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Disney IT Workers Allege Conspiracy In Layoffs, File Lawsuits (computerworld.com)
dcblogs writes with the latest in the laid off Disney IT worker saga. According to ComputerWorld: "Disney IT workers laid off a year ago this month are now accusing the company and the outsourcing firms it hired of engaging in a 'conspiracy to displace U.S. workers.' The allegations are part of two lawsuits filed in federal court in Florida on Monday. Between 200 and 300 Disney IT workers were laid off in January 2015. Some of the workers had to train their foreign replacements — workers on H-1B visas — as a condition of severance. The lawsuits represent what may be a new approach in the attack on the use of H-1B workers to replace U.S. workers. They allege violations of the Federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), claiming that the nature of the employment of the H-1B workers was misrepresented, and that Disney and the contractors knew the ultimate intent was to replace U.S. workers with lower paid H-1B workers."
I don't usually get too worked up over things like this. However, this story has really got me aggravated. I'm curious how many people in the IT Profession feel similarly?
I want to think I really like the Disney company, perhaps that's why it feels so egregious when they've done something like this. My question really comes down to, is 200-300 employees a large enough pool to push something like this into a Class Action status, or is having a couple hundred single lawsuits a better way to go about making a much bigger noise about both the specific Disney situation, or this situation in the US as a whole?
With us drawing close to a Presidential election in the US, perhaps it's time for IT Professionals to re-think who should represent us both in our home states, and in our national Congressional seats. They need to understand they're very directly impacting our paychecks, and the paychecks of the co-workers we actually -like- to work with.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
. . . they call it a "business plan" .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Seriously. This sort of bean counter bullshit is going to continue until people no longer hesitate to drag it into the light.
Yes, sure, it's up to every company to maximize its own profits.
And sure, it's possible that wages for certain classes of skilled workers is out of whack.
But abusing the work visa system to pay pennies on the dollar for labor is just flat-out wrong.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The plain simple fact, you cannot displace American workers with an H1B Visa hire. That's against the law and this is what these companies are doing. Couple that with how contracting companies game the H1B Visa program by flooding it with applications, and you have a broken system that's displacing American workers. H1B Visa program is meant to supplement the American workforce NOT replace it. There are companies with legitimate uses for H1B Visas which cannot get a visa because of these contracting companies. Time to reform the program.
The lawsuits represent what may be a new approach in the attack on the use of H-1B workers to replace U.S. workers. They allege violations of the Federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), claiming that the nature of the employment of the H-1B workers was misrepresented, and that Disney and the contractors knew the ultimate intent was to replace U.S. workers with lower paid [[ and ultimately disposable ]] H-1B workers.
Whats meat for one is poison for other. Freedom fighter for one is terrorist for the other. Whats "conspiracy against workers to shaft them in every which way possible" is "standard operating procedures" for the pointy haired bosses.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The whole thing is a joke...are you really telling me that out of 300 million Americans, you can't find ANYONE in this country who is qualified to do this work? Bullshit. Utter bullshit.
Unless by "qualified" you mean "willing to work at 1/2 scale wages".
The whole thing is a joke, a complete fucking joke.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
There are many ways to save money. Some of them are illegal. The lawsuit claims that this was one of the illegal ways to save money. (Disney could also have saved the money if they just didn't pay the workers at all, let the debt pile up and shot everyone trying to go to the courts to demand the money. Also this is deemed illegal for some reason.)
The sad state of things is such that even though they are using H-1B improperly, those affected are mostly college-educated white males.
This is not a great target market for widespread outrage and demands for reform on the 24 hour news stations.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
It's not really about racism, it's about basic economics. You flood the supply of labor with cheap imports and you reduce demand for more expensive domestic product.
They would just prefer to have them working at half pay for more hours.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
It's beyond time to eradicate the program entirely.
Something like this case - where disney literally laid off staff in order to directly replace them with H1B workers - should be immediately illegal and stopped before they even brought them in + fines and penalties and so on.
The fact that we're here on the internet complaining about this and the workers are only filing lawsuits after the fact shows just how broken the program is.
The problem is big business buys politicians and votes and then write the laws that best suit their shareholders (i.e. profit). Disney is great at getting away with this - look at the copyright extension that directly follows when Mickey Mouse would otherwise enter the public domain.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
You are a commodity to these companies, not a person.
They have literally millions of polite, well trained internet savy indian workers who will work for $5.00 per hour.
How is it that you as an American can remain competitive and yet above the poverty level? Answer: you can't, you are not cost effective to these corporations.
IT workers as group have made the collective mistake of not Unionizing back in the 1990s when it would have made a difference. That is why I got out of it before I started to get my graduate level education. Despite all the hype about IT jobs being "Hot", these companies view you as nothing more than "warm bodies".
This is over and above the problem these companies will face by hiring faceless and nameless H-1B's for things that will require knowledge of local culture, people skills, communications abilities and actual technical talent.(Over and above just base "Google the answer" type of skills)
The Corporate types, who are under the delusion that they can just throw money at problems, don't see the actual problem, that they are basically making a big security mistake, and basically alienating the very talent they need to succeed.
This is the point in history where American businesses lose their ability to be competitive with the rest of the world. Welcome to the Slippery Slope corporate America! It is all downhill from here, You had a chance to invest in local talent, but you have made the mistake of buying the cheapest and you pay for quality. Remember this when you want to complain about the state of education and the workforce in this country. YOU BROUGHT THIS ON YOURSELVES!
Enjoy the hell you have created for yourself! Gotta Run!
-The Last Smart American Guy.
being sociopathic is not a crime, so that alone doesn't make those organisations criminal.
bickerdyke
Attracting foreign workers shouldn't be blocked completely, but there should be a good reason for it. Someone who has skills you cannot get anywhere else. This should be reflected in the wage -- a H1B job should pay say, at least 200K/year or so. :)
When they own nearly all of pop culture. Unless your going to go live under a rock you're gonna be giving then some money. They own ESPN for Christ sakes. I know your already rattling of in your head all the non Disney stuff you watch and read but try keeping your kids away from it without them seeming weird. Media consumption is a social thing for most people. If you keep your kids away from all the stuff everybody else likes they'll lose a huge amount of common ground that helps then relate. That goes for you too. A lack of common interests is one of the things that isolates nerds...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Yeah, but "The Force Awakens" was FREAKIN' awesome!
AC's already called you all on your hypocrisy months ago.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The H1-B program explicitly states that you cannot use the program to replace US workers. You can only import workers to fill a need you are unable to do with local workers. Disney is violating the law. Maybe you should stop judging other people and learn what the hell you're talking about before calling them crybabies.
Yes. So either Disney never should have been allowed to buy Star Wars, or other companies should be allowed to make Star Wars, too. Our economy is about free market and choosing which company gets your money. That's why we have so many breakfast cereals to choose from. But I can't choose which companies Star Wars movie to watch. That's communism!
bickerdyke
In our enlightened times, only one country sends their sons to other countries to kill the people that live there.
Errr, well Russia now makes two, with Crimea & Syria.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Indeed they should! Star Wars is 39 years old. Under sane copyright law (i.e., 14 years + 14 year optional extension) it would be Public Domain by now.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Britain makes 3 given we were your chief ally in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The visa system for workers is completely "save cash for companies", nothing more. If you believe it's a good system in any way, you have either been duped by propaganda or not stopped to consider life without a work visa. So ask yourself, what happened _before_ we had worker Visas? Simple, people immigrated to the US. If someone had a special set of skills and knowledge, companies could pay the costs and do the work to get the immigration complete quickly. The US Government has embassies and a Military for exactly the purpose of accomplishing safety.
Congress needs to do it's job, but so you we. Repeating bullshit does not fix things, understanding problems is the start. Many of our problems were caused by people trying to game the system under the guise of altruism.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
How dare people want to feed, house and clothe themselves and their families! Damn commies!
In our enlightened times, only one country sends their sons to other countries to kill the people that live there.
Errr, well Russia now makes two, with Crimea & Syria.
Only those two countries huh?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/isis-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
Britain makes 3 given we were your chief ally in Afghanistan and Iraq.
USA was already mentioned. No need to list its vassal states.
There are companies with legitimate uses for H1B Visas...
There are no legitimate uses of H1-bs. Maybe - MAYBE - back when it was first created in the early nineties, there might have been justification for it since the tech industry was taking off. But now in 2016 when everybody with half a brain has jumped in tech over the last 20 years? Nope. It is purely a cost cutting method.
Same thing happened to me at Nielsen Media in 2009. They brought in Tata Systems and most of the software developers were replaced with Indians. Is it too late for a class action suit?
Tata has been called in and you can watch, the companies profits and effectiveness go down by about 40% within 6 months, because it requires more time to get anything done. (Translation of everything into 3rd grade english might have something to do with it. those that hire in H1-B project managers take an even bigger hit.) Somewhere in all of this is a IT manager basing his entire bonus for the year on some bullshit claim that he/she "singlehandedly saved the company millions" when what he actually did was differ lost wages forward to the next year in terms of "Go back and do over to fix X, Y and Z" screw ups from miscommunications or things that were left out because of someone in a long broken chain where best practices were not followed.
You can't get something for nothing. It does not work, any engineer knows this and all of the claptrap rolling around the empty suits in the management level is the snake oil that you can save costs without losing something along the way. It is just like the Over-unity / Free energy science fiction some people buy into.
It is news but not for nerds and it really does not matter.
-The Last American Smart Guy
H1-B visa were thought to be available only for companies that couldn't fill the open positions with domestic workers.
This is the part I found especially strange. I have no idea how Disney expects to argue that they couldn't find the needed skill set domestically then turn around and have the current staff train the H1-Bs. Clearly the skill sets were already available. Hell they didn't even have to open a position, it was already filled.
The optimist in me wants to say this is an open and shut case for the IT workers but the pessimist in me fully expects Mickey Mouse and and his congress critter friends crash them under pallets of cash.
Reading the Department of labor website " The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce" If the Disney workers had to train the H-1B it does not seem like they (the H1-B workers) had the skill set to do the job in the first place and it would seem to me Disney did not follow the rules properly.
Most white males are not privileged and bear no responsibility for the crimes of others.
Attracting foreign workers shouldn't be blocked completely, but there should be a good reason for it. Someone who has skills you cannot get anywhere else. This should be reflected in the wage -- a H1B job should pay say, at least 200K/year or so. :)
+1 Insightful, folks.
Exceptional work should get exceptional pay, and if it isn't exceptional, there should be no problem finding resident workers.
Seriously. This sort of bean counter bullshit is going to continue until people no longer hesitate to drag it into the light.
Yes, sure, it's up to every company to maximize its own profits.
And its up to every company to not eat it's seed corn as well.
Let us imagine the supply sider's dream of every American worker (except them) to be paid less than the wages in the lowest paid countries. Then there is no reason to outsource labor. Isn't this what we are told every waking moment?
Okay, mission accomplished.
Now let us imagine these people who are making that - oh, I don't know what you would call it - say "minimum liveable wage" Any less, and they'd starve to death.
Now imagine all these Americans buying homes and cable tv and a new smartphone every year and taking trips to Disney World every year. and having retirement plans and going to eat in nice places and taking vacations to the shore.
And just imagine the folks who would not have jobs where folks sped their money I don't mean to sound like a crazy man, but wouldn't it be a good thing to have more Americans make more money so they could buy more stuff so that your company sells more?
The times I made more money in life I tended to spend more money. Go figure.
Austerity only works for a very short time. Then it becomes a war of attrition like race to the bottom.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Next time forum a union!
Yes, sure, it's up to every company to maximize its own profits.
No it's not! This meme needs to die right now because it's a complete fiction.
Directors have been sued for egregiously fucking up but have never been sued for failing to maximise profits. If that were the case then any company donating to charity (and many, many ones do) could face lawsuits for not using the donations for profit instead.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
In an ideal market, people would be free to move around and seek work where ever the wages and opportunity are right. In our real world, moving from country to country to work is limited by governments that want to protect their borders and labor pool.
Try getting a visa to work in China or Brazil. Those countries do not readily allow foreigners to work "their" jobs.
A government visa program designed to artificially increase a pool of workers is the exact opposite of a free market.
Large commercial banks are doing the exact same thing. As are, I'm sure, many, many other corporations.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Only Syria. Crimea seceded on its own due to people there looking for greener pastures and no real war happened there..
About time someone starts at least trying to stand up to this type of treatment.
H1Bs being locked to the job needs to be removed and the min wage to use one needs to set high say 80K-150K varying due to local COL's. And with an OT level of say up to 50 hours a week (agv over 1-2 months) 120-200K. 80+ hour weeks 150-225K. Payments in escrow for at least 6mo's out Unless the job has MAX time frame of 6mo or less.
Can not be deported making a wage claim and the crop must keep paying into escrow if they fire the worker they can't reuse the H1B for the rest of the year unless they can have a clear case with documentation and proven in court as for why they where fired / layered off. Severance min of 2 mo's if the worker has been there over 6mo's or up to 6mo's if under.
Yes but Disney contracted the work out so we did not due the hiring they did.
ban outsourcing firms from using them or cap
Company wants to save money by replacing overpaid workers with cheaper ones? Story at 11. Really, I fail to see what the issue is here. This is a corporation doing what corporations do - try to minimize expenditures. These people were likely at will employees as as such have no guarantee of job security. If you are making a lot of money, expect to be under the microscope when the cost cutters come around. If you are truly worth it, you have nothing to worry about. This is just crybaby bullshit.
For someone coming off as smug and superior, you are shockingly naive.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
The original idea behind the "70 years after the death of the Author" was that the author during his lifetime should have full control over his work, and it shouldn't pay to kill the author to have the work enter the public domain prematurely.
H1B minimum wage needs to go up as they can clam that we can't find some willing to DO IT work for $10/hr with no benefits and HR says that the workers we have now will not be happy with the big pay cut to keep there jobs. Or that they don't like to car pool and that we find that for most $10/hr workers $20 a day to park is to much for them.
Disney could also have saved the money if they just didn't pay the workers at all, let the debt pile up and shot everyone trying to go to the courts to demand the money. Also this is deemed illegal for some reason.
But they're just trying to make a profit! Everyone knows anything is okay as long as you're trying to make a profit! Corporations are barely getting by as it is!
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
im not sure how to get Employ Citizens First Act into a decent acronym but the plan is
1 Actual Citizens (born here or otherwise) are first rung (80% of payroll tax paid)
2 Green Card holders are next rung (90% of payroll tax paid)
3 Visa holders next (120% of payroll tax paid)
also i would tweak things so that a business will have to fund moving a person to higher slots in this (Visa holders get a Green Card funded Green card holders get Citizenship funded) and remove the Job lock bit on a visa holder (you dump a visa holder you A lose 2 Visas next year B have to find that person a new LOCAL job C pay* the expense to ship the person back (and lose an extra 5 visas next year)
* oh btw no right off on that expense
Doesn't the word "conspiracy" mean that you make at least a token effort to hide what you're doing?
Great. Let's go back to fixed terms with optional renewals. Then there's no benefit to killing the author.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
It's interesting to see a new angle on this, and to see a group actually fighting back against such a large employer. But...lawsuits won't fix this long term. What is going to fix this is a professional organization with a little more teeth than something like the IEEE or ACM. IT Professionals (developers, systems guys, DevOps people, whatever) need to start standing up against stuff like this before any hope of combating it goes away.
I walk the line between worker and manager in a lead position, so I see both sides of an employers' argument. Here's the uncomfortable truth -- there really is a shortage of qualified people, always has been. You need to find and hang on to qualified people for dear life, because you're not going to get a department full of superstars. The problem is that a lot of unqualified people can BS their way to a $150K+ job, and employers often don't know the difference between good and bad. Because of this, they're always looking to cut costs. So when Tata or Infosys comes in, and tells the CIO to write them a monster check to make their lazy good-for-nothing IT department go away, the argument holds water. Anyone working in an offshored IT environment knows that it never works out, but we do a very poor job of communicating our value to the business in some cases.
Other professionals are much smarter than we are about this. They saw companies moving to limit their power and formed professional organizations. The AMA pays for legislation, makes political campaign donations, and ensures its members still continue to command high salaries. If they ever let up, United Healthcare or similar would buy a law saying that nurses or medical assistants could perform advanced procedures for 1/10 the cost. Same thing with engineers, accountants, etc. There is an accepted barrier to entry (medical school, accreditation, licensure, etc.) to weed out the first-level BS artists. Imagine if an IT professional with X years' experience came with a full well-rounded education in computing fundamentals and their speciality, as opposed to graduating from a certification bootcamp. Or if a developer could be guaranteed to know something other than the JQuery and Python scripting he was taught in Coder Academy. As an employer, I'd pay for that instead of having to cycle endlessly through crappy onshore and offshore employees.
The point is that both sides have to give a little. Employers need to stop offshoring to the lowest bidder long enough to allow a talent pool to grow domestically, and IT professionals need to embrace the idea of a profession with salary progression commensurate with experience. If I were king and were able to form the IT Professionals Association tomorrow, here's what would happen:
- A huge collection would have to be taken up from members to purchase legislation banning the most obvious abuses of the current visa system. (Not an outright ban, because the original idea is good.)
- Some fundamental standards and practices would need to be established. This is the really hard part, because everyone is used to things going a million miles an hour and vendors promoting lock-in at every turn. But we're big boys and girls now, and computers are a part of our daily lives; their use should be more like a branch of engineering than a mad scientists' lab or skunkworks.
- Experience levels would need to be set, and training requirements to reach the next level would need to be established. Yes, this includes the idea of licensure, and at the lower levels, the dirty word "apprenticeship." This would allow employers to pay less for lower-skilled domestic labor. Does that sound like a skilled trade? It should -- the fundamentals of computing are becoming skilled labor now, and the creative engineering work should be done higher up the stack by people who have done the grunt work before.
- Members of the profession would need to start taking responsibility for their work, PE or medical malpractice style. It infuriates me when I've walked into projects where someone messed things up
That's pure Socialism. In the USA have a MINIMUM wage - except for those exempted, such as agricultural workers, some food service workers, and congressional flunkies.
By most computations, the minimum wage in effect for a given US locale is LESS than a liveable wage. Which means that something has to fill the gap: food stamps, welfare, charity, working 2 jobs, and so forth.
Thus, what you are proposing is UN-AMERICAN and you should be ashamed of yourself.
I'm assuming you are being facetious,
But really, the achille's heel of supply side-ism is that eventually people cannot afford what you are supplying.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Definitely this. Basically businesses are socializing the expenses and privatizing the profits.
Except that while Trump is talking about building a wall against Mexicans or those from the middle-east, these aren't where the jobs are going. Instead, it's companies that make plenty of money that are hiding from taxation via foreign subsidiaries and then firing local domestic workers in favour of lower-paid imports all while claiming it's because they can't find talent. Additionally, it's in-sourcing companies providing low-budget labour at reduced quality overrunning the domestic mid-level workers while doing an end-run around labor laws.
Well... I think there's a better way to deal with the program than eradicating it: calling the bluff of the people who say it's necessary.
The critical claim is that there aren't enough trained tech workers in the US. So make the H1B dependent on intending to establish permanent residency. Then you get and keep your trained workers.
The reasons companies don't want this is that the purpose of the program isn't to supplement the US workforce, it's to make it easier to ship their jobs overseas when the guest worker with all his newly accumulated experience is kicked out of the country. If there were a shortage of US expertise then we wouldn't be kicking successful workers out and bringing in less experienced ones.
There is no shortage of techies in the US per se, but there's never enough good people. The best H1Bs I've met really do add a lot by being here -- as the best of any group of workers would. So let's keep the best people, who actually end up creating more jobs.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Companies are legally obligated to focus on profits...
Proof needed. You won't find any because it's bullshit.
You know what happens if they don't have profits?
Irrlevant. Generating sufficient profit is not the same as maximising profit.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
So...if you hire a nanny service to care for your kids, you don't care to check if the candidate is a pedophile?
If America needs these people, then give them citizenship. Otherwise you are just training foreigners to compete with America.
The nanny service should be ones to do that but you can sue them over that.
Corporations are all going international. The High US corporate tax rate has caused them to move operations to tax friendly countries. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01... So how is raising taxes further going to help?
If America needs these people, then give them citizenship. Otherwise you are just training foreigners to compete with America.
Don't assume that everybody wants US citizenship.
H1-B here. And I agree so much with you. It's a shame that legitimate foreign qualified workers now have to play the lottery to get to the US because some companies are abusing the system. An H1-B reform is needed for the US, but also for foreign workers who would like to come to the US and cannot get an H1-B because of the flooding companies.
Extending the H1-B quota is just a temporary workaround that won't help. The government should look for abusing companies and sue them. That's not so hard : look at the salaries, look at the number of applications (per-company), and it's pretty clear who is abusing the system. Prioritizing high salaries would certainly be unfair since the silicon valley would get all H1-Bs, but there is something to do about that.
I mean, unemployment in the US is pretty much back to pre-recession levels. I agree that we should cut back on handouts, but I think we should lower the tax rate and remove loopholes rather than raise the tax rate more.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
The difference is that Uber is disrupting a service/industry that is only non-competitive because of monopoly style regulatory capture. That is anti-capitalist and therefore ripe for displacement (and subsequent cheering). A typical employee cab driver still has the option to drive for Uber. It's the 'badge' holders and dispatch companies that are being hard hit, because they were protected from competition for so long by being able to buy up the limited number of taxi licenses that were made available in a given area.
Whereas there IT workers being displaced is happening for the opposite reason. Ie. H1-B regulations are allowing employers (monied interests) to bring in temporary cheap labor thus driving down the value of the resource in a smaller segment without affecting the value of the economy as a whole.
If either workers were required to have some kind of permanent residency (or be aiming towards it - i.e. immigrants), or if there were absolutely no restrictions on workers or immigration, then the system would be pure capitalist. However, in that case, the whole economy would be affected equally, and the cost of living would drop (or the dollar would drop), thus equalising/buffering the effect. That would effectively remove any benefit to the corporation from the above behaviour, thus curtailing the behaviour in a natural capitalistic way.
So, no, this is not capitalism working. If anything, it is 'corporatism' working.
If they move ops out of the country, we class their products as imports and impose tariffs on them. Further, once they're foreign corporations under law, they naturally no longer have any standing to lobby or make political contributions here.
PACs don't have those limitations. That's how foreign corporations have been lobbying in the US for a while now.
No, the unemployment rates are good, but the employment participation rate sucks about the same as in the 1950's when virtually only men worked. Only 48% of the population pays any taxes, that's not sustainable, It's going to have to be fixed and that is going to hurt.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Foreigners trying to influence the U.S. political process outside of diplomatic channels? Now, THAT is a legitimate target for the NSA and CIA.
That's fair. Employment participation rate is sometimes a better indicator of how the economy is doing, but I think it's going to become less good in the next few decades as population age demographics shift more towards the elderly.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
Wow, such an insightful statement contained in a mere simple declarative sentence that is nothing more than a mild ad hominem. It's not your fault, of course, that mods are stupid. Congratulations on your unearned moderation. Perhaps you could follow up your post with another that explains why AC's post is shockingly naive?
Sorry to hurt your feelings. It's quite simple, really. Management is often not very good at identifying the real performers and critical people in a department or team. They make decisions based on politics, who kisses the most ass and who is related to the boss's wife. Most people who have been around the block a few times have learned this. YMMV.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
An post that merely quotes the parent and adds an ad-hominem attack should not be marked insightful.
What's the matter? Don't AC's get mod points? Oh wait...
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Expel Brahmin From Your Country;
Never let your inferiors do you a favor. It'll be extremely costly;
https://petitions.whitehouse.g...
Casteism
Attracting foreign workers shouldn't be blocked completely, but there should be a good reason for it. Someone who has skills you cannot get anywhere else. This should be reflected in the wage -- a H1B job should pay say, at least 200K/year or so. :)
+1 Insightful, folks.
Exceptional work should get exceptional pay, and if it isn't exceptional, there should be no problem finding resident workers.
I'll play both sides of the fence here:
Agreed about letting in exceptional workers. The ability of the US to use its "Brain Drain" power to bring in top-quality talent, and to retain them with a Green card eventually, has been a winning strategy on a global scale for the last century. Other countries pay to educate these people, and then the US grabs them once they have completed their nursing degree, PhD, or whatever. I only learned this when my friends back in grad school, who were almost all from abroad, would explain it to me – people from all continents but Antarctica. That is, the US has long externalized costs in this manner.
But on the flip-side: This strategy accelerated in the late 20th century, and is now out of control. H-1B visas do not result in the above — They have effectively the opposite effect. Being a politically palatable type of "guest-worker" program, most of these foreign workers (most with Bachelors or higher degrees) eventually have to leave. They take whatever skills they have learned back home with them, enhancing the workforce talent-base of their home countries. The H1-B workers are willing to undergo what is essentially a post-graduate internship; save their cash like mad; and return home wealthy and with a higher market-value to boot. Those that stay are in some cases better, but in other cases simply cheaper — they want their children to have a better life, and make this sacrifice.
Well, OK, those are the two extremes. In-between, if you have a huge burden of US student-loan debt, are home-grown, and are looking for, say, a Tenure-track University position — you are out of luck. You are too expensive. You are not wanted. You engaged in many years of voluntary poverty while working for that advanced degree. And what is your reward? . . . Ha. Nothing. Well, actually, it's punishment. You'll have significantly reduced job prospects, and then when your giant-Corp. employer brings in another batch of H1-B's, the US Social Safety Net will tell you that you are "too smartified" to qualify for any benefits to sustain your family while you look for another job. Be aware that "another job" will be something like a factory worker (I've met plenty in this position while on internships years ago). The only good bet is a position with a military contractors (requiring US Citizenship for security Clearance), but not really even there — they strongly prefer to hire "fresh-outs" because that is the cheapest labor that they can get. Experience counts against you.
There is no nationalism here — I am only summarizing decades of observations.
Everybody around the world knows that this is the case. This reversal of the situation is directly eroding the US middle and upper-middle classes (choose your definition), but slowly enough that the full effects haven't been apparent to any generation of living US voters. The end game is that, to oversimplify, the US is reversing the Brain Drain effect to the extent that its major export – un-taxed, unnoticed, and unrequited – is intellectual talent. Companies engage in this due to next-quarter focus on earnings, and not long-term strategy.
This is globalization. But maybe that's OK. Because there will never be another war *cough*, it's fine for super-national Corporations to simultaneously impoverish the average citizen of their (typically) home country, who are their biggest market. At the same time this export higher-level intellectual skills
Seriously. This sort of bean counter bullshit is going to continue until people no longer hesitate to drag it into the light.
Yes, sure, it's up to every company to maximize its own profits.
And its up to every company to not eat it's seed corn as well.
Thanks for saying in a single sentence what just took me two pages to say (see above).
The short answer is that human life-spans, and the rate of these socioeconomic shifts, are on about the same scale. Voters are not noticing, and investors are looking for shorter-term profits. And so the snake eats its own tail...