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US Senator Blasts Microsoft's H-1B Push As It Lays 18,000 Off Workers
dcblogs (1096431) writes On the floor of U.S. Senate Thursday, Sen. Jeff Sessions delivered a scalding and sarcastic attack on the use of highly skilled foreign workers by U.S. corporations that was heavily aimed at Microsoft, a chief supporter of the practice. Sessions' speech began as a rebuttal to a recent New York Times op-ed column by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, investor Warren Buffett and Sheldon Adelson ... But the senator's attack on "three of our greatest masters of the universe," and "super billionaires," was clearly primed by Microsoft's announcement, also on Thursday, that it was laying off 18,000 employees. "What did we see in the newspaper today?" said Sessions, "News from Microsoft. Was it that they are having to raise wages to try to get enough good, quality engineers to do the work? Are they expanding or are they hiring? No, that is not what the news was, unfortunately. Not at all."
Well, as tough as it is, and as right as this senator may sound, this is the result of global free market economy. Companies get their resources where they are cheapest, regardless if this is parts or people.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
The few articles that I've read state that the layoffs are primarily middle management and a ton of Nokia personelle (presumably Nokia peronell aren't overwhelmingly in America?). H-1B are technical professionals not business majors, though I doubt that there isn't some overlap. Said overlap might be shitty workers that they slapped on to the overall firing (easier to fire people for this than bulding up a bunch of evidence for just cause).
There's a false comparison being made here... who says the Nokia engineer or the Xbox content maker being laid off has the same skills as the programmer they are wanting to hire?
Tech workers (and workers in general) are not fungible.
Basic economics says if you are having a skills shortage in a certain sector then you should see wages increasing as employers attempt to attract the required labor. If wages are not going up then you do not have a skills shortage. This is something economist Dean Baker points out all the time.
Why should we pass laws to enable a company to do what it wants?
Laws should be passed because they are morally right and protect the American people, not to make business more profitable. Train the workers you have.
With 12000 being from the Nokia side of the business, and the majority of that outside the US, the Senator is just knee jerk reacting. The biggest hit is a factory in Finland (a few thousand at 1 location). The reason they are probably needing H1-B is to bring some of the staff from closed locations into the US. They aren't "taking jobs", their jobs are just moving local, to people who will pay taxes locally in America, rather than in another country.
Jeff Sessions, Tea Party Guy. Of course he's going to take the nativist view. He probably thinks Microsoft could just take the 18,000 people it's laying off and repurpose them to fill whatever positions it's trying to use H1B visas for. Because tech skills are interchangeable, right? And all those 18,000 are totally okay relocating across the country (or globe) right?
My friend interviewed for a position and he is a top sort of developer. Unbelievably qualified. On top of that, he is about the most friendly sort you can imagine. He did get hired, but required an override because HR said he'd be bad for morale. Of all the people I could imagine he would be about the last on list of 'bad for morale'. I guess you could go deeper into indiscriminate sycophant, but those people are worse for morale.
Nativist view? He works for the people of the U.S. Why do some of you expect him to speak and work for the people of the world? He's not in the U.N. and the U.S. doesn't need to speak for other countries.
This is so easy to fix.
Establish what the standard rate is for whatever position and say "you can have all the H1-B visa applicants you want so long as you pay 20 percent more then what you're paying for domestic labor.
If its not a matter of pay and is a matter of limited labor supply, they'll import the labor and pay them more.
If it is about wanting cheap labor then they'll go with the domestic labor which will by law be cheaper.
End of discussion.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Seriously this is what it's come to, editors? "As it lays 18,000 off workers"? You can't even proofread the title?
Anyway, it's mostly non-American Nokia employees who are being laid off, and it has nothing to do with the H1-B situation. So bottom line Sessions is an idiot.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Go read, because you sound like an ignorant ass.
seconded
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Y'all are missing the point -- Jeff Sessions is a dumb-ass teabagger from AL. His big issue is immigration; he wants to keep any and all immigrants out of the US (excepting his own white self and his family, in the finest "I got mine, screw the rest of ya" republican tradition). He doesn't give a damn about jobs. He doesn't give a damn about engineers. All he wants is to send immigrant children back to the Mexican and Central American drugs-and-guns war zone he and his fellow congress critters created so he can get them dark skinned Spanish speaking people as far from himself as he can get them.
That doesn't make him wrong...
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
This is why slavery still keeps popping up, even in the US. It is great for profits and customers and people always find some kind of mental gymnastics to explain why it is actually good for the slaves or why caring about it makes someone weak.
Go read, because you sound like an ignorant ass.
I came to that conclusion as soon as I read the $ sign, so I didn't miss much.
This space for rent.
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Niklaus Wirth really was a genius when it came to language design. His languages are the most readable I have ever worked with. For fun this weekend I decided to teach myself python and I keep going WTF were they thinking ?* Not to put Python down it seems very well executed, but it just seems to make design choices just for the sake of being different.
*APL, IMNSHO is still the all time champion of being a write only language
Any company which lays off 10% of their workforce should be banned from the H1B program for at least 5 years.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Why would corporations be forced to improve? As Hobby Lobby taught us, "corporation" is just shorthand for the will of the rich stockholders. And they don't give a whit about the plight of the average American worker when they have access to the world. If they can't move the Malaysian to the US office, they'll move the US office to Malaysia. Visa problem solved.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
What the senator is really saying is that Ballmer shouldn't have been laid off and replaced by a foreign worker.
This space for rent.
also forced OT pay for h1-B's.
no more of this you make them work 60-80 hours a week with no OT pay.
I'm going to get a lot of flak for this but I generally favor open immigration when it comes to people who can contribute to our economy, even if this means my paycheck will go down and my field's labor market will be more competitive for me as a result.
Why?
* America shouldn't pretend to be the land of opportunity if it's not.
* If I can't compete in in my chosen job market without depending on the government to protect me from immigrant workers, either I need to get better at what I do or I need to find another line of work where I can compete.
* If my standard of living is higher than the income I would make in a free (from an immigration perspective) labor market, I need to lower my standard of living or find a more financially lucrative line of work.
* If a company has a choice between
1. hiring US workers who may be in short supply and demanding higher wages
2. importing workers to increase the supply and as a result possibly depress wages slightly
3. outsourcing the work overseas where the supply is more plentiful and the wages are significantly lower
everything else being equal it will go with #3.
Now, everything isn't equal, and there are usually clear benefits from having employees who are if not on-site at least in-country. But if the benefits aren't high enough to do #1 over #3 and #2 isn't an option, guess what choice they will pick? If you make #2 an attractive option compared to #3, American will at least benefit from the imported workers paying rent or buying homes, eating food, and otherwise helping the local economies of where they live.
In other words, if America let in anyone willing and able to work who had a job offer in hand, enough skills and financial resources to make sure they don't become a burden if they get laid off, and no particular reason to not let in that person, we should let them in to work.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Not quite, but almost. A big chunk of the people being laid off aren't even in the US. Then from what's left, a chunk aren't even in the same field as what the H1Bs are used for (ie: HR, managers, etc). Of what's left after that, they absolutely can do internal transfers if they can relocate and whatsnot. Of what's left after that, some people just don't have the correct skillsets and may be hard to train in a pinch.
And yes, of what's left some people will slip through the crack. The Microsoft open reqs aren't exactly secret. If you think you qualify, and are ok with the location, go ahead and apply. Living right around the corner from a Microsoft office, a lot of my friends are H1Bs...they all make a heck of a lot more money than I do, and definitely don't fit the stereotype... (For the most part the ones I know are Canadians from Waterloo who preferred coming on H1B over TN1...)
the rest of the world had basically been converted to rubble and it takes a couple of decades to rebuild after such destruction.
I assume you mean the rest of the industrialized world.
Do Canada and Australia not count?
I don't think Canada suffered much infrastructure damage in WWII. Other than the northern coastal areas (particularly Darwin) and some ship-launched attacks on harbors I don't think Australia did either.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
But don't tell him that.
*joke*
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Decades ago - we are talking the 50s and 60s, possibly up through the '70s and '80s, large companies treated employees as a long-term asset not as a short- or medium-term one.
They wanted to cultivate the reputation of "we take care of our employees" more than "we take care of our stockholders."
Back then, it would take a radically different skill-set between those being laid off and those being hired for you to see simultaneous layoffs and hiring from abroad. As a hypothetical example, if a conglomerate were shutting down its meat-packing division and hiring new researchers as it expands its pharmaceutical research division, the odds are that most of those meat-packers wouldn't have the intellectual capacity to qualify for the Ph.D.- or at least graduated-in-the-top-quarter-of-my-class-from-a-good-school B.S.-in-chemistry-or-a-related-field- degree required for the new jobs even if the company was willing to invest 4-6 years to re-train them.
Today, by contrast, if the employee being laid off can't be quickly retrained, the short-term-economic decision is a no-brainer: lay that person off and hire someone for the newly-created job who can hit the ground running.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If they can't move the Malaysian to the US office, they'll move the US office to Malaysia. Visa problem solved.
And that's not the ONLY problem solved. The IRS actually allows a company that moves it's HQ out of the US to pay almost 0 in taxes on income earned here. Look at AbVie. They make an arthritis drug called Humera. It allows me to work, because without it I have massive joint pain. It costs 2500.00 per month for 2 injections I give myself. Guess how much they make in a year? They bought some pissant company in Europe and will now move their headquarters there. All the tax burden on them magically disappears. I'll let you know when the drug price drops. And you wonder what insurance is good for. Walgreen's Drugs is another one. They are poised to do to same thing. Of course, I will lead the charge to never set foot in one of their stores as long as I live. BILLIONS of tax dollars gone, all for the sake of the fucking almighty shareholders. But you know, what helps the "people" (read: Corporations) is GOOD for the economy! Now they have more money to pay the work^H^H^H shareholders. We're fucking doomed. Invest in gold and guns/ammo. You'll need them soon.
He is. Main Street isn't the audience; Wall Street loves downsizing.
Small shareholders get fucked too. When the company moves offshore stockholders have to start reporting shares in a foreign company to IRS and get on an annual-audit list. Big guys - no problem, they have lawyers & accountants that take care of that. Mom & pop with $10K (started with $1-2K 20 years ago - dividends better than interest, usually) in some stock get hosed. They have to sell before it's final, usually into a "dip" in the market for that stock.
"Lays 18,000 Off Workers"
I think that beats Jenna Jameson's record.
What a difference a transposition makes.
also evil.
The layoff wasn't much of a surprise.
I've been expecting it for a few years and I expect that Apple and Google will follow suit,
just not sure of the timeframe. They're all engaged in verticalizing their information
equivalent of a supply chain, i.e. an indicator of saturating markets.
http://nodemy-ghost.herokuapp....
Microsoft layed off a bunch of v\factory workers and QA guys while complaining how hard I is to hire developers. Seems legit to me.
But is so much more fun to shout "big companies are evil!" "rich guys are evil!". than to think about issues. Here's a thought for you: if you think rich is bad, you won't get rich.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Let me preface this by saying I think Limbaugh has become a self-important blowhard, who spends hours saying nothing, just to hear himself talk on the radio. I'm also no fan of the vast majority of idiots signed up as members of the Republican party.
But let's not try to cherry-pick historical events to make conclusions that just aren't there..... The Great Depression might have shown signs of going away before WWII, but you'd have to be kind of crazy to back the idea that America's prosperous period after WWII had nothing to do with winning the war! Essentially, on this one, Rush actually *is* right. Heck, if nothing else, one could make a strong argument that the war put America in an advantageous place in the world market simply because other major competitors were knocked out for a while. (It's easy to look good when the other players are still rebuilding decimated manufacturing capabilities and so on.)
And no... "massive govt. spending and growth" from WWII wasn't the magic ticket to prosperity.... Fools like GWB seemed to believe this, and America found out the hard way that you can't just dump a ton of money into having a war and expect automatic prosperity to result.
In reality, if America had some way to win WWII without all of the military expenditures, we would have been that much MORE well-off, post war, than we were.
Now, arguing about banking regulations, specifically? Yes, I think it's pretty widely understood that the deregulation in the Reagan era (and let's be honest here ... much of that had more to do with Reagan's economic advisers than Reagan himself) turned out pretty bad. If you had to put a face and a name to those ideas, you'd probably pin most of it on Alan Greenspan, who eventually admitted himself that he was wrong. (Essentially, he felt he did the right thing, philosophically speaking -- but didn't think the people put in charge of banking would be so short-sighted and irresponsible to do some of the things they were ABLE to do with the regulations lifted. Basically, he was guilty of believing too much in some of the people who supposedly could make wise business decisions.)
If you want to talk fundamental change that would actually help America's situation today? We've GOT to get rid of the Corporatism. Big businesses can NOT be allowed to infiltrate government and effectively become another arm of it! Too many people, today, have this simplistic notion that big businesses are evil/bad/wrong, and need to be forcibly dismantled -- or forced to give up a portion of their wealth to "everyone else". Big business, itself, is not the problem. A big business is just one of those small businesses people like to cheer for that did well enough, it got bigger and hired a lot more people. The PROBLEM comes in when government accepts financial gifts from said businesses for favors, or allows people with direct ties to the businesses to take key positions inside government itself and proceeds to get new legislation made/approved that only benefits those businesses.
IMO, Obama is just as guilty of perpetuating this as any of our last few presidents -- and the results are like a snowball rolling downhill. For example:
http://www.newyorker.com/onlin...
Maybe the good Senator thinks Hungary is somewhere in Kansas and that Finland is somewhere near Alaska. He is from Alabama, so it's hard to say. As Tom Lehrer once sang about another southerner, "He's from Georgia, and doesn't speak the language very well."
There's no real relationship to Microsoft's Nokia layoffs and H-1B visas, except for those people in Seattle maybe. But the Seattle folks a be marketing people or managers, and you don't usually get H1-B visas for marketeers and managers.
I agree with you about the tech companies and the lack of flexibility with training. Even if you're not a programmer, but simply want a job related to the I.T. infrastructure (network engineer, systems administrator, etc.) -- you run across the same mentality. There's typically a belief, internally, that nobody has time to train a person to get them up to speed on what they're doing. Better to be REALLY specific about what you need, and let the H.R. drones find you a good match.
Then whenever that comes up short, the larger companies especially will go to the H1B VISA idea, because "Hey... if you can't find a great match, at least find someone who says they'll work here for less money, so we can cost justify the extra time it will probably take us to get that guy up to speed."
About nursing specifically, though? My mom was a registered nurse and taught nursing for most of her life. As long as I can remember, she *always* advised people that jobs in the nursing homes or "long term care facilities" were the bottom of the barrel. Those are the jobs nursing professionals accept as "first jobs" when trying to get a career started, or quite frankly, for those who never did very well in nursing school and lack the motivation to do what it takes to go further in the field.
The elderly care situation in this country is in really bad shape, all the way around, though. Complaining that nursing homes are looking at foreign labor to save money amounts to complaining about only one symptom of the problem.... Nursing care facilities are chock-full of corruption; often charging very large fees to residents but basically leaving the people to lie in bed and die after that. I'm pretty sure if you followed the money, you'd find a massive amount of it that's not going back into the business at all.
Yea that's what I thought, not a fucking thing. so shut the hell up and mind your own, think there's some asses to kiss over there
"And I'm admitting all of this as a die-hard Democrat!" Don't forget racist. You're that too.
I'm the son of an Immigrant from Switzerland. I have the benefit of being white.... My grampa had an accent so thick he could barely be understood by non family members when he spoke English. I'm the first person with my family name to be born in America. I'm an American. I look like an American. I think like an American.... The people raised here are American, through and through.
Blaming the (rather imaginary, violent crime is WAY down) problems of your society on "Foreigners" is one of the oldest and saddest things we do as Humans.
Really. Violent crime is down. Look it up. There is no pox. There are no ghettos of civilized Americans. No one is overrunning anything. Calm down and stop being a xenophobic and racist ass.
I would also say that the people that turned Central America (how is Mexico seperate from Central America? Or did you mean South America? Idiot... ) and Africa into hellholes was..... US! America the beautiful, land of the free and home of the brave, has a history of overthrowing governments and propping up dictators. If Honduras is a shithole, it's OUR fault. Etc etc etc..
Also, the drug problem is real... but no market exists without customers. The drugs made in central and south america are snorted up OUR noses. We are to blame for that too. They wouldn't make 'em, if we didn't buy 'em.
So, basically, You're full of it.
Microsoft: "But they are old farts. We want young hipsters without families that make fluffy angry birds, not Microsoft Bob."
Table-ized A.I.
Just in case you were wondering, most of the layoffs are in the Czech republic.
"if you think rich is bad, you won't get rich"
Cool, I like this way of thinking
If you think cancer is bad, you won't get cancer
If you think being eaten by angry bears is bad, you won't get eaten by angry bears
Yeah, let me know how that works out for you.
Do you have any evidence about the skill category of workers they laid off?
Table-ized A.I.
Microsoft renamed developers (SDE in Test) to QA then laid off QA. Including developers with 10+ years of experience. Some orgs were cut by 50%. You were saying?
Your employer's duty is to give you money, not hold your hand and guide you through life.
Microsoft had a very generous severance package for engineers. They're on the payroll for 2 months after "being layed off", they get 2 weeks pay per 6 months tenure up to some high cap, from what I've heard.
When I got layed off in the dot-bust, my employer gave me a check and a shove out the door, but not having to work for 6 months gave me plenty of time brush up my skill set and to place myself with another company.
A free man doesn't expect his employer to be his mommy too - that's how a serf thinks. A company who wants to hire professionals ever again, after laying some of them off, will make sure to have a decent severance package - and MS did that. Most big companies that aren't in a death spiral do.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I know plenty of people at MS. Several months ago, they announced the end of SDT (QA) as a thing. About half the SDT guys found internal transfers to the development teams. The other half were clearly looking for seats before the music stopped. Well, the music stopped.
That's the thing about software - whatever your technical skills, they have a half-life. You have to keep on top of that, or you'll find that what you know how to do simply isn't valuable any more. SDT was supposed to be a "developer, but writing test code" job all along. Now that MS is following the herd in making all test automation part of dev's job, those who had the talent and inclination to become normal devs had plenty of time to make that transfer. And about half of them did.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
BTW, on the QA side, Microsoft did in fact give people a few months to apply internally for dev jobs (it wasn't official that the rest would face lay-offs, but the writing was on the wall). About half of them made that jump. That's not re-training, of course, but it's nicer than most corporate layoffs.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I can't speak for Microsoft, but I can speak for my company -- we're about 100 people, 40 engineers, of which 5 are H1-Bs. I make sure our H1-B employees are paid exactly what they would be paid if they were US citizens, I can promise you that if a printout of our salaries was accidentally left on the printer and all engineers could see everyone's salary, they would find that we are paying everyone relative to their value contributed to the company and not their visa status.
I'll also point out that there are laws that specifically state that we must adhere to that practice of fair pay, though I'd do it anyway because it's the right thing to do. We hire H1-B employees because we can't find US citizen programmers that are good enough and wiling to come here -- there is intense competition here in the Valley.
Oh, and another thing: H1-Bs are not indentured servants. We hire H1-B engineers from other companies, and unfortunately, H1-B engineers sometimes leave us for other opportunities. It takes me just 2-3 weeks and about $4000 to switch an H1-B sponsorship from the current employer to us.
No. Slaves make shitty workers.
Wage slaves work harder. Because their chains are self imposed. Too stupid to save a penny, NEED their next paycheck to make the new car payment.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Then why do employer not want to give up health insurance and let everyone get health insurance like they get car insurance? What about 401k's?
The thing is if employers want the duty to just pay you for services, then they should get out of everything that does not involve work.
But employers are the ones who object strongly making health insurance act like every other form of insurance. employers like the extra their employees pay them every year.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
It was felt by many economists that letting all those big banks and car companies fail would have triggered a ripple effect on suppliers and the economy as a whole. Whether that is true or not is an academic issue that is difficult to test because we cannot fork history.
And most of the new banking regulations don't affect small banks.
Table-ized A.I.
Heck, even the concept of health "insurance" as we have it today seems broken - does my car insurance pay for tune-ups? I'd like nothing more than being able to buy catastrophic care insurance (what was once called "major medical") like I buy car insurance (including the government-mandated high-risk pool so that no one gets priced out - we made that work for car insurance after all), and let all the day-to-day medical stuff be a cash transaction no different from an oil change.
Well, I did just that. I have an individual health insurance package with a very high family deductible. After meeting the family deductible: no copay, no coinsurance, no thing. Insurer pays all.
By doing it like this, I'm using insurance as it is meant to be: I pay the small stuff myself, but should I get into an accident or get very sick, I'm covered.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
I'd argue that an employer's duty is both to compensate you monetarily AND to provide a safe and comfortable working environment. Beyond that one nitpick, I completely agree with you.
Even as a temporary contract programmer, when my project with Microsoft was cancelled, I was treated very well. They kept me on for another month as an unofficial "severance" even though there was no work to be done, and arranged for a few other internal interviews for me. My project lead also bought me an Xbox (the first one, which had recently come out) and some games out of his own pocket.
Obviously, that was a while ago, but from what I've heard, MS still generally treats its people pretty well, and that experience was borne out several times while working for them in contract positions. Note that this isn't completely altruistic - part of it is to avoid wrongful termination lawsuits (I've been given severance pay by another employer in exchange for promising not to sue, which was fine with me), and part of it is simple competition with others who might treat their employees better. And of course, part of it is that most people aren't complete jerkwads, and understand that helping out someone with a severance package is simply the right thing to do, as being laid off is already a mildly traumatic experience.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
... the difference between an XBox application programmer and Nokia OS programmer is ...
...that Nokia engineers have historically built products no one wants to buy, while Xbox engineers make game consoles that people actually buy.
I suppose we could retask the former Nokia engineers with making game consoles no one wants to buy, instead of phones no one wants to buy.
But frankly, Microsoft has already announced that 12,500, or roughly 70% of the 18,000 people being laid off, are primarily factory workers assembling dumb phones and feature phones, which are both low margin, and selling poorly, and they are predominantly not employed in the U.S. anyway.
The remaining 5,500 people are redundancies of the kind you get when you smash a 127,000 employee company together with a 90,000 employee company to get a 217,000 employee company, and then decide that 2.5% of them are duplicate effort which is not necessary.
Rich isn't necessarily bad but this particular bunch isn't just bad they're low down dirty. The layoff aside there is no shortage of developers they just want to avoid paying decent money. That's it.
Then why do employer not want to give up health insurance and let everyone get health insurance like they get car insurance?
I'm sure employers would love to get out of having to supply health insurance. However, the USA has for some reason created this convoluted health 'insurance' system whereby employers are supposed to take care of Americans, not the nation-state.
...but you know how it is. Every other developed nation in the world is wrong, and the USA is right. Same with guns, of course.
And also eating more vegetables and fruits (such as Dr. Joel Fuhrman's work or Dr. Andrew Weil's work) to reduce inflammation. You might also be sensitive to some compounds in food, such as in the nightshade family (like tomatoes) or possibly other things (food additives, etc.)
If you want true alternatives. gold and guns/ammo won't help. All that can be confiscated.
I collected some better solutions at this link and elsewhere on my site:
http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a...
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
Learning more about health creation for yourself falls in part under subsistence production... And also the gift economy,,,
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Large employers get steep discounts on the insurance which drives everyone else insurance up but they are able to offer this as incentives to attract talent when they cannot justify higher pay.
The employer typically never bothered with insurance outside of a company doctor until the government attempted to limit what it could pay people. That's right, I said limit as in you cannot make more than this from one employer. That's when insurance and other fringe benefits became popular.
But the reasons the employer does not want to pay you the difference is because you would find that what they pay is peanuts compared to what you would have to pay on your own.
A free man doesn't expect his employer to be his mommy too - that's how a serf thinks.
Look around you. Do you see people who *want* to be free men, or *want* to be serfs?
I'd bet you dollars to dimes if it wasn't so much cheaper to the employee and employer to have employer provided health insurance, it wouldn't happen. For me, the cost of employer provided health insurance is about 60-70% cheaper than getting it privately (at least when I was working for a large employer). Why? My marginal tax rate was right around 50% and they got insurance at a better rate than I could secure. So while it may have been a cost of about 8k to my employer, it was worth a solid 25k in pretax income to me.
Guess what, an f'ed up tax regime creates weird incentives. I'm not even getting into their incentives of giving you health insurance vs income (less severe, but still another added savings).
wait until there's less of you and more of them. You will feel differently and wish all the H1-B engineers die from a form of Ebola that only affects them.
I hate what outsourcing has done to me. I wish they and everyone that is pro outsource... just drop dead. I've never felt that way before about anything.
Yeah, I don't believe there is a developer shortage, either. I think that the claim is used to undercut the cost of hiring developers. What there is a shortage of is people who can think beyond immediate short-term goals and to anticipate consequences. Time has a not-nice answer to all of us because of that. We will all pay. In the meantime be careful whom you give more and more power to and don't complain if they end up screwing you, you will have yourself to blame, largely. I am generally in favor of ways that pit the universal ways all of us have to abuse power but especially pitting business and government people against each other. The problem is not that business is opposed to government but that business and governrment is too much in cahoots.
Microsoft wouldn't have abused its power if it weren't protected by government, if anti-trust law had been enforced and if people holding the public trust hadn't sold out to them. The rest of us deserve some blame for that too by buying the myths associated with Microsoft's dominance of the market. I never thought that the OEM agreements the company had with hardware companies were ever right, and today I delight in erasing Microsoft products from used systems and replacing them with Linux. I would like to see future systems come bare and the customer gets to choose which OS to install. '
...is code named Precipice, or Cliff, or something like that. Fitting.
Hasta la Vista, Microsoft!
Put a cap on market capitalization of these companies.
Casteism
if you need workers that bad to get H1-b then you must pay OT.
So you can make them pull 60-80+ weeks to get the work of 2 people out of 1.
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Kill the derivatives market. Had all that capital gone into production of real goods and services 15 years ago rather than amplify an utterly virtual marketplace...better paying jobs would exist GLOBALLY. But as it is all that glitters is propping up the ponzi schemes and shell games played by banksters, insolvent insurers and other assorted upper crust hooligans.
I hate your signature...why would I give you the same opportunity?
You shouldn't push policies that are so radical that they have no chance of adoption. The policy I'm pushing is skirting crossing that line as it is... yours goes well over it and thus is non-viable since it has zero chance of passing the legislature.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Employers got into providing health insurance to employees as a way to increase employee compensation when the government changed the tax code and made it a deductables business expense and tax-free for the worker in the 1940s.
http://www.zanebenefits.com/bl...
Ken
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H1B is originally intended for extra-ordinary professionals like Albert Einstein, Linus Torvalds etc and NOT for http://sammyboy.com/showthread...
Casteism
U.S. Senate Thursday, Sen. Jeff Sessions "Alabama-GOP" insults US and Alabama. He supports exporting jobs from the USA, importing foreign science and technology workers, and enslaving illegal immigrants everywhere in the USA. This is typical GOPolicy.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
...
The problem is both with retention and hiring. Before H-1B, STEM employers invested in new-hire training (2-16 weeks was common) and retained employee training (2-4 weeks per year). Now, they don't.
Before H-1B, they didn't engage in age discrimination beginning at about 35 years of age. Now, they do, regardless of intelligence and knowledge and re-tooling/continuous learning and praise of performance by managers and co-workers.
Before H-1B, STEM employers were willing to fly candidates in from around the country for real, live interviews. Now, that's more of a rarity, after a sequence of ridiculous telephone trivial pursuit quizzes.
Before H-1B, STEM employers provided relocation assistance for STEM employees within the country and abroad. Now hardly any of them do.
Before H-1B, they bought display ads in multiple major-city, major-circulation newspapers around the country. For a while they advertised both in many papers and on-line. Now they don't. They've developed a notion of "local" restricted to within a few blocks of the work-place; and leap directly from recruiting within that restricted local to cross-border bodyshopping.
Before H-1B, they included in their ads e-mail addresses, actual physical location addresses, and desk-phone numbers actually answered by hiring managers. Now they don't.
Since H-1B, the numbers of contingent/temp/consulting/custom programming/contract gigs and the numbers of domestic and cross-border bodyshops have exploded, while real jobs, developing hardware/software applications/systems for real hardware and/or software product firms have virtually disappeared.