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IT Workers Training Their Foreign Replacements 'Troubling,' Says White House
dcblogs writes: A top White House official told House lawmakers this week that the replacement of U.S. workers by H-1B visa holders is 'troubling' and not supposed to happen. That answer came in response to a question from U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) that referenced Disney workers who had to train their temporary visa holding replacements (the layoffs were later canceled. Jeh Johnson, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said if H-1B workers are being used to replace U.S. workers, then "it's a very serious failing of the H-1B program." But Johnson also told lawmakers that they may not be able to stop it, based on current law. Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at Howard University who has testified before Congress multiple times on H-1B visa use, sees that as a "bizarre interpretation" of the law.
"Troubling"... "not supposed to happen".
I'm not entirely sure if he's trying to deliberately understate it, or if it is just that he may be completely clueless as to what it feels like for the people who are put in that kind of situation.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You say that like it's an unassailable force of nature. It's not. This has been a problem throughout most of human history, and there's a relatively simple solution: tariffs. No, they're not popular in our free-trade embracing modern political climate - but that climate was orchestrated at considerable expense by the wealthiest members of our nation - those who stand to make enormous profits from the arangement while the rest of us suffer. Because one of the truths of free trade is that, as you point out, in a free market all wages must inevitably fall to match those of the lowest-paid workers within the free-trade zone.
Either we must reinstate protectionist measures, or resign ourselves to remaking our country in the image of the worst oligarchies with whom we share free-trade agreements with.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
A California utility has not only replaced citzens/green card holders with offshore labor, but they've handed control of critical infrastructure to foreign nationals. ATM, India is a friendly nation, but that is not guaranteed to last beyond their next election.
Legally here's what happened:
Some outsourcing company said it could only fill it's consultant ranks by hiring Indians. Since it knew the paperwork really well (and doing paperwork really well is an Indian core competency), it got them.
Then Disney hired the Indian firm to take over some functions at Disney.
Which means that Disney technically did not replace it's employees with H1B Visa holders (which would be ridiculously illegal). It replaced a business unit with a contractor (perfectly legal), and that contractor happened to use H1B Visa holders (also perfectly legal). Courts could rule that the consulting firm were gaming the system, but that's far from a gimme.
Which means you probably should get a new law passed restricting the use of H1B consultants to replace American workers. And you'd damn well better word it very, very carefully or they'll just maneuver around it some interesting way.
The Iran deal is going to boost up his poll numbers when the US can buy Iranian oil, the first time since Carter allowed the Shah to fall [1]. This means lower gas prices, and maybe a return to a non-sucking economy for a period of time.
As for H-1Bs, it is like immigration. People talk about it, shake their fist about it, but follow the money... and find nothing ever gets done, or will get done. Big companies love H-1Bs because they are loyal (and deported if not), dirt cheap [2], and it follows the historic trend that companies have had since the US was formed... open the floodgates to immigrants (documented or not) to dilute wages.
My recommendation? I tell people to go law, finance, or accounting. You can't hire a H-1B in those fields, and there is no such thing as an unemployed attorney.
[1]: Yes, the Shah asked for US help, and Carter gave him the middle finger. Between this, and Carter establishing a permanent presidential order with a permanent moratorium on any new nuclear power reactor construction, he handed the US's fate to Big Oil/Big coal for generations to come.
[2]: For the most part. There are a few H-1Bs which are true experts in their field. However, usually the H-1Bs I encounter barely speak English, and tend to be at the junior level, if that... but they are cheap.
I've never seen a successful software project where the entire application was written overseas. It's not easy to gather detailed requirements from US workers and throw it overseas and have foreign workers completely build it. The only way the offshore model works is to have American developers gather the requirements, plan out the work, give detailed tasks to foreign developers and then monitor the progress daily to clear any impediments / misunderstands and make sure the quality is acceptable. Then you have the problem of who is going to maintain the software for the next decade? To maintain software, you either need excellent documentation (which foreign workers suck at) or you need the same offshore developers to stick with the application through it's lifetime (good luck with that). At some point you lose that application knowledge and end up having to pay new people to learn it from scratch.
By the time you factor in the oversight overhead, the language barrier, the time lost in misunderstands, the quality gap, and the cost of having to pay new developers to maintain the application, I personally don't think the offshore model saves any money. But trying to convince the beancounters that is a waste of breath. All they see is that they can pay offshore developers half as much per hour.
Building software isn't like building an iPhone. An iPhone has detailed specs that foreign workers just need to reproduce over and over again. Each software application is a unique product that needs to be designed, built, and maintained from the ground up. That fact makes it much hard to just throw specs over the wall and have offshore workers execute it.
I like the idea of an H1B tax. Say 50% of the wage paid to the H1B holder has to be paid by the employer into social security. If H1Bs are paid the "prevailing" wage + the employer has to pay 50% of gross wages into social security, then only true H1B candidates should get hired, since there should be no cost saving involved, in the end it should always be more expensive to hire an H1B. For enforcement, any employer found guilty in court of underpaying an H1B could be subjected to 100% social security back tax for all H1Bs employed by the company for a 5 year period. This helps fund social security, prevents the exploitation of H1Bs from below market wages, and protects American applicants / job holders from unfair wage competition. Companies would get greater access to H1Bs as a result of reduced misuse to acquire the talent they really can't get here. If everyone plays by the rules, it's win-win.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
...This doesn't just happen in America. We the people all over the world are getting replaced by cheaper workers now. I was replaced myself, and had to train up a couple of cheap trainees that the GOV. had given my former workplace in a so called back-to-work program, with a much lesser salary - plus the GOV. even PAID for the workers the first year.
No employer in the world can afford to say no to such a deal, the trainees actually had 16 years of experience in their field behind them, but where also laid off from a bigger company earlier on - and had been on GOV. wellfare for a long time, this is SWEDEN btw. so it's amazing it's even happening here, but since we're a wealthy country (on the paper, not counting the MASSIVE debt each Swede have since they essentially don't own anything but borrow money), this isn't something you'll see in any newspaper - much less reported in American news.
It's a sign of the new times we're heading for. The outsourcing is massive, the GOV. will attempt to get work back to the country, so the salaries of everyone has to be slashed, but you try to tell the happy fat cat that he has to cut his living costs and you'll get the UNION all over you until you have to file for bankruptcy if you do what they want anyway. There's another agenda too - and that is they're trying to open the borders worldwide, so workers can essentially work and live anywhere. You'll notice MASSIVE unemployment rates as everything you once knew will fall apart right in front of you, until you eventually decide to accept lower pay, less perks, longer hours etc.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Excellent idea. The minimum wage for any H1B position should be $150k per year, and the employer will pay a 50% payroll tax for each employee hired under that system. It won't hurt the high-end, which the program is supposed to recruit, but sure as hell will end the use of outsourcing firms that skirt the law by mass-hiring H1Bs and then contracting with a firm to replace their IT staffs.
Our infosys contractors rotated every 6 to 9 months. It was a *selling* point to management. They actually believed that all knowledge was seamlessly transferring via documents to the new people and that the new people didn't suffer 3 to 9 months of reduced productivity because they had no clue about the big picture.
Combine that with the fact that the quality of Infosys candidates has dropped enormously since 2005 and it's a recipe for disasters.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The real problem for these companies hiring from India and others, is that they ARE paying low wages for the workers. That makes them susceptible to being bribed by other corporations and nations.
If anybody takes a look at the major companies (target, home depot, nemum marcus, etc) that were cracked over the last couple of years, nearly all had windows, and all had outsourced to India. Indian coders are paid around $8K / year. That means that China or Russia can easily bribe somebody for 80K, which is 10 years worth of salary there.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.