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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...
H1-B is a non-immigrant visa .
This H1-B visa is being vastly abused by big companies. Time for congress to step back and rethink.
This sort of thing is happening at too high a frequency.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Unlimited immigration would actually be *better* than this. Immigrants would at least keep the money in the country.
And the Democrats as well....
All of those assholes in washington keep allowing this to happen. Until we get representation for the people and not the corporations, it will only get worse.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
If you think "all companies that do this are run by Republicans," you really need to think "the few Republican-run companies that do this are joining the long list of Democrat-run ones."
Silicon Valley has the highest H-1B use in the US, and they're primarily left-wingers out there.
There are also a lot of H-1B recipients at colleges and universities, which are by no means right-wing enclaves.
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.
"Silicon Valley has the highest H-1B use in the US, and they're primarily left-wingers out there."
Got any proof to support that assertion?
California (and SiValley) companies are generally quite right-wing - the MBAs have a pretty firm foothold there.
It's because of the entertainment industry that people think that the state is very socialist/left wing.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Every American IT worker should boycott Hertz in solidarity and trash them online whenever possible.
How is this even legal? Is there not a requirement to prove that the required skilled labour cannot be sourced locally? The race to the bottom how really moved into the final stretch!
Read http://smile.amazon.com/gp/pro... and you'll see that the government isn't allowed to investigate, nor is there any obligation for companies to prove it. It's truly a racket designed to enrich the businesses.
The article has some small, honest mistakes. The paragraphs:
Hertz is trying to improve its IT operations. It hired a new CIO last year with experience in the car rental industry, Tyler Best.
The firm seeks a "transformative IT agenda," said Hertz CEO John Tague, in a conference call with analysts last year, according to a transcript at Seeking Alpha.
Tom Kennedy, Hertz CFO, told analysts in an earning call last year that "we have 1,500 people in the back office, which is quite double what it should be. Our call centers are probably double what they should be," according to the Seeking Alpha transcript. He said the firm's IT spend is over $400 million a year.
should actually read
Hertz is sacrificing customer service for short-term profits. It hired a new CIO last year with experience in the car rental industry, Tyler Best.
The firm seeks a "seppuku IT agenda," said Hertz CEO John Tague, in a conference call with analysts last year, according to a transcript at Seeking Alpha.
Tom Kennedy, Hertz CFO, told analysts in an earning call last year that "we have 1,500 people in the back office. We can reduce that by 750 people by eliminating time spent actually doing things. We need to completely change that to people filling out forms to get IBM to do things for us vastly slower and for vastly higher costs. Ideally, once this is done, our change control costs will drop because nothing will ever get done. Our call centers are probably double what they should be -- having enough staff to serve customers is so 1990," according to the Seeking Alpha transcript. He said the firm's IT spend is over $400 million a year. "Tyler and I should be able to get at least a few million of that as a kickback from IBM, once we're parachuted out for destroying the company."
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.
The owner class is hard, hard right. Like Robber baron grade hard right. The workers are left on social issues, but a lot are still hard right on the economy.
That's sort of the problem. There are lots of folks who are left wing socially (pro-gun control, pro-gay rights, pro-choice, etc) but get real right wing real fast when they think they're taxes are going up. Our Media is left wing on social issues but hard right on economics. Free Trade, Trickle Down economics and Austerity are practically gospel in American media.
Part of the problem is folks look at just about every expense that isn't food as taxes. I've caught lots of folks doing it. Insurance? Tax. Phone Bill? Tax. etc, etc. The other problem is that after the Iraqi War Americans aren't seeing good returns on their taxes. Literally Trillions of wealth was just handed to a lucky few in exchange for nothing. We've let large scale corruption slide for so long that folks have lost confidence in the gov't. They've also forgotten what America was like before the Feds stepped in and started preventing super fund sites from happening (Flint Michigan Water Supply anyone?).
The other problem is Bill Clinton. He moved the country hard right so he could forge an alliance to get into the prez office. Again, left on social issues hard right on the economy. Trump brought up Tariffs but made it a point not to use the "T" word. What's funny is watching all the folks out there who know something is wrong but can't figure out what to do about it pushing Trump and Sanders up in the polls. It's gonna be funnier when Rubio or Bush gets the election despite popular vote thanks to hard right stuff like Citizens United.
Oh, and the colleges have been moving hard right too. Where do you think those $10,000/semester tuition bills came from?
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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
who doesn't think H1-B hurts them? Oh, and doesn't have a sweet gov't job (either directly or because they served in the Military & work for a defense contractor now).
/.).
/. crowd has finally realized their in real trouble here. We're all in the same stop the blue collar guys were in the 80s when manufacturing went overseas. What I'm wondering is if we're gonna do anything about it? Or are we gonna roll over and play dead like the blues did.
I'm curious. Not too long ago when a story like this hit all the posts chimed in about how they'd just leave and go to another better paying company that doesn't do this stuff. Nobody thought it would even catch up with them and they all thought they were irreplaceable. Me being me I knew sooner or later they'd get around to everybody except a few MIT geniuses (who have better things to do than bitch on
Basically, I think the
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of American IT workers with South Asians IT workers have worked out for the corporations that have done so.
I've had the "pleasure" of having to work with a major American IT vendor who recently outsourced most of their services to Indian subcontractors. The crap the Indian staff tries to slip under our radar is just appalling. They are breaking things that are not broken and are completely incapable of producing any original solutions. All they can do is Google around a bit and copypaste a solution, and if that doesn't work they come back to us, the customer begging for help.
That's not all. When someone from our office gives them a working solution, they come back to us and present it as their own and try to bill us for it. It's just amazing and I've heard countless similar stories so it's not just this particular vendor, it's *everybody* there doing this. All the bright minds in the IT sector in India have long gone abroad, the remaining IT workers are the ones who didn't make it to the top and are left doing the shitty jobs. They got nice titles, though. You could accidentally mistake the local janitor for a CEO if you went solely by the titles.
So yeah, it hasn't worked out that well for pretty much anybody in the IT sector yet everybody still keeps doing it.
-SR
I've been out in industry for exactly a decade. I know who they are laying off. I would bet heavily that these are the guys that like doing things the way they have always done things and are content on not improving it. They're the drafters that refused to learn "that CAD thing". You see it all over Slashdot. You guys sure like things the way you used to do them. "Why kids these days don't need to learn Assembly".
I spent a recent layoff learning Python 3.4. It's near impossible to get people off of 2.7 at work or Matlab. Why? Because that's what they learned during undegrad and grad school and that's where everything is written. And they do have a small point, I'm don't have time to go back and re-write 50 years of working software. Once we as a society figured out Linear Algebra in Fortran we stopped messing with it. Numpy, Matlab, et al are just pretty BLAS wrappers.
However at impedes a lot of progress. At this point I feel like I'm in Office Space half the time:
1st Bob: What you do at Initech is you take the specifications from the software engineer and bring them down to the hardware engineers?
Tom: Yes, yes that's right.
2nd Bob: Well then I just have to ask why can't the software engineers use the hardware engineer's API?
Tom: Well, I'll tell you why... because... software engineers are not good at dealing with APIs...
1st Bob: So you physically take the flash files from the software engineer?
Tom: Well... No. The project lead does that... or they're e-mailed....
If you're doing things the same way you did them even a year ago, then some lazier person that does your job is currently writing a script to do it that way. So in 50 years we can all look back and laugh at "Those idiots used to do it by hand". If you write a script to save you 1 minute a day, that's 4 hours a business year. If you write a script to save you and all of your co-workers 1 minute a day. That's an additional 4 hours per head per year. Start adding that up over a decade or two.
It's entertaining to watch you guys not wanting to use new tools, I just started writing new tools to use the old tools I wrote. I could reduce my manager's headcount by 3-4 and keep the same work level output with an improvement in quality. Software engineers have already done that, it's what continuous integration is for. Then they got tired of dealing with merges, so they wrote tools to automatically do merges if everything tests out.
CGP Grey's "Humans Need Not Apply" is a good video on the current state of automation. While I don't share quite his outlook his statements about what is going on right now is dead on. (Humans' will just start building warp drives instead of dicking around with what we do now). If TensorFlow can pick those images out that accurately they sure as heck can read the graphs I used to have to read much, much better. Give me the picture of a tachometer trace and I could tell you what's wrong it your car. I don't need to hear it, see it or know what's going on.
Last night on SharkTank there was a guy that had a mobile app that could take your measurements 20% better than a professional tailor, just by taking some photos and doing some math. If you were hoping to be a tailor and spend time measuring people, I have bad news.
Engineers these days use Simulink. Finding Engineers that can Code is hard. So we taught the en
You know what would be better still? A balanced policy designed to help all Americans rather than one designed to help the Zuckerbergs and the other rich campaign donors.
People are arguing this as if it's a political football and furcrissakes turning it into capitalism-vs-communism.
It's about trade vs profession.
This isn't a serious problem with doctors, dentists, lawyers, accountants, or teachers. Why? They're real professions, licensed by the local state. This isn't an inherent barrier to foreigners - if they meet the qualifications, it's a fraction of a year's effort and pay to get certified - but it's a huge barrier to the underqualified.
The hirers here are hoping that (a) the new-hires can pick it up well enough that with a few extra staff (and still cheaper) they can keep up production and (b) that the cracks won't show until they're on to their next promotion.
IT needs to be a Real Profession for about six reasons, but as a side-effect, it would end this continual pressure downward on the salaries of everybody in the industry by various efforts to dilute the talent pool with poorly-qualified competitors. Hiring kids away from college is another.
Just about anybody used to be able to hang out a shingle and be a dentist or doctor; engineering was a trade you picked up on the job working under a builder. Anybody want to go back to that? If not, support professionalising IT.
So then attach the conditions for that visa that the employees getting it has to be paid at least the same level as domestic employees.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Clinton gets financed by Wall Street, and what they profit from is what she will have as an opinion.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
>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.
"There is truth to that. I know one Indian guy at my company who has said before that he sends most of his salary back to his bank in India and intends to go back home and retire early there."
They all say that. After 2 dozen years they can't stand the unpaved roads, the dirt and the rest at their former home and they'll just do a vacation there each year.
Not to mention, their kids don't want to be caught dead at their dad's former homeland.
Many have no intention of staying in the US.
I've heard stories of American men in Silicon Valley who saved up their money after working 20 years to retire in Mexico or Central America, buying a lot to build a mansion by local standards and marrying sweet little nothing from a nearby village. The locals don't mind because the "rich man" will keel over from having too much sex with the sweet little nothing and everything he owns will stay in the village.
Not to mention, their kids don't want to be caught dead at their dad's former homeland.
Or the wife and kids don't want the guy to return home from the US because they're too busy living off the money he sends back home. I knew a guy from the Philippines who got caught in that situation. After working 20 years in the US, he went back home unannounced and told his family that he retired from working. His family hated him and the village vilified him for being a lazy bastard for cutting off the cash flow. Last I heard he got divorced and bought a fishing boat to live on.
I'm sure there are many lawyers making sure this works - but at a guess, those workers weren't actually replaced. Their job was instead outsourced to another company, that hired new workers on H1-B visas. Different company, different contract.
It's not uncommon. You should see the tangle that is Ark Experience, the creationist theme park - they've structured it in a manner that might be termed 'tax efficient.' Employees are actually under contract with a church in order to avoid state non-discrimination laws that forbid discrimination on grounds of religion, so the park can make sure only to hire young-earth-creationist Christian guides. The park itsself is run by a for-profit company in order to claim some government subsidies for tourism, but the most of the takings are not given to that company because then they would be taxed. Instead they are considered as 'donations' directly to another church (not even the same one as the employer) - because donations to a non-profit entity are untaxed. Or it was like that anyway, it's gotten in such legal mess I'm not sure how it works any more.
A similar trick is used by many franchises: The brand rights are held by a company in somewhere like Ireland or Luxembourg, where there is no corporation tax. The individual branches license the right to use the brand name for a fee calculated to be very slightly less than their net profit would otherwise be - so that almost all the profits are made by a company in a tax-free jurisdiction.
Really, if you structure a big company right, you can avoid all manner of laws.
It's hard to swallow the safety net. You have it banged into your head while you're a kid that you shouldn't need help, and if you do it's because of your poor character and life choices. Over and over again I hear the phrase "There's always a choice". I hate to keep harping on this but tell that to the kids with permanent brain damage from lead in Flint, Mi...
None of this is by accident. This is how the ruling class stay in power. It's part of what keeps the pitch forks at bay. When FDR & Co pushed through Social Security so we wouldn't have legions of homeless starving old people they pretended it was a pension program because those people wouldn't take the help. Ayn Rand nearly died homeless late in life before one of her close friends talked her into taking the help she needed (her books didn't do so well when there weren't billionaire asshats pushing the Austerity agenda).
There are other factors at play. For one thing people measure their quality of life relatively, not objectively. This is why it's important to have an underclass (blacks in the south, the bottom caste in India, etc, etc). It's the whole "Starving kids in China" syndrome. As long as someone has it worse people don't demand better. Part of that's fear of losing what little they have (aka Conservatism) and part of that is just how people measure things when they're not used to Math and Science. Again, there's a reason why the ruling class is fighting against public education these days...
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This following was published January 31, 2013.
"Migrants working in the United States sent a staggering $120 billion back to their families last year, it was revealed today.
The amount of money being sent by migrants across the entire world reached $530 billion last year, making it a larger economy than Iran or Argentina, the data from the World Bank showed.
This worldwide figure has tripled in the last ten years and is now three times bigger than the total aid budgets given by countries around the world. It has sparked debate whether this so-called remittance money could be a viable alternative to relying on help from other governments.
In the United States last year, more than $120 billion was sent by workers to families abroad - making it the largest sender of remittances in the world. More than $23 billion went to Mexico, $13.45 billion to China, $10.84 billion to India and $10 billion to the Philippines, among other recipients."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
Life is not for the lazy.
I'm not quite sure why you're brining up the soviet union's problems, but I (perhaps incorrectly) get the sense that you're brining it up to suggest that external factors--rather than internal economic policy--were the major causes (or even the root cause) of economic problems in the soviet union. I'm only responding to that point.
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.
These things sure hurt, but it doesn't fully explain the soviet union's economic problems or why the soviet union was unable to overcome them.
The fundamental problem with the soviet union is that the state owned enterprises and collective farms were incredibly inefficient both in terms of their production and what they produced. I'm not from the former soviet union, but I have many friends who are, and I hear lots of stories about how the collective farms would harvest crops so inefficiently that people in a town could basically subsist off everything they left on the ground. Many got most of their food from personal garden plots, which produced much better quality food. Of course, since production quotas were set by some central office, they didn't respond to which (inefficiently produced) goods were in demand.
None of this proves that "pure capitalism" (whatever that means) is better, but don't misrepresent the causes of the soviet union's economic woes in terms of these "uncomfortable facts".
Are you joking? NoCal votes 90% Democrat regardless if the candidate already bankrupted the state twice (Jerry Brown) or if they are the worst Senators in the entire Senate (Feinstein and Boxer). SoCal (much closer to 50/50 down here) couldn't make a difference if they wanted to.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
capitalism is the continuous cycle of optimization resulting in a survival of the fittest situation for businesses with the most fit being fully automated. outsourcing to a country with lower wages is simply an optimization. the question is how long we can sustain an economy by using such practices before it either collapses or a secondary post-scarcity economy springs up.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
My son, he's a smart bastard. He has a trust that doesn't really pay that much. He'd be able to survive and live in the US but he'd not be able to have all the toys a guy might want, he wouldn't live in luxury, and so he'd still be motivated to work and be productive. I thought it was a good idea but the kid's smart. He's been living in Peru for almost a year now. He supports himself, a girlfriend, and helps his girlfriend's family out - and he's still saving money.
It's a managed trust and I don't know exactly how much he gets from it. It's not a whole lot, I think it's about $2800 to $3200 per month. He can live fairly comfortably on 1/10 of that in Peru and could survive on it in the US but not have all the toys and goodies he might want. I've often wondered why more people, specifically in the IT sector, didn't take their salaries and sock away everything they could and just retire after putting in their 20 years. I love going south of the border and there are places in varied climates, across the globe, to pick from that aren't actually all that bad.
He went down to help collect samples of endangered species and do genome sequencing with a few of the other students who major(ed) in biology. He met a sexy native girl and I've seen him twice since. I will, however, be seeing him again soon. He's to buy a small bar/hotel and going to have a go at running a business. I do not want nonproductive children. He's not much of a drinker so a bar's not a terrible idea and he'd be contributing to the local economy. He's a pretty good kid.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
_American business tax laws actually encourage this type of activity_.
Why do you think Ford and just recently Carrier decided to move thousands of jobs to Mexico? Or the fact here in the USA, the states with the lowest tax burden are attracting many thousands of jobs? Or why in their (in my humble opinion) insanity in raising business income taxes, the state of Connecticut is losing thousands of jobs (GE just announced they're moving a lot of their operations out of the state)? Or why Apple has 70% of its $218 billion liquid asset hoard sitting in non-US banks? Or why American tech companies engage in that highly complex "Double Irish with Dutch Sandwich" accounting scheme to substantially lower their tax burden for European operations?
That's why I strongly support radical tax reform in the USA _so it encourages savings and capital formation staying in the country_. Business income should be taxed at a no-loophole flat rate of around 12%, which would make it among the lowest business tax rates on Earth and because the taxation is simple, save hundreds of billions per year in compliance costs, which could encourage businesses to far less likely export jobs for tax reasons.
If one takes off the team R or team D goggles and thinks about recent history, it becomes clear:
"The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies... is a foolish idea. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can throw the rascals out at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies."
Carroll Quigley
They know it, even if you don't.