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FWD.us To Laid-Off Southern California Edison Workers: Boo-Hoo
theodp writes: Speaking at a National Journal LIVE event that was sponsored by Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us and Laurene Powell Jobs' Emerson Collective, FWD.us "Major Contributor" Lars Dalgaard was asked about the fate of 500 laid-off Southern California Edison IT workers, whose forced training of their H-1B worker replacements from offshore outsourcing companies sparked a bipartisan Senate investigation. "If you want the job, make yourself able to get the job," quipped an unsympathetic Dalgaard (YouTube). "Nobody's going to hold you up and carry you around...If you're not going to work hard enough to be qualified to get the job...well then, you don't deserve the job." "That might be harsh," remarked interviewer Niharika Acharya. Turning to co-interviewee Pierre-Jean Cobut, FWD.us's poster child for increasing the H-1B visa cap, Acharya asked, "Do you agree with him?" "Actually, I do," replied PJ, drawing laughs from the crowd.
Yep, the nerve of them, unwilling top live in the closet and eat the table scraps the CEO tossed them. All they had to do is pant and go "WOOF" occasionally.
Note that there is actually a law against what Edison did, it's just not enforced. I guess you side with the criminals.
> "Nobody's going to hold you up and carry you around..." is a good
> theory only if it applies to all. But it most certainly does not.
it's not a good theory, or practice, even if it did apply to everyone. we live in a society, not some dog-eat-dog nightmare-fantasy hellhole.
"i'm alright, fuck you jack" is not a sustainable ethos for any individual and certainly not for a civilisation. it's a psychopath's creed and psychopaths are at best parasitic on society if not outright destructive to it.
"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." -- Frédéric Bastiat, 1848
yes, that's exactly what you're supposed to think. you're supposed to be consoled by the fact that you'll go to heaven when you die and that'll be better than anything the rich cunts have now. that will more than make up for the shitful life you're living. hallelujah and praise the lord. accept your lot, everyone gets what they truly deserve.
These guys are jerks. Obviously the Edison IT workers were qualified - they trained their replacements. Equally obvious they were available to do the job, so there was no reason to bring in H1Bs. Outright fraud by Edison, abetted by the government.
It's more of a sleight of hand trick: the actual issue on the table was price; the 'FWD.us' flacks did a quick swap to capability (so that they could assert that those lazy workers could have gotten the job if they just up-skilled some more or something); and then abandoned the issue before anyone could point out that 'make yourself able to get the job' is not a matter of 'become more capable'; but 'become cheaper and more powerless.'
At least when these guys are talking about actually unskilled individuals what they say is somewhere close to true-ish, albeit not very helpful(yes, it is true that people with no skills and tepid intelligence are fucked. Any plans on how the bottom couple of quintiles are going to just train their way into being somebody you'd let touch an application, much less pay to do so?); but this one is a pure cost move. The workers were able to get the job, that's why they had it. They did have the skills, that's how they trained their replacements. They just weren't cheap enough.
Obviously, if you run a company whose two main costs are techies and electricity, you want to be able to hire techies for whatever qualifies as subsistence wages in Uttar Pradesh; but don't pretend that that's about 'skills', and don't fucking pretend you are doing us a favor by preaching some wise words about job creation at the same time.
They cost less money.
That's it. There is nothing else.
They're not better because they're foreign. They're "better" because they're cheaper.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I've never been hired or paid by a customer, dipshit. And neither have you.
And if all the customers went away, because they were too poor to buy the company's product, how many jobs would the 'job creator' company be creating? Companies create jobs when there are actual *customers*, and ones that can afford their products, otherwise there's no reason to create more jobs to produce things that nobody needs/wants/can-afford, right?
Historically, small businesses create more jobs than any corporation does. Mom and pop businesses. Family businesses. Local cooperatives. Some individual who sticks his neck out - and entrepreneur. Young companies create jobs - older, more established businesses do not.
http://www.sbecouncil.org/abou...
http://smallbusiness.house.gov...
http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/ar...
http://www.nber.org/digest/feb...
Of at least equal importance, is the question of WHEN do businesses create jobs?
Small businesses, new businesses, and startups create jobs all the time. Large corporations instead only "create" jobs in times of plenty. That is - they stand back, and watch the small players take the risks. When they see little guys making a go of it, then they either buy out the little guy, or go directly into competition with that little guy.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Yep, all that stuff is gone. Only 10-15 years ago I think, Porter-Cable tools were still made in the US, but that's been moved to Mexico..
However, if you want to find some American-made stuff at Home Depot, go to the electrical aisle, and look at all the dirt-cheap electrical sockets (the kind you install in your walls) and light switches (again, the kind you install in house walls). They usually cost less than a dollar each (unless you get some fancy kind), and they all said "made in USA" last time I checked. Of course, those products are not made for a global market (they're only usable in North America: Canada and Mexico has the same standards; not sure about South America, but everywhere else uses entirely different electrical hardware), and since this is easily the largest market for construction goods like that, and also since there's probably a large amount of automation involved in their manufacture, it probably hasn't made sense to move production offshore yet.
There's actually still a lot of stuff being made in the US these days, it just depends. US manufacturing today is generally heavily automated, so it doesn't involve much labor; anything requiring too much labor gets moved offshore to where labor is cheap. But here's a few things off the top of my head that are still made here:
- Tesla cars (california of all places)
- Many other cars (I heard Volvo is opening a new plant in South Carolina I think; lots of foreign automakers have plants in the southern states)
- manufactured homes (too big to transport across the ocean)
- specialty/high-end products (here's an article I ran across, lots of stuff like custom-make bicycles, high-end clothing/bags, etc.: http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/13/...)
- here's a whole website for you: http://www.stillmadeinusa.com/
Nope. The unions in Sweden, Denmark, Finland and, to a lesser extent, Norway, for example, are much stronger than the unions in the countries you mentioned. As far as Europe is concerned the countries you mention are on the lower half when it comes to union strength. (Which is clear if you notice the antics they get up to. A strong union wouldn't have to behave like that.)
So, no cigarr. Try again.
Stefan Axelsson
This video may help explain things a bit. Short story is that companies looking to hire H1B personnel will post these positions in two publications of "general" circulation and then if anyone does apply they will use every method of disqualifying them that is legally available. They categorize this as "good faith recruitment" to the department of labor when in reality it is anything but.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the (supposed) good of its victims may be the most oppressive