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Tech Worker Groups Boycott IBM, Infosys, Manpower
itwbennett writes: "Three U.S. tech worker groups have launched a labor boycott of IBM, Infosys and Manpower, saying the companies have engaged in a pattern that discourages U.S. workers from applying for U.S. IT jobs by tailoring employment ads toward overseas workers. For its part, Infosys disputed the charges, saying that 'it is incorrect to allude that we exclude or discourage U.S. workers. Today, we are recruiting for over 440 active openings across 20 states in the U.S.' Representatives from IBM and Manpower didn't respond to requests for comment on the boycott."
Because IBM advertises on Slashdot and Slashdot Beta sucks.
Useless thieves, liars and parasites.
What a world. If I'd have known how people really are (and believed it) when I was younger, I'd have become a plumber or a lawyer. Either way you're dealing with human shit and no one can outsource you.
Fuck tech jobs.
These guys have been doing this for over a decade ... someone's slow to the party.
Here's hoping you're successful.
Anyone who has worked for any of the three should know by now that they pay their IT workers about 20 to 30% of what they bill the client at best. Avoid body shops like the plague if you want to make decent money.
Why hasn't the state-run media (i.e. the networks and major newspapers) ever even mentioned "U.S. tech worker groups". This is the first I have ever heard of it. It is about time..
American IT workers boycotting firms which don't hire Americans? They're not even going to notice.
I'm not sure what's left at IBM ever since they started selling off divisions years ago. The PC/workstation/laptop division got sold off as Lenovo, their online services never materialized, and there's not much sign as what their products are. Is IBM just a corporate shell remaining?
"Bright Future Jobs, the Programmers Guild and WashTech."
Who, who, and who?
As of August 1999, the Programmers Guild had 400 members. Mighty important organization there, if you can't be bothered to offer membership numbers from this century. Which, to be fair, looks to be the last time their web page look was updated.
As far as I can tell, "Bright Future Jobs" is one person Donna Conroy.
WashTech is a union. No thanks.
I suspect that IBM, Infosys and Manpower won't even notice their "boycott."
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I did my time at IBM and learned this the hard way.
IBM does not favor hiring foreign applicants.
What they did at IBM Boulder was simple. At the beginning of LEAN in IBM e-Business, they laid off 1/3 of the staff. They moved from dedicated support for a pool of resources. And, as a result of the class action lawsuit, they cut everyone's pay 15%. After a lot of people left voluntarily, they fell well below the level of staff they needed to keep things running.
So, they decided to hire. Not regular employees, of course. Contractors. Only makes sense, yes? So, they opened up a number of junior admin positions at $12/hr. And a number of senior positions at $15/hr. When no one applied, they bumped it up slightly. Eventually, they were able to hire people in, but at a much lower rate than what the people who had left made. The nice thing about this from their perspective is that they also eliminated contracting companies that had things like paid vacation. (There might be a contracting company that still pays vacation, but I don't know what it is. There is one that still offers a small training budget).
Nationality of employee was completely irrelevant.
The color of the cog in the machine is irrelevant.
Cheap. Crappy. Brutal. That is the IBM Way now.
People expect to be able to buy cheap crap made in asia, but they get pissed when companies decide to just move everything to asia.
There is ample evidence that many American corporations have been actively discriminating against American Workers for well over a decade. This is especially true when it comes to STEM work skills. India, China, and Russia have been the main sources of off-shoring (and now, in-shoring). India is the absolute worst, with India's goovernment actively pushing for more H1-Bs because they would rather America hire them than India build proper educational and business infrastructure systems. Indian government is one of the most corrupt on earth (easily as corrupt as some of the worst African states).
Want proof? Unemployment is a problem in America, and so are our sticky problems with immigration. Undercover of helping those immigrants who have so long labored in our agricultural sector, the American IT sector has seen fit to use the sentiment to help agricultural workers to create a Landslide of advantage for itself. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
The H-1B fiasco has cost Americans **$10TRILLION** dollars, since 1975. For anyone who wants to know the truth, read on.
One of the most respected technology pundits in Silicon Valley has this to say about the H1-B worker problem http://www.cringely.com/2012/1...
Here's an attorney and his consultants teaching corporations how to manipulate foreign-worker immigration law to replace qualified American workers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
H1-B abuse if accompanied by other worker-visa abuse L-1 Visa (H1-B's are only the tip of the iceberg). There are more than 20 categories of foreign worker visas. http://economyincrisis.org/con...
Professor Norman Matloff's extremely well documented studies on this problem. http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/...
Federal offshoring of healthcare.gov website http://www.economicpopulist.or...
How H1-B visa abuse is hurting American tech workers http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
There is no stem worker crisis in America http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-wo...
Marc Zuckerberg and wealthy tech scions continue to perpetuate this trend http://programmersguild.org/do...
Yahoo http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs...
Also, little known is the tactic of creating many different kinds of sub-visa categories to "fool the system". There are almost TWENTY different kinds of work visas. The whole thing is a sham and a lie, designed to drag down wages and keep from having to re-train Americans. Never thought I would see this day!
Some of the information presented in the aforementioned links will shock most Americans, because American corporate leaders don't want us to know the truth, and they are paying off policy makers with contributions to keep the truth from us. Bill Gates, John Chambers, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, and many, many others - including the principals of the most prominent immigration law firms, who profit from this outrage, are lying through their teeth. There is NO shortage of STEM workers in the US!!
The executives at Manpower must have done some reading and figured they wanted to be more like Manpower of Mesa.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
I've witnessed H1B-related shenanigans directly myself, such as forcing everyone to work without overtime pay at a big telecom company that rhymes with Ate Tea and Pea. The citizens tended to balk, but not the H1B's because they didn't want to rock the boat because their pay was a lot of money when spent back home. It's a lopsided mess; a way for companies to get more labor for less money. The "shortage" thing is lobbyist bullshit!
Table-ized A.I.
I gave infosys a resume for a friend for a job that required a degree.
They bounced it back to me and said it needed to have her exact high school graduation date. Not the fact she had a high school degree. The date at which she was 17 or 18.
It should be illegal to require a person's high school graduation date on a resume.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
How about removing the tax loop holes that allow this nonsense to happen?
Good. Offshoring is only making money for these middle men. The clients take on loads of cheap offshore people who don't know how to tie their shoes and end up paying other people to do the work if they're lucky or paying their offshorer for even more people to do the actual work if they signed a bad deal. The workers offshore work crazy hours and get nothing, crap salary, no training. The few motivated competent people offshore move on to H1-B or other parts of the industry but most just get dumped on. It's stressful continually failing to do a job you're just not able to do, and it's painful working with these guys, trying not to get completely frustrated. Meanwhile onshore workers get dumped on and we end up doing more work to cover for the offshore guys while salaries drop and it's hard to move because a lot of the big guys are going with the management fad... Code quality is visibly dropping worldwide.
Do real HR in India and the industry drops by 90%. If you actually require the people you hire at $5/hour have some IT knowledge or aptitude (just one or the other, not both, that would be really optimistic) most people will have to leave the industry. Sort of like NA during the boom except clueless people would last 2 days here instead of billing clients for years.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
Almost all unions in the US are nativist in origin if not in current implementation. No big surprise that the collapse of the unions in the late 60s and 70s coincided with the rise of minorities in blue collar/skilled labor.
Unions for unskilled labor are bad enough, but unions for people who have skill but for some reason think they shouldnt have to compete - fuck them to hell.
Because it's OUR fucking country and birthright you stupid fuck! NO Asian country would ever consider doing this. They actively discriminate against foreigners.
It's kind of a kick in the teeth to people who get a degree and/ or trained to get better paying jobs to further themselves. Get a degree and go into debt and then we will outsource your jobs overseas.
The funny thing at least in India a lot of the people that are working for hardly anything are just starting out or don't have experience. Experienced people in India don't want to work for nothing either.
I don't think this is really about nativism. It's about the american residents getting screwed by having their wages driven down, the H1Bs being screwed by becoming cheap indentured labour for a period of time, the government budgets being screwed by decreased taxation due to lower wages, and large tax-avoiding multinationals doing the screwing.
Like Electricians? companies cant pull this shit on Electricians, if IT people would pull their heads out of their ass and unionize the problem would solve it's self overnight.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
In order for business to not use H1B's means changing the tax laws that create this unfair enviornment that Americans are becoming more, and more unsupporting of.
I am an Indian, and I say this with shame.
Indian companies only want to milk America dry and all the while to get rich in the process. They don't care about American workers one iota. That is Indian mentality in general. They live like parasites which feed off host systems until the host dies and then move on to another host. There is no sense of morality, integrity and fairness in the blood. Everything is fair game, if it makes ME rich/happy/satisfied. That is a typical Indian, hence the shitty Indian infrastructure, the constant gaming of the system, the constant backstabbing of the fellow workers. If you are an Indian, and you disagree, you are either a rare breed or you are lying through your teeth.
I wish H1-B visas' would be stopped immediately. There is no freaking shortage of American workers and it is all about making sure that American companies are able to fatten stockholder wallets, and Indian companies making sure America is bled dry while they become the global power house.
Nativism is the political position of demanding a favored status for certain established inhabitants of a nation as compared to claims of newcomers or immigrants.
Hence the H-1B program is nativist because people here on an H-1B visa are required to leave the country if they're unemployed. That's very different from groups that have a more privileged status like citizens and green card holders. This nativism is one of the main complaint of opponents of the H-1B program.
"Tech worker groups" sounds suspiciously like whites and Asians to me. Why should these high-IQ groups receive advantages when so many other groups don't?
You're also a bigot who believes that whites and Asians are smarter than other groups. Have you been reading "The Bell Curve"?
Nativism
"Tech worker groups" sounds suspiciously like whites and Asians to me. Why should these high-IQ groups receive advantages when so many other groups don't? They don't need any advantages, they already have them in the form of a culture that values education and two-parent families. It sounds a hell of a lot like racism to me. What would Maya Angelou say about the situation?
You're the racist man! I am surprised that no one has called you out on you're BS!
Uh, no, it's NOT racist and he is quite correct. By the way, In-juh is the biggest protector of their own workers. Try to emigrate to In-juh as a software engineer and see how far you get.
IBM repeatedly claims there's a tech shortage so they can import cheaper H1-B and offshore labor to boost their bottom line. This has been going on for over a decade and no one's called them on it. About freaking time.
Organization? You must be joking..
My father is a former United Auto Workers President of the Union & told me that to do it, you need to get sponsorship from a MAJOR union, such as UAE, Teamsters, etc. to get it going)...
Then, it's going ALL OVER THE JOINT *trying* to get workers in shops to join!
(That's GOTTA be a LOT of work man - No, it might NOT be "shoveling coal into a hot furnace", but it means travel time away from everything you know though...)
I did that "migrant farm worker" role in IT in most capacities to get paid of course, & for decades in order to NOT ever have to do it again, & I'm finally there @ last (& have been for a decade++ or so).
I'm 50, as far as I am concerned now with the businesses I run independently, I am ALL DONE with that world... too many years "faking" who I was, fitting the "Corporate Mold"... no more, along with the travel.
HOWEVER - YOU, or others here, MAY not be!
NOW, I don't *think* YOU like me too much, & what-not, since you've "ribbed on me" before (for what or why I am not sure) but... this is the 2nd time in a few months I've seen your points & agree with them (overlooking those differences, being a man about it is all).
APK
P.S.=> There's your formula above in the 1st & 2nd paragraphs pretty much - go for it, OR I sincerely HOPE others do... our field, NEEDS this, badly!
... apk
did not know Manpower is a company. I always thought man power is the number of people available or required to perform a particular function. Manpower is also called: personnel, staff.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've heard it all before and it's really wearing thin. Thankfully most real Americans don't pay any attention to the alleged slur anymore despite its repetition at increasingly higher levels of hysteria. You can only cry wolf so many times. Oops, so sorry, that's no doubt a culturally biased reference! LOL
BTW, Asians are among the most racist and class conscious people on earth. The Japanese-Negro inter-racial marriage rate is approximately zero.
I know for a fact that some companies game the H1B system. If they want a particular H1B individual they will take that person's resume and generate a job description from it (ever wonder why sometimes you see ads that want very specific long combinations of skills/experience?) and then they publish the ad for the minimum required time so as to not generate suspicion. Maybe they actually get a couple of resumes that would be a match for their crazy ad, no matter. They do the interviews and select the H1B person they wanted from the start, and justify it with a thin pile of "qualified" applicants should they ever get audited. They can easily explain away why the couple of local applicants they got didn't pass the interview. Happens every day here in Seattle.
`Nativism is the political position of demanding a favored status for certain established inhabitants of a nation as compared to claims of newcomers or immigrants.`
It also applies to business practices when dealing with people or companies that are not based in your country; i.e., imports/exports.
`Someone explain to me why people who just happened to be born in the bounds of an arbitrary nation should have ANY advantages over someone who was not.`
Because a) nation's boundaries are NOT arbitrary, and are often set as a consequence of war and personal sacrifice by citizens of that country, and b) people who already live in/support/pay taxes to a given country should quite naturally be favored by that country in relation to people who don't/aren't.
`In fact, precisely the opposite argument can be made: those who were disadvantaged by birth should get all the advantages when it comes to being employed in the USA.`
The argument can be made, just not well given the logic is liberal and quite poor. Liberalism is defined as a set of political positions which allow entities to claim false moral superiority and then coerce others to give them things they are not deserving of nor have worked to earn.
`"Tech worker groups" sounds suspiciously like whites and Asians to me.`
And why is that? Do you resent those groups? Are you a racist?
`Why should these high-IQ groups receive advantages when so many other groups don't?`
Because in gainful employment money is exchanged for value; those with a higher IQ are often (but not always) those who generate more value, therefore they tend to have an easier time getting and staying employed.
`They don't need any advantages, they already have them in the form of a culture that values education and two-parent families.`
But a lot of liberals would argue that culture is bad and that any form of `family` is equally good (they just can't argue it well because it's obviously not true).
`It sounds a hell of a lot like racism to me.`
Indeed. ;)
`What would Maya Angelou say about the situation?`
Nothing coherent, I'm sure, but that wouldn't stop her from getting a bunch of false accolades for her `work`.
Newcomers/immigrants are residents of this country, and have been granted the right to work here. H1Bs are neither. They are foreign nationals with no standing in this country that large companies lobby our government to allow them to come work here temporarily at depressed wages (and yes, they *do* get lower wages). The more a given area brings in, the more the local wages stagnate.
Don't get me wrong, I do not place one bit of blame on the H1B worker. Just like I don't blame our neighbors from south of the border for sneaking into our country in hopes of a better life. For all of America's problems, it's one of the best countries to be born in. Who I do blame are greedy corporations simply looking to take away the earning power of American workers. It's okay for a business to try and make as much money as the market will let them, but somehow workers are viewed by companies as not having that same right (as an aside, just look at the Silicon Valley collusion to stifle tech-works wages with their secret "no compete" agreements).
Nativism is the political position of demanding a favored status for certain established inhabitants of a nation as compared to claims of newcomers or immigrants.
Almost all unions in the US are nativist in origin if not in current implementation. No big surprise that the collapse of the unions in the late 60s and 70s coincided with the rise of minorities in blue collar/skilled labor.
Which minorities are those? African Americans? Since most African Americans have ancestors in this country going back over 200 years, I don't think they qualify as the "newcomers or immigrants" that nativism discriminates against.
Nativism is the political position of demanding a favored status for certain established inhabitants of a nation as compared to claims of newcomers or immigrants.
Someone explain to me why people who just happened to be born in the bounds of an arbitrary nation should have ANY advantages over someone who was not. In fact, precisely the opposite argument can be made: those who were disadvantaged by birth should get all the advantages when it comes to being employed in the USA.
Because the US is not supposed to be a communist country. Nor is it supposed to be a global God watching over the world.
But with globalism, and many power-hungry corporations and governments (there is no difference anymore) that has changed.
Global corporations, do not care about constitutions, or laws, or traditions, or anything besides making a buck.
There is nothing to explain. If you are for globalism, then your argument makes sense.
If you are pro-America, communism (whatever vector it arrives under, be it overt political means, or religion, or sneaking it in via "capitalism" that is really fascist socialism and state-sponsored, bought by the corporations) is supposed to be beyond contempt.
The real question, if America is to be a communist country, and it is too late to turn back, then is it to be welfare for the people, or welfare for the corporations?
Education is nothing more than training for the global workforce; it, too, has been purchased, and is nothing more than state-funded
education camps for lifelong servitude (the global state, America is no longer pertinent)
If you want to dismantle all borders, and unite everyone under a world government, besides the loss of culture and identity you will wrought upon civilizations, beyond the cynicism and exploitation and greed and that are the true motives (and the aggressive wars that will be justified as defending a way of life, but are nothing more than an offensive waged on the world to make corporations even richer), then great.
Please, let it be a government of the people, not of the corporations at the expense of everyone else.
The real question, is why should capitalism be allowed to buy governments and make them socialist, so that they have generations upon generations of lifelong slaves?
Why should the rules of America all of a sudden change to make behemoths even richer -- because they bought the law?
Like you said -- the opposite argument can be made. Giant corporations sitting on billions need no hand-holding, what they need is a good kick in the balls (if they had any, alas, they do not, for they do not wish to compete, they are for anything except competition, they strongly prefer bribery and fixing things).
The real question is, did we the people elect to be globalists, or was it ushered in quietly?
Not everyone in the U.S. cares about parents, or families.
Why would you foster more socialism upon those who want less?
I agree, the U.S. does not need any more rigging, we rig things enough.
Your solution, of rigging things even more, is worse.
Race doesn't matter to corporations, you think they give a shit? Money is what matters.
Do you think Hitler really cared about race? It was an excuse for power. Do not confuse the means with the ends.
It is not the job of the corporation to wage socialism upon the masses.
If you want socialism, the government can do it directly, without corporations siphoning off the majority of it, and tossing scraps
back to those they are (out of the kindness of their ever-loving hearts!) trying to "serve."
There is no need for a middle man here, if that is what you truly want.
Hell, do it the other way around, lets just kill all the governments and laws and be bound by corporate handbooks instead.
At least then we won't have to pretend anymore.
At least we can pay our taxes directly to their recipients, instead of going through the government and pretending we are
So manufacturing jobs are pretty much gone in the u.s just a few left which are owned by foreign automotive companies from Germany and Japan and now these big corporations want to take the service based jobs as well. So what is left for the blue and white color worker? prostitution? Sorry, but big corporations such as microsoft, ibm, apple, oracle, ford, gm, etc.. should be all split up to increase competition.
Someone explain to me why people who just happened to be born in the bounds of an arbitrary nation should have ANY advantages over someone who was not
Originally it was called the "Declaration of Independence" and no, it was not arbitrary, it used to mean something.
Other nations can speak for themselves.
Charity begins at home.
We (natives) built this country, developed the land and the infrastructure, defined its laws and its culture and made it a distinct entity. We pay the taxes that keep it all going and keep it defended from those who would take advantage of us. "We" were not a uniform body of people, but a series of waves of immigrants (or invaders, depending on who you ask) and what we were 20 years ago isn't what we will be 20 years from now, but nevertheless, we are unique among the nations of the world, just like everyone else.
It's only natural that people who know and are related to each other would want first and foremost to support each other over any other randomly selected set of people. Every country does this, and while "everyone else does" is a poor excuse in general, in this particular case, anyone who does not is at a disadvantage relative to those who do.
It is a Conservative axiom that people should be self-sufficient, but outsourcing critical resources is a violation of that axiom, whether it's by offshoring or by imported labor. Putting your assets into the hands of people who have no reason by virtue of shared common interests other than short-term commercial ones is simply foolish. Today's friends may be tomorrow's enemies, or at the least, have found some other country to work for instead.
So slapping a label on it doesn't make it somehow evil. It's simply being prudent. We're not talking xenophobia, putting up a fence around the country or anything of that nature, we're talking about strengthening and supporting our native assets. The people whose paychecks get cycled back into the tax base and local businesses instead of flying off to other lands. And who will still be here in 20 years and know what to do when the temps have all moved on and taken their domain knowledge with them.
By the same argument then we should not be allowed to import foreign cars because it hurts the Americans who work in the auto industry.
Similarly, made in China products should be banned because they hurt the American factory worker.
And so and so on.
Yes, allowing foreign workers in the US hurts the people in the tech sector here. But, you can't simply ignore the huge pool of people in India and China who are trained to be engineers. This is capitalism and the low cost of labor will put an enormous pressure on the way the systems work by artificially restricting them.
Also competition makes us all better. Why are we afraid of a little competition?
`By the same argument then we should not be allowed to import foreign cars because it hurts the Americans who work in the auto industry.`
... big difference.
It actually does, but nobody cares at this point given the Big 3 made garbage for a long time because they had a monopoly on the market. Introducing the foreign manufacturers was a result of people in the gov't getting pissed off with the Big 3 and the Labor Unions who they collaborate with. Had the Big 3 built cars that were worth a crap they probably wouldn't have the competition they do, they just got greedy in a big way and got cut for it.
`Similarly, made in China products should be banned because they hurt the American factory worker.`
They actually do, not to mention hurting people who buy crap with lead paint and pet food that's tainted.
`Yes, allowing foreign workers in the US hurts the people in the tech sector here. But, you can't simply ignore the huge pool of people in India and China who are trained to be engineers.`
Of course we can, especially since the ones in In-juh tend to be trained so poorly. Did you ever ask yourself why so many of them over there are trained to be engineers? Uh, that's so that they can try and attempt all the work that was outsourced from here. Stop the outsourcing and you'll find more people here will actually go into STEM fields/careers.
`This is capitalism and the low cost of labor will put an enormous pressure on the way the systems work by artificially restricting them.`
No, it's crony capitalism where a few people benefit from huge profit margins off of using cheap foreign labor while a lot of workers, taxpayers in general, and the government suffer from loss of income tax revenue
`Also competition makes us all better. Why are we afraid of a little competition?`
Says the guy who hasn't gotten it in the rear from it. It's not competition, it's cronyism, and if you're not the one directly benefiting from it you're probably getting screwed by it.
at least they're _trying_.
And fyi, you owe everything you have today to Unions (that and the Cold War putting a halt on outsourcing). For God's sake man, read about what pre-Union life was like for all but the very, very rich. Just go read "A People's History of the United States" and go from there.
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the workers are too spread out. It's tough to organize them. You'd need money, and after 40 years of outsourcing and declining wages nobody has that. Also with how bad the economy is people are scared to stand up for their rights. There's a reason they call it "Wage Slavery"...
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That's the big money saver.
It's only a matter of time. Give it 5, maybe 10 years. Immigration reform means 300,000 new H1-Bs, and most studies show that for every H1-B officially given away there are 3 to 4 of those guys actually working. You didn't think they were sent home, did you?
:).
So, what are you going to do in a few years when 1 million new tech workers (all younger than you, cheaper, and who work more hours) hit the market? You'll do absolutely nothing. You'll be too busy keeping your head above water to. Which is exactly what they want.
One last thing. Doctors have Unions (AMA). Lawyers too (it's called the Bar). If your having trouble understanding why a skilled worker would want a Union ask yourself why Doctors and Lawyers have them
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The thing is that H1-B's are much better for America as a whole than not allowing this immigrant labor because the alternative would be more US companies moving off-shore.
If they do tax revenue and the associated secondary business activity in the US goes with it.
H1-B has some bad effects but the alternative is much worse.
Why are we afraid of a little competition?
Suppose all entry-level programming jobs go overseas. If an American can't get an entry-level programming job, then he/she can't get their foot in the door - they can't get experience.
Over time, experienced American programmers die, retire or quit. Who will replace them? Other experienced programmers. But who has the experience? Programmers in other countries.
So gradually, American programmers will be replaced by non-American programmers. (Entry-level jobs go overseas, and gradually overseas programmers become the only ones who can take jobs requiring experience.)
The US is losing factories. I'd hate to have us lose the ability to write software, also.
Suppose you were a programmer in India with a decent job, and your company found out they can hire citizens from Timbuktu who are happy to work for 40 cents (US) an hour and work long hours and never complain because 40 cents is a lot of money in Timbuktu.
Over time it appears that many Indian companies favor these Timbuktu workers because they are docile and hard-working compared to Indian citizens, due to their circumstances.
You may lose your job and/or find that wages are going down and expectations going up.
Now, can you honestly tell me you'd be happy with this situation and believe it to be "fair"?
Table-ized A.I.
If you really mean what you say, then where is India's subsidy of the US tech market? Oh right, they are full on "Nativists"
No big surprise that the collapse of the unions in the late 60s and 70s coincided with the rise of minorities in blue collar/skilled labor.
Which minorities are those? African Americans? Since most African Americans have ancestors in this country going back over 200 years
African Americans were actively excluded from unions until the late 1960's, see Unions and Discrimination.
My grandfathers fought in a war to maintain our standard of living. They worked hard to improve their country, for themselves and for their children. Now I watch these dirtbag corporate execs piss it all away to people of another country and expect us to reduce our standard of living in order to "compete". These same shitcocks who live opulent lifestyles off the backs of the same people they piss on.
No. If they want to exploit all of this foreign labour, they should be forced to move their headquarters and executive officers to those countries where they do all their work, then import their product as if they were a foreign company. If they want to take advantage of all the niceties, protections, and advantages this country provides them, they can damn well show some support in return. If not, they are nothing but parasites who deserve to be removed.
"somehow workers are viewed by companies as not having that same right"
In the end there's no more rights than those you can and will defend.
Companies use their big pull to defend their interests. A worker has no such a strengh and -basically voluntarily, they killed whatever strengh they could have as a group the day they ditched unions.
So no wonder.
"We" were not a uniform body of people, but a series of waves of immigrants
And the part of the reason the US is the greatest economy on the planet (and also the world's leading culture, which is also monetizable) is due to immigration.
For example, consider these immigrants: Albert Einstein, I.M. Pei, John Muir, Joseph Pulitzer, Irving Berlin, Ang Lee, Cary Grant, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Eddie Van Halen, Rupert Murdoch, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Pamela Anderson, Dave Matthews, George Soros, Sergey Brin, Alexander Graham Bell, Marcus Goldman (Goldman Sachs), Pierre Omidyar (eBay), Theodore and Milton Deutschmann (Radio Shack), Maxwell Kohl (Kohl's), Daniel Aaron (Comcast), Sol Shenk (Big Lots!), Jerry Yang (Yahoo!), John W. Nordstrom (Nordstrom's), William Colgate (Colgate), Nathan Cummings (Sara Lee), E.I. du Pont, James L. Kraft, Charles Pfizer, William Procter, James Gamble, Andy Bechtolsheim (Sun / Arista Networks), Andy Grove (Intel)....
Those are of course the 1st gen immigrants. Think about how many 2nd and 3rd gen immigrants who are participating in expanding the US economy and culture (like me, for instance).
It's only natural that people who know and are related to each other would want first and foremost to support each other over any other randomly selected set of people.
Personally I don't care about people who theoretically share some kind of artificial division of humanity with me. Nationalism is a dangerous feeling that should be relegated to its proper recreational use. Man-made borders of a country are only means to achieving scalable governance.
I only care about the myself and my family and the things and people that are important to me. That is why the US is such a great and open country where people of all kinds can work together to create amazing economic and cultural growth. That is the American way!
All barriers to economic freedom reduce everyone's potential. Everyone is different, and mathematically we know that if everyone can specialize in what they are most productive at (whether that is management, computer programing, being a nanny, being a house cleaner), total productivity of humanity is maximized.
Posting anonymously for hopefully obvious reasons. Do you really think this is just about a few people grabbing money? Read Carroll Quigley, G. Edward Griffin, Gary Allen, Mark Dice, Alexandra Robbins, Antony Sutton, or hell even Albert Pike, etc... and you find the reason. It's not about a few money grubbers holding management positions, those people are mostly just focal points for blame. Wake up people! Interesting that every company you name has attendance at steering committees like Bilderberg and Bohemian Grove, "lobbyists", relations with the CFR, and numerous Government agencies isn't it? It's also interesting that even after all of these allegations are shown to be factual, there is no investigation and things are swept under the rug by those same Government agencies.
No, it's not just about money grubbing.
Yes, people have been trying to wake up the public for decades, actually much longer than that.
Good grief, you could have at least read 1 of the links the person provided before posting this trash. Seriously, either you are a shill or dumb as a brick and should STFU.
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Don't bitch at the companies, bitch at the corrupt US officials who allow the practice.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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> By the same argument then we should not be allowed to import foreign cars because it hurts the Americans who work in the auto industry.
My "foreign" car was made in Kentucky and the wife's in Ohio.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> Someone explain to me why people who just happened to be born in the bounds of an arbitrary nation should have ANY advantages over someone who was not.
That's the best argument for elminating the H1B visa actually.
You think those Indians are being done some kind of favor? They are not. They are being allowed to become part of an underclass. If we were to be true to your rhetoric, anyone we saw fit to import for their skills would be the equal to any other man rather than at the mercy of his importer.
Creating an underclass is the kind of thing that "Maya Angelou would object to".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
"My grandfathers fought in a war to maintain our standard of living." What a bunch of bullshit. What war could possibly have had anything to do with standard of living? There was never any credible threat of invasion for almost two centuries. The only thing to improve the standard of living was the exporting of goods to other countries fighting in the war, which doesn't require you actually fighting them.
And who will still be here in 20 years and know what to do when the temps have all moved on and taken their domain knowledge with them.
This is part of why I say that the H1-B visa should require that a US citizen should be required to be hired to shadow every single H1-B visa position at an equal pay. The H1-B visa holder should not be allowed to do any work when the US citizen is not shadowing him and the US citizen should not be able to do any work when the H1-B visa holder is not shadowing him. This way, the cost of hiring an H1-B visa holder will pretty much always be more expensive than local labor and thus employers will only hire an H1-B visa worker when they really cannot find local labor. (which is what the program is supposed to be.) It also solves the problem of not being able to find qualified local labor, as an actual gaps in local labor skills would eventually be filled by the shadowing program.
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We need health care not tied to jobs in usa as having to pay for worker health care hurts profit and leads to people pulling 60-80+ weeks vs hiring more people.
I'm sure all the wealthy business owners and CEOs stopped reading your comment early and patted themselves on the back for saving the corporate industry 10 trillion dollars of waste that they could pass on to the needy, deserving shareholders.
I think my anger was at Nativism because of the
"Tech worker groups" sounds suspiciously like whites and Asians to me. Why should these high-IQ groups receive advantages when so many other groups don't?
No, No, No. I meant Nativism was a racist.
The tax law isn't the problem, it's that guest worker systems incentivize fraud. Get rid of that first, then you can talk taxes.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
No, guest worker systems on the whole represent anti-citizen fraud. They're the 21st Century version of indentured servants.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Also competition makes us all better. Why are we afraid of a little competition?
Not if businesses are only seeking the most compliant party, not the most competent party.
It's why the US first sought slaves, then Southerners, then Mexicans, and then the rest of the Third World. It's also why businesses want contractors, which gives union-type protections to employers against their own workforce. Workers are more easily controlled in those countries versus developed countries like the US, UK, Western Europe(although contract-based hiring doesn't help), and Australia.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The only American content in those cars is the fact that they use permatemps to assemble Japanese-designed cars. They're the manufacturing equivalent of guest workers.
Perhaps when the put a bit more car in
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Having been on both ends of that pay scale, is that IBM at the time was paying the contracting company about 35 an hour for those positions that paid 15 an hour. I couldn't possibly see how that was a cost effective move for them.
I think IBM is highly prone to get in the rut of some 'truth' being accepted at face value without ever looking at evidence. They think that offshoring to the lowest bidder is the same as offshoring to a higher bidder in the same geography from a talent perspective. Contractors are *always* cheaper. American citizens are just too expensive to hire.
It actually does, but nobody cares at this point given the Big 3 made garbage for a long time because they had a monopoly on the market. Introducing the foreign manufacturers was a result of people in the gov't getting pissed off with the Big 3 and the Labor Unions who they collaborate with. Had the Big 3 built cars that were worth a crap they probably wouldn't have the competition they do, they just got greedy in a big way and got cut for it.
Lack of competition will make anyone lazy and greedy, including American tech workers.
Of course we can, especially since the ones in In-juh tend to be trained so poorly. Did you ever ask yourself why so many of them over there are trained to be engineers? Uh, that's so that they can try and attempt all the work that was outsourced from here. Stop the outsourcing and you'll find more people here will actually go into STEM fields/careers.
If they are trained so poorly, then why are engineers and scientists from India and China able to become top scientists and engineers in the US?
No, it's crony capitalism where a few people benefit from huge profit margins off of using cheap foreign labor while a lot of workers, taxpayers in general, and the government suffer from loss of income tax revenue ... big difference.
Nope. You are also free to utilize foreign labor to make money. There is no cronyism because there is no special preference given to any group. Anyone can use foreign labor. If foreign labors were restricted only to certain groups of people then that would be cronyism.
Says the guy who hasn't gotten it in the rear from it. It's not competition, it's cronyism, and if you're not the one directly benefiting from it you're probably getting screwed by it.
People born in ghettos and slums are screwed, the people who get horrible diseases are screwed. This pales in comparison to your screwed which is a loss of a small fraction of your income. You were born and raised in a privileged background in the US and have an engineer's education. You are not screwed. You are just whining.
My grandfathers fought in a war to maintain our standard of living. They worked hard to improve their country, for themselves and for their children. Now I watch these dirtbag corporate execs piss it all away to people of another country and expect us to reduce our standard of living in order to "compete". These same shitcocks who live opulent lifestyles off the backs of the same people they piss on.
Your grandfathers also looted, colonized, killed natives and owned slaves. Your standard of living could also have been due to those.
No. If they want to exploit all of this foreign labour, they should be forced to move their headquarters and executive officers to those countries where they do all their work, then import their product as if they were a foreign company. If they want to take advantage of all the niceties, protections, and advantages this country provides them, they can damn well show some support in return. If not, they are nothing but parasites who deserve to be removed.
Then why does the American consumer buy foreign cars? Why do they buy electronics from China, oil from the middle east and so on. They should move to the middle east if they want to use middle east oil or move to Japan if they want to drive a Japanese car. Or move to China if they want to buy Chinese goods. The American consumer is betraying the US companies by not buying purely 100% American made goods.
Also competition makes us all better. Why are we afraid of a little competition?
Not if businesses are only seeking the most compliant party, not the most competent party.
It's why the US first sought slaves, then Southerners, then Mexicans, and then the rest of the Third World. It's also why businesses want contractors, which gives union-type protections to employers against their own workforce. Workers are more easily controlled in those countries versus developed countries like the US, UK, Western Europe(although contract-based hiring doesn't help), and Australia.
From what I know, this has been long solved.
For almost a decade, one can transfer H1Bs. So, if your boss treats you badly or pays you too low, you can switch jobs and keep the same H1B. There are also lots of headhunters who poach H1Bs because the original employer has done all the hard work of getting the H1B, paying the fees and bringing the worker to the US. If they can get them to switch employers, you avoid all the costs of hiring a fresh H1B.
Second there is never ever a question of competence. If there is any local US worker who has even the min qualifications required for a job, they are entitled to take it away from an H1B. All the job descriptions of H1Bs must be posted visibly on public area of the company.
And if your current employer finds out you're talking to a headhunter or interviewing elsewhere, you get fired and deported. No thanks.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Mine was made in Ontario because when I buy a foreign car, I want a foreign car, dammit!
I was working for a "minority" company (two women) doing documentation and was billed at some absurd rate where I received 20-30% of the rate. When forced to do mandatory 50 hour weeks (a urination contest between my boss and her managers, NOTE: a 20% increase in output would NOT dent a 1.5 year backlog) I was paid straight time for the overage while the contractor collected double time. I could not protest as this would have left me unemployable in the Midwestern-type city.
When a thinking manager was asked how to cure the backlog, he replied, "Triple my trained staff." While he was being truthful, his candor got him moved to job where he could do no harm.
Frankly, in the year 2014, who would want to work for IBM anyway. 20 years ago they took care of their employees and still had some respect as a tech powerhouse - now they are essentially just cooking the books selling off chunks of the company to the Chinese government for one time gains and doing the bare minimum they need for their US employees that remain. The only thing IBM has now is a glorious past and a few customers stuck buying overpriced mainframe hardware because it is cheaper/easier than rewriting all their legacy applications. It is sad that finance types got control of the place from people with vision but there are a ton of other US tech companies who have stepped up and taken their place as the driving force in the tech industry.
As for Infosys and Manpower - who cares. I wouldn't want to work for them at their low ball rates and I have never worked for a company that used their services anyway. Anyone who does use their services will get what they pay for.
You've given them what they want. I have no doubt that IBM and others are fully moving to the point where there are zero US employees except for the top layers of management. US employment for IBM is somewhere under 85,000 vs 400,000 (including contractors) world wide. There are more IBM'rs in India than any other country. The largest IBM sites are in India.
And if your current employer finds out you're talking to a headhunter or interviewing elsewhere, you get fired and deported. No thanks.
Except that's not how it works.
If you are fired, you have 180 days to stay in the US to find another job. You will only get deported if you overstay after that. Plus, you have all the worker rights of the US and can use legal action.
However, once you have an H1B, you have it for life. You can get a new job on the same H1B years later. So, if you go out of the US, find another job in the US, you can resume on your old H1B without going through the whole process again.
Also in most cases, H1B to permanent resident (green card) is usually within 9 months to a year. Then, if you have a green card, you can't be deported after you're fired.
What the hell does liberalism have to do with this? I'm a liberal and I think the H1B program should be scrapped, because it's not fair competition. It's a difference in inherent costs of living in a higher standard of living society, versus the fetid cesspool that is a large portion of industrialized India, and the falsely inflated China. I don't actually have problem competing, but if most of the people are literally lying and getting hired, then why are we even saying this is capitalism? It's a scam plain and simple, created for and by corporations to get rid of the expenses associated with actually having to train their personnel.
If you meet anybody from India ask him "What Is Your Caste?" If he answers it, then you're doomed. Because he has already injected Cancer into your Country. Caste is like Cancer. Caste cannot be Cured. Caste has to be Cut-Off. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06...
Casteism
Am I the only one who was shocked that a major firm had only 440 openings across the country?
Yeah I think IT workers need a lobbying group. Everyone else has one. Not sure we need a union.
Worker rights. lol.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
It's anarcho-capitalism, right out of a Ken Macleod novel. Basically, get away with what you can, and only cease doing it if there's someone powerful enough to make you stop.
Maybe we might want to consider that the tacit acceptance that 'every man for himself' is a viable basis for society tends to lead to a society in which the strong rather brutally run roughshod over the weak. And while many people talk tough, the actual number of people who can play in such a space is perishingly small....the people who advocate for this often overestimate their ability to dominate others. See also Dunning-Krueger.
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The thing is that H1-B's are much better for America as a whole than not allowing this immigrant labor because the alternative would be more US companies moving off-shore.
If they do tax revenue and the associated secondary business activity in the US goes with it.
H1-B has some bad effects but the alternative is much worse.
Let them. Have you ever worked with or seen the quality of code and design from the whole "learn by rote" crew. They'll (the companies) be back after the first bad quarter when they're socked by Wall Street.
That is the hidden reason abolishing the draft? What kind of draft exempt job would a H1B get? If that happened the draft board and a lot of elected officials would be crying because because their son was drafted.
More watched the film, "Office Space" last night.
sheesh - try being a woman...an "older" woman...a woman who opted out care for her children. Silly woman, child care is for 3rd world domestics!
“Poor kids. They don’t realize they’re all going to be executed by the time they’re thirty.” - comment in a recent episode of the HBO series Veep upon visiting a Silicon Valley startup.
If those CEOs were serious about hiring us they would HAVE training and re-entry programs. When I went back to work for a previous boss (thank you, thank you, thank you MM), it took me all of 1 month to become productive and another 2 (evenings and weekends) and I hadn't worked in 13 years. I then started a small company with some non-misogynist OLDER guys - we sold it for a chunk of change.
Bad on you Chambers, Z, Schmidt, Gates...
“Poor kids. They don’t realize they’re all going to be executed by the time they’re thirty.”
-from a recent episode of the HBO series Veep upon visiting a Silicon Valley startup -says it all.
You guys should try being a woman...an "older" woman...a woman who opted out care for her children. (We all know that child care is for 3rd world domestics...)
Companies used to HAVE training and re-entry programs - but now they just buy new programmers and press eject for olders. When I went back to work after my 13 year opt-out thanks to a previous boss (thank you MM), it took me all of 1 month to become productive and another 2 (yes, I struggled evenings and weekends). Later I started a small company, based on ideas gleaned while home with kiddies and joined up with 2 non-misogynist, OLDER guys - we sold it for a chunk of change.
So HA HA Chambers, Z, Schmidt, Gates...you misogynist, ageist jerks you.