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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.
Well PJ, direct from your web-site http://letpjstay.com/
"PJ, the co-founder of Echo Labs, always dreamed of starting a company in the United States, but if he doesn't get an H1-B visa, he'll have to move Echo Labs to Canada."
And my response to you is,
If you want the H1B, make yourself able to get the H1B. Otherwise, enjoy Canadia...
There are plenty of good European CEOs who are used to much lower compensation that I'm sure could do the job. Perhaps it's time to onshore the CEO position and save a few million in one shot.
Why in the hell would anyone train their replacement though?
Because usually all you know is that /somebody/ is going to be replaced: it might be you, it might be any one of the twenty other people who do a nearly identical job to you. You hang around because you hope that - when the cut comes - you are one of the few spared and you don't want to work with idiots (thus having to do not only your own job but covering for all the replacements). Or working for a large corporation hasn't stripped you entirely of your conscience, you won't want to leave the same burden on any of your current co-workers if you yourself are laid-off and they aren't (you may even care about the customers too, who shouldn't have to deal with poorly trained replacements).
Even the more pre-emptive and forward-thinking employees who have sent out resumes would still stay at the job as long as they can until they actually get an offer for a new job.
Having said all that, I once was fired "immediately" but was then "allowed" to stay an extra two weeks to train my replacement. I graciously turned them down and left right after the meeting.
In a previous job I had the choice between leaving and leaving with a bonus if I would train my replacements. I took the bonus, which was the rational choice.
A friend's company outsourced the IT department and Call Centers.h
He agreed to train the replacements.
What he got out of the deal...that is, what his company did for him.
3 more months of employment than those who refused
3 trips to Europe where the outsourced call centers were. (His wife joined him for a European vacation.)
New contacts
Great recommendations
Several thousand dollars of IT equipment
Retraining -- at least $10K in training and salary while being retrained
With the retraining, he was able to land a new job as a "Limited Time Employee" for a major integrator and works a project in the city he lived in. His LTE work has gone on for over 3 years (kind of like a real job and it expected to last for another 3 years. (The "contract" is rebid periodically and he may be picked up by the contract-winner so there is the possibility of employment beyond the 3 year contract he knows about.)
Given current business practices in the US, the rational thing to do is train your replacements incorrectly, but in such a way as their lack of training is only noticeable after you are fired, or long enough after the training has taken place that it can't be tracked down to your specific instruction. This way, you either harm the company who fucked you or you give them an employee who can't do the job, showing that H1Bs aren't worth the effort.
Customers are still the job creators. Companies that lose customers shrink, and that involves lay-offs. Ask GM and Chrysler. Companies that gain customers hire. Ask Facebook and Google.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Simple solution is to change the rules of the H1B visa..... not by stopping the "skilled" immigrants but by having every visa come with residency - which would free a skilled worker to work anywhere and not just for the sponsoring company. I have personally seen the impact on wages for H1Bs because of the need to stay with the company while the company works through the process for residency (which can take the full 6 years). If they change jobs the residency process has to start again, which makes the company not having to compete in regards to wages for H1B visa holders. Competition is good, H1B to residency process depresses it and distorts the market.
I doubt it. I tried to unionize our shop (all I needed was 50%), and while the other coders agreed that it was a good idea in principle, less than half would sign up when the crunch came, even though the law prohibits firing for unionizing. Chicken is as chicken does. Heck, even WalMart workers here unionized.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
You are either seriously uneducated, indoctrinated, or maliciously motivated. Contract power between two groups is the most serious issue that exists in politics, economics and even socialization. It's why we don't let people fuck kids, fire unionizers, discriminate against minorities, or violate human rights. Just look at the struggle between Netflix and Comcast. Comcast was certainly happy to abuse it's power and they are rightfully hated for it.
The fact is, employers and companies have a lot of power over people and we NEED regulations to defend ourselves either at the top or the bottom. We need to have balanced power between all stakeholders or someone will be abused as soon as the group in power can justify it (to themselves, not to others).
And it's really not the government that's to blame, but the people who voted for them.
It's it not really the people's fault either, but the powerful few who manipulated them.
I'm sure we could make an excuse for them as well (or we'll have just come full circle) but the buck has to stop somewhere.
Trust me, I understand that. I'm married to a double MBA, and am a manager at a large corporation myself.
Morality at the business level typically depends on several things.
Is the company publicly owned?...If so, their morality is only dictated by laws and regulations, other than that, they have an obligation to their shareholders to make as much ROI as possible. Obviously, market forces (news, and consumers) can drive them toward doing more morally acceptable things, but they're typically only doing so because it's driving profits...they don't want bad PR.
Privately owned businesses can be driven in any direction their owners please, within legal bounds. My dad owned a small business...morality at that level is more of a personal style issue. Can I run my business, make a reasonable profit, and still not be an asshole to my employees...."reasonable" being in the eye of the beholder/owner.
Just another day in Paradise
I've seen this done twice. The company reorganizes the departments such that it isn't so much a "skill" issue, it's a "skill mix" issue. The help desk people don't know how to also be Linux Admins, the Linux Admins don't know how to also be COBOL programmers, the COBOL programmers can't also be web developers. Then they post the new job classifications at cheap rates so that few permanent US residents want to take the jobs. Once they got the new people in, the org changed again so that a year later is was back to being pretty close to the way it started.
It isn't a fear of firing but the realization that unions are simply trading one management bureaucracy with another.And although they can't legally fire you for joining a union they certainly can eliminate your position and off-shore it with the net effect being the same.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
So how is it that we allow foreigners to come in and work jobs with this kind of access? You want a few hundred ISIS operatives to cross the border? No problem arranging the border sensor grid outage.
Have gnu, will travel.
If a single commenter mentioned this, I didn't see it. The entity employing H1B workers is required by law to file a Labor Condition Application to ensure that they meet or exceed the prevailing wage, and an attestation designed to ensure that they are not used to break a strike nor to replace citizen workers - i.e., that the H1Bs are really needed because citizens cannot be found to do the jobs.
Obviously this does not work, or there would be little to no motivation to gratuitously replace citizens with H1B workers. What no one has satisfactorily explained to me (beyond waving the hands and mumbling "corruption") is, how is the law being flouted?
into the ideals that were pounded into his skull since childhood. That's the problem. The free market has failed us middle class techs. We can't possibly compete with people who lack food security. Yes, the H1-B program increases the GDP, but that's useless to the middle class since we're getting a smaller and smaller piece of the pie. The solution is protectionism and socialism, but the 1% have spent our whole lives demonizing these things.
/.ers is fighting the same uphill battle. It's the same reason the right wing just won the UK. You take control of the basic discussion and thought processes. Hell, look what we're doing. We're not talking about our standard of living, we're talking about "Job Creators". They've framed the debate in such a way that we can't even start to talk about the real issues.
Ask yourself what your high school economics class was like. Were you ever taught there was any way but free market laissez faire economics? Heck, in my class they didn't even bother demonizing it, it just wasn't taught. Libertarianism was a fait accompli. The grandparent, like a lot of
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Doesn't quite work that way. There is a division of labor out there which may or may not be fair, but here it is:
Unskilled
Skilled
Talent
Your burger flippers are unskilled. The problem with that is that anyone can be unskilled at something, so there's always a large pool of people to pick from. More people than any number of unskilled jobs available. If they want jobs, they have to compete somehow. If they have no skills, then price is all they can compete on. "Retraining" an unskilled worker is pointless because, while it is relatively easy to do, you're still doing unskilled labor.
Your skilled workers are not just plumbers and electricians, but also most IT workers too. They can get screwed, but can usually find a job if they are willing to relocate. However, there is a danger that your skill itself becomes useless, or that there is a local glut of people who do what you do. Skilled workers are the most likely to be able to play the market based on re-training and movement. However, they're not immune from layoffs. Re-training will help them, but only if the re-training is close enough to what they did before where they can apply experience to that new job. Otherwise, off to the unskilled pool with you.
Finally, talent. The reason you don't "offshore" CEOs is because CEOs and rock stars and distinguished scientists are themselves considered valuable as unique individuals. They don't just have a skill, they personally have resources which are believed to improve your company aside from what they know or how many hours they work.
To be honest, there are CEOs out there who look like idiots in their field, but invariably, they're hired because of something they bring to the table. They know people, they are superb marketers, they're incredibly brilliant (even if past their prime) scientists, or they just have a brand. It doesn't have to be a CEO, it can be an asshole superstar programmer with as much gift for self-promotion as for coding.
My latest example of this is a senior executive who was at one place I used to work. He introduced a lot of interesting concepts, but didn't really develop those into a stable product. When I came on, I determined that he didn't even calculate how much his latest database was going to cost us per user. In fact, he didn't even get a price quote. In short, he was a walking disaster. Except....
Except he was a brilliant sales engineer who could talk to executives and make them interested in our product just by looking at some slides. We landed a huge deal and now we have a pile of shit, but when we get that pile of shit fixed, we're in a great place. I may have torn my hair out at the poor decisions that were made, but at least I had something to fight for, whereas we could have had a tight, perfect app with zero customers.
Or perhaps we could have had a great app and still gotten the good deal. That's the downside of talent, you don't always know if the brand is more than the marketing, but when it works... it works.
Yesterday, I watched a video from 1997 where Gil Amelio from Apple was introducing what would eventually become MacOS X. That video also had one other feature. There where two words on a slide brought everyone to a standing ovation: Steve Jobs. The talent had arrived.
Don't get me wrong, being the "talent" doesn't make you smarter or better, necessarily. It does mean you have a brand, though. And it is impossible for us to have a realistic discussion of why CEO's make what they make without understanding that they aren't paid for how much they work, or for what they know. For whatever reason, they're paid because they are who they are, and who they are is perceived to be a force multiplier of some form.
Of course, CEO's are offshored all the time. But no one calls it that, because it is a completely different process. They're business rock stars, and a lot of the same crap that goes for that type of rock star goes for them too. Including the ridiculous pay, and often the bad behavior as well.
So you say.
I say that a society that destroys individual freedoms by using government violence l shouldn't exist. As to 'I am alright, fuck you', that is a nice narrative, applied to individual freedoms, but the reality is that it is much more appropriate tocyour socialist vision, where the majority oppresses a minority, minority being people building the economy, running businesses that produce thing everybody needs and wants. Businesses are the entities that create and give (and selling is giving in exchange, that is the only way to be sustainable). I say that companies give us everything and the mob wants to steal more than what is exchanged on the voluntary basis.
I say that the true humanitarians are businesses, without them the society is precisely what you described. I say that by running a business an individual must not lose his or her rights to the collective wishes of the mob. I say everybody must be free to do business as they wish, as long as they do not murder, rape or steal. I say mob and government are the primary causes of murder, rape and theft, not business.
You can't handle the truth.
Seriously, the H1-B is about companies being able to control the price. IOW, it is a local communist approach. All competition disappears.
With green cards, the employee is free to move around, and as such, they can find the best companies to work for.
That is how we get REAL competition.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.