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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.