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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
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?
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.
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Technically he works for the people of Alabama, and engages in the magical cooperition of federal government that is intended to give us all the feeling he works for the rest of us. Regardless, if he does something good we should all praise him.
Personally I think libertarians are people who worship some strange pagan deity, in the sense that they believe in and worship magical forces of nature which sensible people shield themselves from, so what he's doing is good. Unfortunately I think by the time his position matters, his party will have shut him up.
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.
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.
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....
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?