Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
10/10, top libertarian trolling, would read again!
Fair is fair, so let's make sure it cuts both ways, all the way up the management chain. Let anyone who can and is willing to do the CEO job for less $ take the position, and have to have the current CEO train his replacement.
I'm not religious, but this kind of shit only makes me think of that famous line: "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven."
Circumcision is child abuse.
Corporations are not, and have never been, the job creators. Customers are the job creators.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Edison wanted cheaper workers, plain and simple. Dalgaard and Cobut should be ashamed of themselves, but slimeballs like that know no shame.
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...
This is why it's morally OK to fuck over corporations.
The beatings^Wlayoffs will continue until morale improves.
No. Those "leftists" want to ensure that workers have more control over their own lives. This is inherently difficult to do when employers, both individually and collectively, have much more power than the employee.
An employee who is fired loses their livelihood.
An employer who has an employee that quits loses some of their capacity to do business. Depending upon the size of their business, that loss in capacity ranges from negligible to critical-but-not-fatal.
There are various ways to balance that power. Regulation is one means. Unionization is another approach. Of course, controlling supply (e.g. limiting H1B's) is also a valuable tool for changing the balance. Note that I say balancing power. Even many staunch union supporters would agree that giving workers more power than employers is a bad idea.
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.
"If you want the job, make yourself able to get the job"
I wanted the job so hard I tried to get my DNA to change so that I was Indian but my damn lazy American genome would not cooperate.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Corporations in the United States are a legal invention of the citizens of the United States. They were created because the citizens believed that corporations would provide more good to the country than bad.
If it seems to the citizens that corporations are providing more bad than good, we can dissolve corporations. Now of course this will be difficult to do in the current political and social landscape. In the extremity, though, we can always return to the ways of the Founding Fathers, meet the armed goons of the government on the battlefield, and blow their brains out.
I do not expect that that happen in my lifetime, frankly. However, what is much more likely to happen, and far sooner, is that one of these workers who are told to train their H1B replacements will arrange on their first day to usher them all into a large meeting room, lock the doors, and shoot every last one of them. Sending the message to the world: "Come to America on H1B, and die."
But please note, I am not advocating any of this. I'm merely predicting it. Because throughout history, when the powerful repeatedly failed to listen to the "lower classes" complaints of injustice, eventually the lower classes kill the powerful -- And it won't matter if the powerful were "right" according to this political theory, or they were "wrong" according to that economic theory, when they're rotting in the gutter as the proles piss on their corpse.
"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
H1Bs aren't immigrants. They are foreign workers here to take jobs that no one wants. That's the "theory", anyway. In practice, they are used to import indentured servants at the cost of US citizens.
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.
Every time I read one of these statements from the entitles poodles that run corporate America, I hear guillotines being sharpened.
You are welcome on my lawn.
...with the dismissive attitude of an authority figure who knows they can't be touched.
"You should never doubt what nobody is sure about." -- Willy Wonka
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.
Customers create the jobs. If another company can undercut the price of your company, you will lose sales and employees will lose their jobs, and the other company will gain sales and hire more employees.
In the end, the customer is always right, and the customer is the one funding the ongoing business of the company. Lose too many of your customers and you go broke - see GM and Chrysler as examples.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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
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).
A buisness does not create, people do.
If you are on an island and demand things then you do it, because you want to survive. No business is there, but demand, and the job to create those things, exist. If someone who already knows how to do those things is on the island he will just do it more efficiently, and can make more money at it, but he did not create the job..
Lets do your same test. You are on an island full of nothing but farmers, and only need to grow one crop that only takes one person to create and everyone is equally good at making that crop. Is there anymore jobs for farmers? No, because demand=jobs. Add one non farmer to the mix, now there is demand for farmers, and he will pay the farmer who can best serve his needs the cheapest. He created the job.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
You did read that they had to train their replacements right? So their resume was good, the offshore peoples was not.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Here's an easy solution to this problem. Make H1-B a path to citizenship (and really we want as much intelligent and highly-skilled labors as possible to stick around) so that eventually companies can't hold the H1-B over an employee's head to keep wages down. Next, keep track of former H1-B workers who are currently unemployed and do not allow for any addition applications until there there are fewer than say 10% who have been unemployed for more than a year. Additionally, count any citizens who were displaced by an H1-B worker (would need to follow companies using H1-B workers more closely, but that's part of the trade-off) as part of this pool as well.
If a company can't find enough skilled workers, they need to raise wages to attract better candidates and let the companies who aren't willing to pay as much draw from the pool of applicants who are less qualified. Otherwise they can pick from what's available and spend some time training their hires.
Require all employers who hire an H1-B to pay TOP MARKET RATE for their region for the position they hire that person for.Additionally, require the employer initiate and cover all costs of Naturalization of the H1-B employee after 1 year or rescind H1-B status and send them home. A per worker fee that is large enough to cover teh cost of oversight should be required for each H1-B worker hired. This could be handled through ICE -- the same as they handle Green Card Applicants -- just perform random interviews and checks on the H1-B workers to ensure they are indeed working in the job capacity they were documented as and are indeed receiving the appropriate level of pay. Deviation should result in hefty fines the first time ($100,000 or more per incident) with severe penalties after repeated incidents ($1,000,000+ fines and revocation of all H1-B permits and inability to obtain future permits)
This way, we can be sure H1-Bs will indeed be a highly skilled and specialized worker hired because there is no local equivalent and that the H1-B worker is not exploited as a cheap labor source and given all employee accommodations as required under law.
people can make things and sell them to each other without corporations, they are strictly a mental construct humans use to organize their thinking, in the physical realm corporations do not actually exist.
the customers do not actually create anything.
let's try this exercise: you are a farmer and you have extra food. there are hungry people with money. no corpoation is necessary for a business transaction to take place here.
You are stuck an island by yourself
yeah sure that argument clearly is deeply rooted in real life experience, NOT
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.
Germany has historically had extremely strong unions, and their economy is doing just fine. It isn't unionization that screws up economies, it's having overly-generous government pension programs (with people retiring in their 40s or whatever it was in Greece), too much business going on under-the-table and no taxes being paid on it (a huge problem in Greece), and people not doing much productive work in general (another big problem in Greece, where it seems most people work for the government, and the rest working in tourism, and no real industry to speak of; when was the last time you bought something that said "Made in Greece"? I think they make some cheese, and that's all I can think of.).
Knowing how to do something, in the absence of customers willing to pay for it, doesn't create jobs. Do your island test this way - he's alone on the island, he knows how to make boats and canoes and airplanes. Who's he going to sell to once he's made enough to satisfy his own demand?
Knowing how to do something, even with customers, is not by itself sufficient to create a job. I might know how to make a nuclear weapon - that doesn't mean I'm going to have any customers absent a supply of yellow cake; not only that, but the people who would want to buy one are the people who will make sure they're your last customer, so your "business" is closed due to a "death in the family."
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
A "job" is any activity in which you're paid for work.
But I'll be sure to pass that on to my buddies in the housing industry that only work for several months at a time or my other friends who work as musicians "Hey, do you know you don't have a job because you're only employed for several weeks at a stretch?"
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
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
While there is a proper definition of the term "libertarian", most slashdotters who identify as such do not understand it. Indeed, the same can be said for most anyone who self-identifies as "libertarian". Most would seem to fall into the "I should be able to get rich at others expense and smoke weed" camp. Then there are the Rand fanboys who still believe that labor is a "free market". I don't know which group is more self-deluded but they are both out of touch with reality.
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
Facebook is continually trying to increase the number of advertisers - their customers. And an author of a book is no different than an author of software - the cost of producing the first copy is high in terms of time and labor, each additional copy is almost nothing. But, in both cases, if nobody is a customer, they haven't created a job for themselves, just a hobby. Same as all those devs who work for free on open source don't have a job developing open source.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I'm not a proponent of perpetual unions, but rather a system where we can activate/deactivate unions as necessary. However, in tech now is a time when a union is needed to level the playing field, and use the power of the collective to lobby against big corporation lobbying agenda (H-1B increases).
So they're paying less for that employee, but they're not going to get as much productivity out of him, either. Perhaps they could hire two or three people to insure adequate coverage of your position, but anyplace where off-shore development is booming, you won't get those kinds of rates for people for long. I did a gig with IBM where all the dev work was moved to Romania. A couple years later a few contracting companies that'd set up shop there were asking rates only marginally competitive with US salaries at the time. Certainly not enough to hire multiple developers for the cost of one in the USA.
If it's an off-shore position, he's probably not going to be loyal to your company, either. There's the same incentive for that guy to job hop for more pay every few months that there was for US IT workers when the industry was booming in the 90's. So that guy you spent that couple of months training could easily be gone a few months after you leave. The end effect of that is a company that doesn't actually know how to do anything.
These factors contribute to a lot of failed off-shore efforts. You don't hear about the failures so often, as those companies would rather their shareholders didn't hear about them.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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.
Socialism and Protectionism are _not_ easy answers. That's what makes them real answers. Real answers are _hard_. We're facing a lot of complex problems with a large and incredibly powerful group of individuals trying to sabotage any attempt to solve them.
This is always been a problem of socialists. Our rhetoric sucks because we don't have a grand ideal to lean on. It's so much _easier_ to say if we leave things alone their sort themselves out. It _sounds_ better and it _feels_ better. Sure, it's wrong. But it's a tough sell.
It's like when you were a teenager and didn't want to listen to your parents. I mean that exactly. Your parents weren't right about everything, but if you're middle class enough to be reading this they were probably right about 90%. But nobody remembers that 90%, just the 10% of the time they were wrong. Socialism has the same problem.
And no, Russia and China aren't socialists. Next question please. It takes more than words to be socialist, just like it takes more than sex to be a parent.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The first thing they should do is to abolish the random lottery for H1B visas and grant the visas within the cap to the applicants with the highest salaries. That would help to stop companies that are abusing H1Bs for driving wages down and at the same time would make sure that if a company really really needs the skills of a specific foreigner, they could get a visa for him or her by paying a very high wage.
Jan
When's the last time you opened a product labeled "Made in one of those four countries"?
Probably not too long ago. Check out Volvo cars (built in Sweden) or Volvo trucks (built in Sweden, and Swedish owned). To just name two. There are many others.
Now of course, we've been non white for the last 30 years or so. Still going strong. If you lot would just stop starting wars all over, or at least take care of the refugees we wouldn't have to. The town of Sodertalje (home to Scania) took in more Iraq refugees than all of the US of A. Combined.
Then again, if you weren't so hot on wars, the Norwegians couldn't export their "Raufoss" rounds to you, so there's that...
Fact of the matter is that we have a very positive trade balance with you, even considering how small Sweden is. So a lot more shit gets done here, than over there... A lot more...
Stefan Axelsson
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.
When the geek turns to thoughts felonies he contrives schemes so finely calibrated that they cannot possibly work.
I dunno, I am not seeing much difference between his plans and the actions of a good amount of CEOs that come on board a company, drive it into the ground while sucking up any profits laying about, and the bail in their golden parachutes before everything hits rock bottom. Hell I can think of two of them have made runs at being president.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the (supposed) good of its victims may be the most oppressive
Plutocrat mentality: "I've got mine now, the rest of you can grovel for scraps."
Table-ized A.I.