Dublin, described as being “more like a gig than a corporate event”. 

Another consultant said it was the techie equivalent to “being a Swiftie at a Taylor Swift concert”.

ChatGPT is the new giant on the block gaining hundreds of millions of users since it was first revealed 17 months ago. It is trailing a new video-to-text solution and is playing the partnership card early. It has done a deal with Dublin City Council to improve tourism services through the use of AI to generate personalised travel itineraries. It has also collaborated with the University of Limerick.

However, Activision Blizzard are also a giant and, amidst the excitement of the public debut of a new arrival, their changes are a footnote about transience.

Tech companies and their leaders often pride themselves on being “disruptors”. And that may be highly desirable in their sector. But all the political signals, throughout the world, are indicating a voter desire for stability. Those two objectives are in conflict, and must eventually clash.

What's your view on this issue?

You can tell us here

AI to the resuce

A striking issue arising from the recent snowfall was the levels of irritation over Met Éireann's warnings and whether they should have been orange rather than yellow.

Which may suggest that we have become rather spoiled by the accuracy of forecasting in recent years and forgotten that what we are issued with are estimates, not certainties. Who, for instance, can proclaim the moment that rain turns into sleet and then snow? Or back again?

The problem seems to be that that heads-up didn’t come quickly enough for some people. Certainly not for the aid agencies supporting the homeless and refugees living on the streets. The Irish Refugee Council shared sad images of tents used by applicants for international protection which collapsed under the weight of snow and ruined possessions.

We are told that artificial intelligence will come to our rescue for more accurate forecasts. A collaboration between academics, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, and national meteorological services aims to provide more accurate forecasts for up to six weeks ahead by feeding data from a wider range of sources into the supercomputers which make the final crunch.

The new AI systems will subsume historical reports dating back to the 1940s and also take more account of the performance of the city landscape and the building materials it contains.

There are huge benefits — in flood control, in resource allocation, in construction, agriculture and energy management — by utilising highly granular, longer-term, weather forecasting. In the forseeable future we will know much more. We will wonder how we got by with the simple question: “What’s the weather like today?”

What's your view on this issue?

You can tell us here

Death of Sibu

The death of the stalwart attraction of Dublin Zoo, the Bornean orangutan Sibu who arrived 40 years ago as a five-year-old, has caused considerable sadness among staff who enjoyed his company and friendship.

They spoke of the “charisma, power, and expression” of the great ape, who lived with three females Leonie, Riona, and Majur.

Orangutans are among the most intelligent primates on the planet. However, there are only around 57,000 Bornean orangutans left in the wild due to their habitat being systematically destroyed for palm oil, a high-yield, low-cost, monoculture crop used extensively in cooking and in food products, detergents, and cosmetics.

His former keeper suggests that the best tribute to Sibu would be to boycott items containing palm oil. We should do that not only as a memorial, but because it is in the interests of us all that the uncontrollable spread of palm plantations at the expense of natural forest is halted.

   

WEATHER CENTRE

Check out the Irish Examiner's WEATHER CENTRE for regularly updated short and long range forecasts wherever you are.