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Disney Making Laid-Off US Tech Workers Train Foreign H1-B Replacements
WheezyJoe writes: The NY Times brings us a story on the Disney Corporation laying off U.S. tech workers and replacing them with immigrants visiting the country under H1-B visas. The twist is that the immigrant workers are not your nice local visiting foreign guy from the university who wants to stick around 'cause he likes the people here... they are employees of foreign-based consulting companies in the business of collecting H1-B visas and "import[ing] workers for large contracts to take over entire in-house technology units." The other twist? The U.S. tech workers are required to train their replacements before vacating their jobs, or risk losing severance benefits (excerpts of the Disney's layoff notice are included in the article).
...just what you'd expct from Disney
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
So how many "nerds" and information technology workers are going to reward Disney by buying tickets to see the new Star Wars movie this December? Wouldn't it be funny if their target audience boycotted the movie out of solidarity and it flopped?
You can toss in So Cal Edison in the same bin
http://www.computerworld.com/a...
Now unless I misunderstand the law. H1-B is supposed to be for jobs Americans can't do. Tell me how a dept that is and has been doing the work is suddenly unskilled and unable to do the job but is able to train their replacements. Also if these people have the "Skills" why are they being trained by those they displace ?
So, we all have heard we have a lack of workers with necessary skills...
Given that US citizens are now training these H1B workers with their job skills, what sort of skills were they lacking in order to justify the "need" for the imported skilled workers?
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Wow. Train your replacements. Bit like making the condemned sharpen the guillotine before they step up.
Can't say I've heard of a dick move like that since FuckedCompany.com was tracking this sort of thing.
And to think I was considering visiting many of your parks this year. With friends and family. I'll be certain to inform them all what a magical place you've become.
Fuck you Very Much Disney. I hope your bottom line feels this shit. Have a Nice Day.
The contracting company can claim H1Bs are required because the current employees are not actually looking for jobs. And of course, quitting en mass wouldn't help because the H1Bs have already been approved.
The employees should trash Disney's systems. Completely and totally cripple them. Using time bombs that trigger after they are certain to be gone. Blame can always be laid at the incompetent H1Bs.
“The program has created a highly lucrative business model of bringing in cheaper H-1B workers to substitute for Americans,” said Ronil Hira, a professor of public policy at Howard University who studies visa programs and has testified before Congress about H-1B visas.
By law the H1B should not be cheaper than hiring Americans. They need to demonstrate they are paying prevailing wages and that they have made good faith effort to recruit Americans. But the companies game the system thoroughly. They lobby the congress to create strict dead lines like, "if there is no reply from immigration side for 90 days the application is deemed to be approved" and they the congress cuts the budget and staff of the immig department. They pad up the qualification requirements on one hand, "degree in math/engineering, x years of experience in y technology blah blah blah", then on the payment side they name the positions that have low pay. Naturally they would not find qualified Americans willing to work at that pay.
The way around these issues should be to create some sort of bounty program. Let the government crowdsource it. Make these H1B applications and the documentation supplied by these companies public. Any one should be able to challenge and point out the "gaming". There should be some sort of reward for people who catch them cheating. There should be some safe guards against frivolous challenges, and this program could be revenue neutral by making the cheaters pay for this by fines.
In some fields in some ways H1-B applications are legitimate. People who come to USA, get a degree from accredited US university who work in the field they got their degrees in are not to be confused with these body shopping companies that import people with degrees from diploma mills in India. Indians who came in the early 1990s with degrees from top univs like IITs, IISc, TIFR, AIIMS, RECs and got further degrees in US universities earned the good will and the reputation for Indian engineers. Now all that is being squandered by these cheap body shoppers gaming the system bringing ill-repute to all Indian Americans.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The 57-year-old project manager and software developer. His boss said he was doing a great job. Now, he's replaced by an H1-B with limited English. Yeah. I can't blame Disney for doing what they need to do to make their bottom line look good, but if this wasn't illegal, I don't know what is. I guess I'm just glad Disney doesn't make software for aircraft or medical equipment, because the quality they're going to get from these H1-B workers is going to be proportional to what they're paying them.
They keep thinking their jobs are lost due to H1Bs, or due to Indians being hired overseas when the company opens a branch there.
Truth is, that jobs are lost at a much higher level because American management nowadays hires foreign contractors, but this is invisible to blue-collar workers.
Contractors are the easiest way to outsource, because a cheaper price is offered over a proven track record. It's as simple as that.
I run a company overseas that gets contract work from American companies, which recently fired 1000 American employees because they would rather outsource the job to companies like mine.
But even though that is the most common case scenario, you won't see that in the news. If 1000 Americans were fired and replaced by H1Bs instead, then it would be all over the American news sites and everyone would be outraged.
Hedge your bets: keep working/training but look now.
If you get an offer try to negotiate a start date after your release date to grab the severance... but consider that you need to beat your fellow soon-to-be-unemployed colleagues to the remaining jobs in the area, so the few weeks pay is not really worth it.
Too bad all the local employers know what is going on and the well is somewhat poisoned.
If the well is poisoned, then the only logical answer is to not have a handful of employees quit ASAP, but every fucking one of them.
A strike would perhaps send a ripple back through this entire H1-B bullshit and put and end to the loopholes being gamed.
The U.S. tech workers are required to train their replacements before vacating their jobs, or risk losing severance benefits
I'll start by saying, I have no shortage of cynicism and this doesn't surprise me in the least. So I know, "legally" doing this and "no one cares" don't mean the same thing.
But in order to hire H1Bs, I thought a company needs to demonstrate that they have advertised locally for the positions and can't find any sufficiently qualified people to take them. The fact that they have laid off their existing staff (a pool of local people willing to do the work), and the existing staff has sufficient skills to actually train their replacements, seems 100% antithetical to the conditions required for a company to hire H1Bs.
Any IAL's want to comment on how Mickey can get away with this?
The problem is that the government is influencing the market by allowing companies to pay these people less by virtue of their immigration status. A H1-B is sponsored by a particular company. They can't just quit and go find a better paying position when they are abused/under paid/etc.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
If Disney wants to boost profitablity, they should bring in an H1-B replacement for Robert Iger. I'm sure they could find lots of qualified candidates from India or China who have experience managing an organization the size of Disney and who would be willing to do the job for less than 46.5 million dollars per year. Replacing this one employee would have a larger savings effect than replacing the entire IT staff, while allowing the IT staff to continue innovating and making Disney run smoothly. As a gesture of corporate good will, Disney could allow Mr. Iger to continue working at a theme park as a cast member, preferrably wearing the Goofy costume.
The author of the article is guessing (*) (and presenting it as a fact) that they are on H1-B visas, since they happen to be unpopular... Most likely, though, these are L1 visas, used by foreign companies with offices in US to do intra-company transfers.
The L1 visa has no caps and no requirements for prevailing wages, and makes it much easier to bring in foreign workers into US.
(*) - http://www.computerworld.com/article/2915904/it-outsourcing/fury-rises-at-disney-over-use-of-foreign-workers.html
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
I have to train my replacement because they're laying me off. I'd tell them to kiss my fucking ass.
This is the 21st Century USA. Most people are living so close to the edge already that they NEED that money they'd get while training their replacement, just like they'll GLADLY sign the no-badmouthing contract to get the severance pay.
Why should this be illegal? Protectionism creates a selective advantage for the protected workers but makes the workers complacent and makes the company less competitive over time.
I'm a freelance tech worker, and I neither have nor want protection from foreign workers. I compete and add more value.
This is funny because the author doesn't realize he's the same as a foreign worker, that is, he's part of the problem. As a freelancer you make it cheaper for companies to hire from without because you don't have the same overhead as an employee. That's fine, your willing to take less it's your prerogative (less than what it costs for an employee or what a outsourcing company would charge). Fact is I've worked for companies that relied on outsourced "talent" and I've discovered that whether native born or imported, neither a particularity good job with software. It's mostly because they think their code don't stink, but they haven't had the pleasure of supporting their own code. You employees know what I'm talking about.
No, by and far the only reason many freelancers get hired is because they claim to be early adopters of new technology and business don't want to give employees the time to learn anything new. Investing in your employees is like a rainy day fund, it eventually pays for itself.
If they did this as a group upon being notified of the layoff they could have negotiated a better severance package. It may also have gotten the NLRB involved.
The H1B replacements can't be said to fit the requirements of the job if they must be trained.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
We could create a GoFundMe for the laid off US workers to make up for lost severance. Then let them walk !!
...whom I'm friends with, they say that of the 250 notified, only about 50-60 left the company because most were able to stay in the same field/department. The reason for the staff change is for a large system replacement being provided by an Indian software company. The people who left were maintaining very old systems that needed replacement...we're talking green screens here. Now, I'm not saying I agree with the concept of the hard push for increasing H1-B employees in the US, but there may be more to the story than what was presented in the article.
As a US tech worker, I am glad to see this getting some attention. But, I am also a little puzzled as to why this is getting so much attention.
This sort of thing has been going on in IT for decades. In recent years, the trend has accelerated significantly. In 2009 Bill Gates sat before the US congress, and explained that the tech industry was suffering from huge shortages, and desperately needed more foreign guest workers. At the same time, Microsoft was laying off thousands of US workers.
BTW: US workers are naive to think they can solve this problem by raising public awareness, or by voting. The only way to solve the problem is to organize and fight back. But, I doubt that will happen, especially tech workers.
There are actually two sub-categories -- L1-A, and L1-B. The L1-A is the "executive" one, which is harder to get and carries great benefits (such as getting a green card fairly quickly).
The L1-B is the "run of the mill" corporate transfer. It's fairly trivial to get, and is often used even for very temporary work (i.e. bringing somebody in for a week from a foreign office to help out with silicon bring-up).
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
Except that you missed a few huge points dipshit. The government requires that anyone filing self employment taxes will have to have Form 1080s from at least two different companies. This ensures that the freelancer in question is an entrepreneur, not someone being taken advantage of by an evil company that just wants to pay them less and avoid having to pay employment taxes and benefits for someone who should be classed as an employee.
People do freelance work because they want to and can make a good living at it. It's people taking advantage of natural market conditions to attempt to start their own small business to help control market prices through natural competition. This is a good thing and helps everyone. As a consultant doing freelance work, I actually make more per hour than I do at my day job as a software engineer. Just because you work for a company that hires incompetent domestic independent contractors to try and avoid taxes doesn't mean that all independent contractors are incompetent. I've found a lot of very competent people in my field doing consulting work on the side.
H1-Bs are people imported in from half a world away to perform the same job you do at a fraction of the cost to the company who's replacing you. The H1-B program is artificial and harmful to the market and economy in general. Require them to get regular work permits and/or green cards if they are people who really want to come here for a better life and become US citizens. Even if they don't want to stay they still should be accorded the same fair market value for their work. H1-B is a very specific and restrictive form of work visa that is being abused by a lot of companies. Some, like mine, have a couple of H1-B workers, but I know for a fact we pay them well and treat them with respect. For one, we even sued the guy's previous visa sponsor because he was worth employing and wanted to be here, and his previous company was being total dickbags. I've found that this is an entirely uncommon approach, though.
On the flip side, I've seen H1-Bs that are totally incompetent and are probably being paid and abused proportionally to the shitty work they do. Many companies are catching on to this. It's more expensive in the long run to fix the fuckups, especially for a company in a field where sensitive information gets stored and a data breach can be potentially devastating to millions of people.
> Oh, don't think "union" like other professional groups. IT skills are not anything that can be unionized
Why not?
Other professions, like medical doctors, are organized, and it works for them. It works like all hell.
Ask yourself why the US has not flooded the market with foreign physicians? Ask yourself why the wages for physicians have not been crushed?
The reason is: doctors have organized, raised money, and lobbied congress. They have become a protected group.
Tech workers could do the same. But they won't. US tech workers would rather, pointlessly, send links to articles to one another; and then gripe that nothing ever changes.
It should be illegal because the point of H1-B is 'we can't find local skill to fill the position, we had to go overseas to get it'. The fact that you already *have* the skills and are laying them off to *replace* with H1-B workers means you are violating the intent of the H1-B program.
With respect to protectionism, having a coporate 'sponsor' for your VISA means handing a corporation unreasonable power over that guest worker. This weakens their negotiating power if the general market conditions suggest they are not as well compensated as other companies do. It's one thing if they would be as empowered to quit their job without fear of deportation as the person they are replacing. This is a factor that makes H1-B holders stay cheaper than their non-H1-B counterparts, even when they should be on a level playing field when working in the same geographic location.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Why should this be illegal? Protectionism creates a selective advantage for the protected workers but makes the workers complacent and makes the company less competitive over time. I'm a freelance tech worker, and I neither have nor want protection from foreign workers. I compete and add more value.
This should be illegal because, as far as I understand the law says H1B's are supposed to be for workers with skills not found in the local population. However, these workers seem to be doing the same job as Americans, seeing as they are being trained by the Americans they are replacing. So I don't see how these people can claim to have some special skill set.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Forget about "raising public awareness" public only cares about issues that affect them directly.
Forget about voting the problem away: about 99% of politicians favor more guest workers.
We need to organize.
Consider the following situations:
1)
Management: train your h1b replacement before we fire you, or you do not get a severance, or a good reference.
Worker: I guess resistance is futile.
2)
Management: train your h1b replacement before we fire you, or you do not get a severance, or a good reference.
Everybody at the company: you try to pull that bullshit and we all walk out right now.
Management: okay, never mind.
Sorry, but there is no way you can "apply like everyone else". If they scrap the H1B -> GC path, what's left either marry a US citizen, the GC lottery, invest $1M and create 10 jobs, or be a Noble prize laureate. US does not have a points based immigration system like Canada or Australia.
If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress?
You can pretend to know something about me if you want, but actually I'm only part of the problem for people who are afraid of competition. And no, I don't get paid less than the employees - I get paid more. Always. Because I'm good.
How nice for you. I guess we should all just become superstar consultants and we wouldn't have a problem. Can everyone be in the top 5%? I'm thinking that's not possible.
You come off as pretty arrogant; basically telling people that if they didn't suck so much and were more awesome like yourself, they wouldn't care if people were trying to undercut their wages by making them compete with desperate people willing to settle for much less, because companies would just throw money at their awesomeness. I'm glad companies throw money at your awesomeness, but you seem to have an advanced or rare skill set making your example inapplicable to many other situations.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
oops--this was the comment I meant to link: http://www.jdunderground.com/o...
These are all well and good valid points, but allow me to respond from the perspective of an Executive, as I'm privy to quarterly and yearly financial reviews at the company level. Labor is the single biggest cost driver of most any American company. And it keeps growing year over year. At one IT company I worked for, labor costs grew anywhere between 6 and 10% per year, and that was with relatively high turnover in entry-level jobs. The drivers of these costs were the experienced senior personnel who are with the company for years, who negotiate for and get the bonuses and raises they arguably deserve. They also tend to manage to negotiate to be at the top of the pay scale for their profession/age/region. All good, right? No--because of wage creep. Wage creep means that because salaries must always go up for retained employees, labor costs must always go up. And companies are forced to decide between increasing labor load per employee to unmanageable levels, raising their product/service pricing above and beyond an acceptable level of inflation that the market will allow, or finding any legality/loophole they can to reduce headcount through layoffs, outsourcing, and bringing in H1Bs. As overworking employees tends to lead to poor morale and people leaving for greener pastures, increasing headcount means increasing COGS and OCOGS beyond what current revenues and profit margins will allow for, often the only alternative is to go to the Indian contracting houses and outsource IT personnel because middle-aged experienced native IT people are a massive cost center to the company. And that's not even taking into account the "good enough" expectations of clients who don't need perfection in their expectations of the product/service being delivered, or the banks who monitor the company's EBIDTA because they provide the operational cash flow, or the Wall Street analysts that work for momentum stock-preferring investment houses and watch expenses like a hawk, and whose recommendations or condemnations can trigger hordes of angry calls by shareholders straight to the CEO--and let me tell you, the REAL power in America is concentrated in the shareholders. You, me, everyone who has a 401K or stock options or owns stock, we demand growth at all costs. There's a poster downthread who talks about how legal laws will bow to economic forces and that this cannot be stopped. That poster is right--this process CANNOT be stopped. The days of American IT workers commanding above-average salaries for their work are numbered and fading away. This change is coming, it cannot be stopped, and it doesn'lt matter that many of the big employers lied to get this. This would have come regardless. Change IS happening, but it's not necessarily the fault of big bad CEOs and faceless Mr. Smiths--it is the turbulence of the world at play.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
> Tech workers could do the same. But they won't. US tech workers would rather, pointlessly, send links to articles to one another; and then gripe that nothing ever changes.
I think tech workers tend to be more wary of unionization for various reasons. They tend to focus on the unions everyone knows - auto workers, service industry, that sort of thing, and scoff. They ignore that there are defacto unions for professional engineers, architects, doctors, lawyers, that all serve to regulate, license, and thus protect their industry. Those people are all unified within their professional groups, whereas a software developer might look at a designer or sys admin as not really on the same team - so why would they band together?
I also get the idea that being part of a union is something that tech people generally are afraid of. They fear that the union leadership will saddle them with bullshit, or they'll get drawn into debates/arguments that they're not part of. They might feel that a union is out of touch, or would be too unwieldy.
Then there's the idea that unions are old school. We have computers, we're tech people, why go old school with a *union*? After all, if you're making a decent wage, do you really care if someone else is getting the shaft? It's a shortsighted position, but stories like this make it a little bit more obvious that things may change relatively quickly for anyone.
I think these issues could be addressed if the union was redesigned. No elections for union "leadership", but more direct democracy. Representatives could be chosen via sortition, and then the randomly selected would be tasked to figure shit out, with the membership eventually voting on any and all proposed rules. All of this would have to be done online, and would require complete transparency. It would require quite a bit of tech that hasn't been built yet. If only we could get some people together to figure this shit out..
I worked for a major aerospace company back in the early '80s and at least part of the IT operation there was unionized. So it can happen or at least it could before money equaled speech.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
A subtle mistake in a script. A few well placed words in some documentation that nobody will read for a few months to a few years and POP goes the server security. (*Cough* SONY *Cough, cough*).
Plausible deniability. It's what's for breakfast!
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
You leave out the other obvious alternative. Accept that your long-time developers are adding something irreplaceable to your company - and instead of thinking of them as an ever-growing drain, consider them your partners and accept that they deserve to be well compensated for the depth of company-specific knowledge they've acquired over the years. More, probably, than you - who were probably brought in to manage the company well after many of them.
H1-B workers are good only to the extent that they are treated the same way your existing long-term workers are. And that they themselves become long term - and gradually more expensive. Training these cheap workers entails a productivity hit. And if you don't keep them and grow them, you will never have a next generation of senior developers to carry your company forward. This system of 'managed, intentional turnover' may keep development costs down, but it is suicidal for the company. And it only works for managers that themselves plan to move on before the whole house of cards collapses. But if you must, blame 'the turbulence of the world' if you think that justifies your sociopathic view of it...
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
If you can't keep up to your labor costs as a company, capitalism indicates you should dissolve and that other companies fill your place. If this happens with regularity and the economy is properly healthy, the people who used to work with you will not have trouble finding other jobs because many other companies will fill your place. These new companies may even form in other locations and distribute themselves where the workers are. Instead, the government insists on creating loopholes to keep you going which benefits less and less people over time. I don't really blame you for taking the handouts you are getting, but let's just call a spade a spade.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The U.S. tech workers are required to train their replacements before vacating their jobs, or risk losing severance benefits
SOOOooooooo.....
They can obviously find Americans who can do the jobs.
So why do they need H1B workers ?
Only takes one disgruntled employee to burn the whole place to the ground.
Just sayin'...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
At one IT company I worked for, labor costs grew anywhere between 6 and 10% per year, and that was with relatively high turnover in entry-level jobs. The drivers of these costs were the experienced senior personnel who are with the company for years, who negotiate for and get the bonuses and raises they arguably deserve.
This appears to be a very short-sighted way of looking at the cost drivers of this company. The real cost driver is that your labor requirements have been increasing each year, and instead of hiring more entry level workers you have invested in experienced staff that can improve company efficiency. If done well, these experienced workers can reduce your hiring needs by far more than the meager 6-10% raises they have been given. If done poorly, you are wasting those raises on ineffective senior level employees.
Wage creep means that because salaries must always go up for retained employees, labor costs must always go up.
Wage creep is similar to scope creep; a small amount is inevitable but proper management can keep it mostly at bay. If someone's wages are going up faster than inflation, they better be bringing more value than they did last year. Paying people more just because of seniority is idiotic. But seniority usually comes with increased knowledge of a company's business processes which does make them more valuable, so increased seniority usually comes with deserved raises above inflation. But your total wages should only go up if your total labor requirements go up. If labor requirements don't go up, and your senior employees are getting better at their jobs, it means there should be corresponding terminations to lower wages because you don't need as many employees anymore.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
What's worse, I promise you that a larger company that has made enormous campaign donations to certain politicians does not have to jump through all of those hoops.
All they have to do is strike. They can't be fired while striking, and if there's any hint of punishment for striking they'll get a much bigger payday than their severance package.
Those comments didn't show up.
Fail.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
There's a poster downthread who talks about how legal laws will bow to economic forces and that this cannot be stopped. That poster is right--this process CANNOT be stopped.
I can't disagree with this statement more. Business is about competition. Companies play these games because if they don't, their competitors will. If you make it illegal, and enforce it, the competitive landscape remains level. Everyone's costs go up. Sure, the costs will get passed on to the consumer. However, the company won't lose business, or market share won't be impacted.
The only downside is the risk of imported "goods" (I use this term loosely as it could be a service as well) from a competitor based overseas. We saw this in the manufacturing sector in the past. However, I'm not sure that would apply to other fields.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
"The days of American IT workers commanding above-average salaries for their work are numbered and fading away. "
If it was TRULY the case, then company would not need to use tricks to bypass the law and outsource outside. What would happen is company STOP hiring worker at that price, forgoing the task to be done, and would let wage drop down and would yell "too many worker ! Too many worker!". But this NOT what is happened. At the same time as they are yelling "not enough worker !" to get H1B, they pretend like you that local people are too expansive. And this is where they show their true reason. The *SOLE* reason is that US worker are too expansive, and they perfectly know very well there is no shortage of them.
And by abiding to the company having lot of H1B and not showing the door to the company asking for more H1B, the US government show perfectly clearly who they are doing governance for : not for the people, but for the companies. Well thanks for clarifying that to us.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
some people are just paranoid control freaks. I worked with a guy who was always worried about losing his job-which he was quite good at--and getting him to share knowledge, passwords, etc could be excruciating. And this was a unionized, government position, he was about the last person who should be worried about getting canned.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Labor is the single biggest cost driver of most any American company. And it keeps growing year over year.
That's funny, because wages have been pretty stagnant for more than 20 years.
At one IT company I worked for, labor costs grew anywhere between 6 and 10% per year, and that was with relatively high turnover in entry-level jobs.
How does the labor cost compare to revenue? You can't just look at it in isolation like that. Also, if you have high turnover in entry-level jobs, you're doing something wrong. What does the retention policy look like. High turnover is very expensive for most companies. You should be looking at that, now how to get more out of low-level labor for the same pay.
The drivers of these costs were the experienced senior personnel who are with the company for years, who negotiate for and get the bonuses and raises they arguably deserve.
"Arguably" being the key term. If you're not getting a return on the investment for those bonuses and raises, why are you handing them out? If you are getting good ROI, then what's the issue?
They also tend to manage to negotiate to be at the top of the pay scale for their profession/age/region. All good, right? No--because of wage creep. Wage creep means that because salaries must always go up for retained employees, labor costs must always go up.
Why? As mentioned, retention is cheaper than turnover. There is no reason to continue to keep your employees "at the top" if they are not providing good value for the company. If they are at the top working for you, they will probably have a hard time getting more at other companies coming in off the street, so you can limit those raises, or at least make sure the increase are justified by increase value / revenue.
increasing headcount means increasing COGS and OCOGS beyond what current revenues and profit margins will allow for,
Why are you increasing headcount? Is it because the company is growing? Then why do you complain about sharing increased profits with the workers that are generating it for you?
often the only alternative is to go to the Indian contracting houses and outsource IT personnel because middle-aged experienced native IT people are a massive cost center to the company.
What a short-sighted bunch of bullshit. You're an executive? Well you suck at your job, and doing this is going to hurt your company, whether you are too ignorant to realize it or not.
You, me, everyone who has a 401K or stock options or owns stock, we demand growth at all costs.
So now you have growth, but it's better to cut your employees (who are doing the work) not only out of the growth, but out of any compensation at all for helping you get there. Then you hire these young, inarticulate buffoons to run the front lines and, guess what? Now you're bleeding customers.
The days of American IT workers commanding above-average salaries for their work are numbered and fading away. This change is coming, it cannot be stopped, and it doesn'lt matter that many of the big employers lied to get this. This would have come regardless. Change IS happening, but it's not necessarily the fault of big bad CEOs and faceless Mr. Smiths--it is the turbulence of the world at play.
Actually, from your description of your management style, it is absolutely your fault, because you can't see how harmful these practices are to your company's long-term survival. Today you're replacing US working with cheap foreign labor. Tomorrow your (now shitty) company is replaced by cheap foreign goods and services.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
I agree, however, I see no reason to give them any more courtesy than I receive. Moreover, there isn't any real solution to the problem as long as the world is moving to it's final form (i.e. transnational oligarchy), prior to the world's inevitable resource collapse (hydrocarbons, phosphates, water). This will "solve* the problem, but not in a good way.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
A complete fucking lie.
There never has been, and there never will be a free market. It simply can't exist.
I think when the rules of your "free market" are open for sale to the highest bidder, what you have is a corrupt system which starts with the premise that what is good for corporations is good for the country, but ends up exactly where we are ... a corrupt oligarchy.
I think entities will always lie, cheat, and steal to the extent they can get away with, and cutting regulations on them in an asinine ideological position which has repeatedly been proven false.
I think all the bullshit lies we've been fed over the last 3 decades about how cutting corporate taxes would benefit us all, despite zero evidence to support that claim, is such a giant scam it isn't funny.
I think extending copyright terms for douchebag corporations like Di$ney has more or less allowed them to hoodwink us to maximize their profits but generally fuck over everybody else.
I think the claim H1Bs is to cover is a skill shortage is a complete lie.
I think people who claim the free market exists, and that it is some perfect ideal are drooling idiots who lack proof.
So, jack up the taxes on corporations, put copyright back to where it was before Di$ney bought an extension, stop pretending that the profits of a corporation in any way help the rest of us, and stop allowing lawmakers to pass laws which hands to keys to the kingdom to corporate assholes who give us nothing in return.
It's time we stopped pretending that what is good for corporations has direct benefit to the rest of us. Because that's been provably false for a long time.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Tech workers are anti-union because they all believe they are above average and that having a union will drag down their wages to the average. They don't realize that employers are taking advantage of their pig-headedness.
News Flash: Unions can bargain working conditions and leave salaries to individuals. Working conditions can mean no more exempt employee bullshit, no more arbitrary changes to 401K programs, no arbitrary changes to vacation policies when a company is bought out, etc. etc. etc.
I hope your bottom line does not depend on American sales of your product. Your line of reasoning is that Americans are too expensive to employ and thus do not deserve a job. Once you left with only foreign workers who will buy your product? American's wont be able to afford it.
Maybe you should look at WHY your employment costs are going up. Hint: look at the rent for a 2BR apartment around where your company is. If it's anywhere near SJ CA, I bet you'll be shocked at what you see: $2100 to $3000.00. There's the real reason: the cost of living keeps gong up. Another word for it is greed.
What's wrong with protectionism? Do you dump your children and get new ones if they are cheaper? No, you don't because your children are valuable to you. The fact that the American government wants to throw way their workers who are loyal citizens and replace them with foreigners who are cheaper proves that it does not value its own chidlren. The whole purpose of having a an elected government is to protect its citizens rather than to treat the citizens as disposable commodities.
The workers are not a commodity, they are real people. Protecting real people should be considered a virtue. There are more important things in the world than profits, and congress needs to learn this. The whole point of protectionism is that they should be protecting me, even if I'm not a CEO, and if they won't protect me then why should I vote for them?
I say if these companies can form in India and China and compete against American businesses, then let them. America doesn't have to be an incubator for those companies.