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Canada Waives Own Rules, Helps Microsoft Avoid US Visa Problems
Freshly Exhumed writes Citizenship and Immigration Canada has granted an unprecedented exemption to Microsoft that will allow the company to bring in an unspecified number of temporary foreign workers as trainees without first looking for Canadians to fill the jobs. No other company in any other field has been granted such an exemption, and it does not fall within any of the other categories where exemptions are normally given, according to a source familiar with process, effectively creating a new category: the Microsoft Exemption. Microsoft Canada did not immediately respond to questions about the deal, but in an interview earlier this year with Bloomberg Businessweek, Karen Jones, Microsoft's deputy general counsel, said the deal will allow Microsoft to bypass stricter U.S. rules on visas for foreign workers. The entire issue of temporary foreign workers has been as blisteringly hot a topic across Canada as it has been in the USA.
I fear the neo-cons want us back in the day of William the Conqueror, where there were Normans and the peasants they owned.
davecb@spamcop.net
It's not just a surplus in CS - in some areas it's a HUGE surplus. This is just a continuation of the exemptions granted to the banks to bring in foreign workers and have the current workers train them to do their jobs and then get laid off, ditto fast-food chains who don't want to hire Canadians who know their rights and as such are "too uppity", etc.
FTFA:
Karen Jones, Microsoft’s deputy general counsel, said the deal will allow Microsoft to bypass stricter U.S. rules on visas for foreign workers.
"The U.S. laws clearly did not meet our needs. We have to look to other places," she told the wire service. She went on to say Microsoft didn’t choose to expand in Vancouver "purely for immigration purposes, but immigration is a factor."
The source said that means the company will take advantage of rules governing intra-company transfers, which require employees to work for at least one year at a company subsidiary before being transferred to the U.S. He says the result will be a net disadvantage for Canada.
Bad enough the Burger King - Tim Hortons deal was a blatant tax dodge at a time when governments everywhere are trying to get corporations to behave more responsibly ... I guess the Harper government decided to "double-double down."
Blame Canada.
Shame, Canada.
Oh, Canada.
Oh-oh Canada.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Western Europeans are coming from an economy just as good as our own, so they aren't willing to work for peanuts and thus don't drive down wages like people from third-world countries do.
Asians from developed countries (e.g. Japan) would be welcomed just as warmly, for the same reason.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
It sounds more like a way to get more overseas workers into the US.
"The source said that means the company will take advantage of rules governing intra-company transfers, which require employees to work for at least one year at a company subsidiary before being transferred to the U.S."
Sounds like they'll import cheap labor to Canada. Have them work there for a year and then import them into the US.
If you're not ever more in demand as you gather more years of skill, perhaps you've let your skills grow stale (thinking "the cloud" isn't important is the new thinking "the internet" isn't important), or perhaps you have 1 year of experience 20 times, instead of 20 years of growth.
Neither insults nor denial will change the facts. IT has several problems, including ageism, racism, and misogamy.
But for back-end/infrastructure coding, things change more slowly, with a slow drift from C++ to Java over 10 years, and now Python just starting to be taken seriously, maybe in another 10 years it will be important. If you can't keep up with that sort of change, how'd you learn the field in the first place?
Of course, if you never want to change tools, there's a job as a kernel dev waiting if you can hack it - they still party like it's 1989!
Around 1985, assembler, then c, c++, then clipper and a bunch of other database development tools, then switched to windows for a while, pascal and delphi, switched to linux near the end of the century, the "p" languages (php, python, perl), bash scripting, javascript, java (I was late for Java because it was TOO DARN SLOW). At some point I had to use windows concurrently to do flash development and a few other things.
So, neither 1 year of experience repeated 20 times, nor a reluctance to try new things - whatever gets the job that I was being paid for done.. That came to an end 3 years ago when my retinas started to bleed too much and I couldn't use a computer until a few months ago. I miss programming for a living, but I don't miss all the garbage that seems to be inextricably entangled with it, such as the "pissing contests", the hoarding of information, the sexism, the insane hours, the constant changing of designs "because someone saw something really neat and we need it too". Besides, the treatment of people with visual (or other) handicaps also generally sucks.
I guess it's time to end with the almost-obligatory "now get off my lawn, kid" comment, but my heart's not really in it.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
MS might be using it as a way to weasle around HB-1 requirements (people getting foreign subsidary experience to get around limits)
That's exactly what it is. There's no point in sugar coating it with the presumption of that they're trying to help out the little guy. This is all part of the orchestrated plan by the elites to create an oversupply of labor with foreign workers and drive wages down. Their proximity to Vancouver makes this a slam dunk for Microsoft. Why sink money into lobbying for more H1Bs when L1Bs are unlimited and NAFTA greases the bureaucratic wheels.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
When people get their panties in a twist about how much "wealth" the Walton family has it just shows they don't understand what wealth is.
Their "wealth" is paper. They could be worth X millions one day and X - a butt load of money the next. It has no impact on how much they can spend at lunch or whether they get the premium cable package or the standard. It's not cash. They'd have to sell or take out loans against their shares if they wanted to go buy a Private Jet or something like that.
So the fact they are worth a few billion in paper doesn't diminish your pay check at all.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
That's because the bottom 42% doesn't save. If you don't save, you have no wealth by definition.
I know this may come as a shock to you, but it's very likely the bottom 42% can't save in order to build wealth.
And quite often it comes down to simple math and nothing else.