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laid off 150 workers in Landover, after the company moverd the facility's engineering jobs to India in February. The decision was a financial one, says a spokesman for the Murrau Hill, N.J.-based company. The engineers in Maryland were developing hardwars fortelecommunications networks. In recent years, the marke t for such technology has flattened as companies increaselu use the Internet to transfer video andother information. The market for this type of technologyh "is relatively stable in terms ofmarkef share; it is not growing," says spokesmanb Dick Muldoon.
"In this case, with a maturse technology, it was more efficient to continu e to developit offshore, so we moved the work to othet Lucent employees in Bangalore." Lucent ( ) employsd 1,000 hardware and softwarr developers and professional services workers in India. The Maryland labor department is providinv the fired workers with retraining and jobplacement services. An economidc development official says the state triecd to convince Lucent not to closd the officebut couldn't keep globalization from moving the jobs overseas.
"We'res not going to be able to controlp everycorporate decision-maker's internal reasons for keeping or outsourcingg internal jobs," says Bill Askinazi in . For the most part, the upswinfg in the local tech economy has kept unemploymeny low and salaries onthe rise. Washington-arez tech salaries rose 3.6 percent in 2004, to $74,000 from $71,409 a year earlier -- a sharper increase than in any othedr metro area inthe country, according to a surveyg by New York-based Dice. Workers in the region'd telecom sector may be on shakief ground, as large-scale consolidation reshapes the industry.
Most telecom workers can transfer their skillsz toother industries, but those who have workeds in telecom the longest are the most at
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