Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Everyone figured it out a decade ago. The difference between these guys and people who just bitch about it in slashdot, are that these guys are the first to have the balls to try and do something about, however ineffectual it may wind up being.
American IT workers boycotting firms which don't hire Americans? They're not even going to notice.
Actually, they're outsourcing law jobs to India these days. They can't outsource things like arguing in a courtroom, but a lot of the clerical stuff they can.
Technically you can still outsource a plumber job to another company. I guess you meant offshoring not being really possible for plumbers and until technology does not replace that job completely this and lawyers stay a good option. Surely due to currently existing legal limitations one still needs lawyers in flesh standing in front of the judge. But research can be outsourced already.
The do IT services and consulting in addition to some continued technology development. They buy a technology, and develop it internally, and then sell consulting services to implement it. Think of SAP. Same idea, same questionable (at best?) quality of delivery. But for companies that can't make a project happen with in-house talent, there's a market for so-so IT consulting.
"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.
So what you're saying is the second anyone infringes on the rights of a group you belong to you automatically band together in protest, even if it's at the potential expense of your livlihood? Gathering legitmate evidence to make a reasonable case for your claim takes time. Rallying troops together takes time. Planning for possibly not having a job if this backfires takes time. I guess fortunate for you that firing off a [weird] rant on Slashdot doesn't take any time at all.
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 do IT services and consulting
So, nothing?
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.
They sell a bill of goods to banks that have plenty of money and no brains.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
An interesting experiment would be to change my name to Ashokar Gupta, and say I'm an orphan, in the U.S. with a H1B visa. The results would be fascinating.
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?
Selling "nothing" for a high hourly billable over an extended contract term is the pinnacle of selling. Don't minimize IBM's profit-generating prowess in this respect.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
The most visible part were riots and there were times in London where these were happening with tiring regularity approx every 20y or so.
The whole thing about how evil humans are is true and at the same time untrue. Some basic regulations are needed so that people are not ripped off. If industry can survive only if they pay hunger wages then maybe it there is no reason for it to exist locally or some helping hand is needed, not necessarily in form of cheap credit or release from regulation but some industrial policy like the one Germans have would do something. OC for that one would need to have educated work force. BTW: Germans complain about missing hands on the floor all the time because people are not ready to work for money that are being offered. Seems to be the same story all over. What seems to have been working for England back then was that once one industry was not as profitable as it used to be a new one came around. The only unpleasant part were the hunger and riots on falling part of the curve.
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.
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.
Company A buys company B, needs to import or marry their two systems. Neither company has staff on hand to do the integration project, because everyone at B got laid off, and A is busy with business as usual. Consultants come in and delivery a badly built, badly delivered "solution". It might even meet some subset of the requirements in a minimal way. I wouldn't say they're giving great value, but it's not nothing.
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.
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
An interesting experiment would be to change my name to Ashokar Gupta, and say I'm an orphan, in the U.S. with a H1B visa. The results would be fascinating.
That's a great idea. I wish Bright Future Jobs, the Programmers Guild or WashTech - or a newspaper or a government agency - would do the following:
1) Check with your legal department, to make sure you're not doing anything illegal.
2) Write 50 resumes that sound like the applicant is an American. Make sure that the resumes are are generic and forgettable, so that duplicates aren't remembered.
3) Copy the resumes. In the copies, change the contact information and university that they attended, so that the applicant sounds like they come from India (or some other non-US country).
4) Send in all of the resumes, and see which ones get results. If there's a big bias against Americans in the results, publicize the heck out of it.
The hiring companies might reply to the American-sounding applicants just for appearance's sake, but not intend to hire any Americans. I don't know how to test that kind of bias.
So what you're saying is the second anyone infringes on the rights of a group you belong to you automatically band together in protest, even if it's at the potential expense of your livlihood?
Yes. It's called being in a union and something the corporations (with government assistance) eradicated to the point of almost extinction around the same time this behavior began.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
> 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.
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.
Regardless of the outcome, publicize the heck out of it. You don't get to hide the results just because they don't confirm your pre-existing bias.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
That's one way, but if the boycotter in question has skills that the companies in question want at the price they want them, and then turn around and refuse to entertain them, that is what sends a message. So how many do it?