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Hertz Is Pulling a Disney
New submitter wcrowe writes: Hertz is laying off over 200 IT employees, outsourcing the work to IBM India Private Limited, which has filed paperwork for H1-B visas to bring in replacements from overseas. This sounds pretty similar to what Disney did a year ago.
I thought the whole point of H1-Bs was to fill jobs that they couldn't find qualified applicants for? But now they are firing (excuse me, 'laying off') the workers, then turning around and claiming they need to import people? If this doesn't get rid of the excuses for the H1-B program, NOTHING will...
This H1-B visa is being vastly abused by big companies. Time for congress to step back and rethink.
How about a few hundred mil in "campaign contributions"?
Sanders wants to raise the salaries of H1B workers. Which would lessen stories like these, and reduce them to situations in which you truly can only find the person you want overseas (and make sure they get paid a fair rate).
Clinton wants to raise the cap and allow more stories like this to happen.
This isn't just a Republican/Democrat debate, it's a more complex split.
The current workers won't take a 50% pay cut and we can't find qualified workers for what we are now offering so we need to fill the positions with H1-B visa holding workers.
You gotta vote for it. A 95% reelection rate is a reflection of voters who don't give a damn or are corrupt themselves, not the corporations.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Nobody's suggesting communism, which like pure capitalism just doesn't scale well. This is proof of the latter--capitalist companies scale very well indeed, but the benefits of capitalism for the average person go down as the average company size goes up. One huge national company in any industry simply needs fewer support people, customer service people, lawyers, accountants, custodial workers, etc. than the same geographic footprint served by multiple smaller businesses. This is the still heart and black dead soul of the mergers and acquisitions game. It's why small businesses owned by people relatively local to the area(s) served are good for communities and why huge corporations tend to be parasitic instead. First, small businesses employ actual people and second, small business owners are to a much larger extent than corporate shareholders socially accountable to the communities they live in. Offshoring is simply not in the small business playbook.
I'm not a fan of the communist ideal either, but let's face some uncomfortable facts: the Soviet Union suffered near its start from a paranoid dictator (Stalin) who didn't give a crap about communism or any other kind of -ism other than his own power, it was devastated in a war in which it sustained vastly more casualties than we did and which in the US did not touch our industrial infrastructure, plus after that war it had to endure literally decades of economic warfare from the west. If there's one thing western countries, governments, and companies know how to do it's wage economic warfare. In that narrow regard, there is a similarity: people who work for a living have endured economic warfare levied against them since Reagan and Thatcher's times and yes, it's time to change the economic rules to no longer literally favor the outsourcing and offshoring of jobs.
It's funny--what the Nazi regime and the Japanese military dictatorship could not destroy we've allowed our own capitalists to dismantle and we've not fought them with even a fraction of the vigor we prosecuted World War II with. That needs to change.
I realize this is a News for Nerds site, and many nerds fear losing their jobs in the short term to places like India. But 15 years ago /. used to have a lot more vocal free trade thinkers. The concept is that India gets richer, China gets richer, and that leads to peace and more net jobs (for example, Hollywood movies earn much higher international sales, USA chicken and corn exports go through the roof, Buick triples its exports). If this makes Hertz rentals cheaper, that income goes to something else in the USA, probably.
I explain it to my kids this way. Your cell phone was assembled by Taiwanese owned companies in China. That alone 1) reduces chance of war between China and Taiwan, and 2) reduces the cost of your cell phone by 400%, so 3) Chinese people can now afford to buy the cell phones, and 4) the cost of the cell phone falls another 400% because of scale of manufacture (as Chinese can now afford them). Would you rather live in a USA where the cell phones are assembled in California and cost $8000 and the Chinese are working in rice fields? Sacrificing the 1000 California assembly line jobs creates about 10,000 Chinese jobs (from the increased production due to cheaper phones) and creates programming jobs for cell phones - in California.
The same people who got alarmed by outsourced phone assembly jobs now express alarm about the programming jobs. And they sound like the same people who were alarmed in the 1970s when Hertz started buying more Japanese cars, so the cost of cars went down and the quality came up and Japan became wealthy and peaceful and eventually opened Toyota and Honda factories in the USA.
Trump says China and Mexico stole your jobs, Bernie says corporations sent your jobs to China and Mexico. They are both old enough to remember how utterly stupid the anti-Japanese-car kerfluffle turned out to be, shame on both.
Gently reply
>Republicans want for us all.
And Democrat presidents passed TPP and NAFTA ... Google outsources and uses contractors that outsource, and Google isn't right wing, not even close.
http://www.alternet.org/labor/...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
How about we stop spreading lies that is a republican issue when both parties are fucking everyone over for profits. Voting for a democrat or republican isn't going to fix the corporate cronies who own both parties. Lets not excuse corruption and bad behavior for whatever party you belong too, because they are your party.
Until we start holding our own accountable, nothing will ever change.