Slashdot Mirror
Laid-Off Disney IT Workers Decry Offshoring At Trump Rally (computerworld.com)
dcblogs writes: Two former Disney IT workers spoke at a Donald Trump campaign rally on Sunday, telling about the shock of having to train their foreign replacements. Speaking at the large rally in Madison, Ala. was Dena Moore, a former Disney IT worker who trained her foreign replacement, and said tech workers are reluctant to talk about the problem. IT workers "are afraid, they're in shock," she told the cheering crowd. "They're not coming forward because we have been taught all our lives to make do and keep going on. But you know what? This little old grandma is going to stand up for what's right. "The fact is that Americans are losing their jobs to foreigners," said Moore. "I believe Mr. Trump is for Americans first."
Hah, Trump vs. H-1B/Offshoring.
Whether that means offshoring jobs, or speaking against offshoring jobs as a means to the presidency, or hiring foreign workers to work on his construction projects ... Mr Trump will always do what's best for Mr Trump. If your interests align with his great, and if they don't he'll try to convince you that they do for as long as he needs your cooperation. The only reason Mr Trump is running for president is because he thinks he can use the position to advance his business concerns and make him richer than he already is. Why waste money buying off politicians when if you can get yourself into office it's free?
Trump is the end result of lots of people feeling disenfranchised and angry over many, many years. To be fair, there's a lot to be angry about, but I don't think that Trump's supporters are really thinking this one through. People who are angry rarely do. They just want "something" to be done.
Welcome to the second wave of "Hope and Change" as a political platform.
Love sees no species.
Heed this: If Sanders is the nominee, I'll vote libertarian as always. If that witch is the nominee, I'll be voting for trump. I'm not alone, by far.
I suspect that these starry-eyed optimists wouldn't be entirely pleased with Trump's cost reduction strategies during his years in real estate, which have included trying to go cheap on the pesky human resources; but they are correct that he is basically the only option on the republican side who is even interested in pretending to care about the filthy peons who aren't good enough to realize their income in capital gains rather than 'wages'.
It's almost as though people can't be made to vote against their economic interests by promising to keep the scary gays away from school prayer forever. Crazy stuff.
Do these Americans seriously think Trump gives a fuppenny tuck about American workers? I have absolutely no doubt that Trump employs in his companies whomsoever is (a) cheapest and (b) causes the least trouble. If he is now trying to get elected on an 'American jobs for real Americans' ticket then that represents a level of hypocrisy in him that even I thought impossible in a human being.
The "shortage" of US citizen IT workers in America is a myth. Importation of "guest workers" through various means are simply companies on the buy AND sell side of the equation gaming the US immigration system to distort the price of labor. The same could be said in other industries such as farm labor. Adequate supply of labor exists, but the industry is chafing at paying market labor rates.
The beneficiaries of this cozy relationship between politicians and offshore companies who broker IT consultants by the pound are the politicians taking $$$ and the brokers taking huge skims off the top of the rates paid for the guest workers. Meanwhile, both the US citizen workers and the guest workers are faced with lower wages, with the guest workers taking the brunt of the abuse. (Imagine paying half or more of your salary to some broker who's only "value" is to pay off politicians to get you a visa into another country).
Want to start a technology company and don't want to pay the prevailing wages? Then by all means open up shop in China, Eastern Europe, Brasil, India....wherever. I'm sure those countries would be delighted.
If slashdotters' "all about me" attitude is any representation of the attitude in the US, America is screwed. A country has to be able to make some sacrifices and work together. A nation of people who just look out for themselves is a nation that is headed for civil war.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Sad aspect of human nature. The protectionist measures suggested by Trump will harm everyone including the ones supposedly being helped.
That's what the economists say.
One of the things that brought the Roman empire down was all the poor barbarians who wanted in on her wealth. So, they flooded over the boarders and sucked them dry.
Let's look at this as a supply and demand problem. There are billions of poor smart people in the World. If I took the 90th percentile of intelligent people in the World, I can populate the US more than twice over with just geniuses.
Meaning, you can be replaced easily - and I don't care how smart you think you are.
Now, with wages being pushed down, our cost of living won't go anywhere. The bank isn't going to say, "Awe, your job prospects have been decimated by H1-bs. Here, we'll discount that mortgage because we're such nice people."
Food prices are going up.
Our standard of living is declining.
Our economy has changed dramatically in the last 20 or so years. Globalization is proving to be a bust for us little people. The benefits go to the top while we get the crumbs. We never had to deal with a business just picking everything up and going to some third world country, setting up shop and then importing what they make over there. Please, that cheap big screen TV is worthless to me when important things are increasing in cost. We never had to deal before with a company closing an entire department down and sending it all to India or Eastern Europe.
My father-in-law who graduated with his BSME from a public university in the early 60s walked into a job and never had to look for a job in 55 years. Today, he'd have a hard time getting that first job because he didn't go to a top school.
Things have changed and are changing for the worst for us little people.
What can be done? Don't know exactly. But the first step is to eliminate the H1-b program. It is not needed.
should be evidence enough that the employer is lying when they say they can't fill a position with an american and they should lose ***ALL*** of their h1bs, those here should be sent back home - not allowed to find a different employer to sponsor them, AND the employer should be prohibited from applying for more for at least five years.
Since when did a country protecting its borders and putting the interests of its own citizens ahead of the interests of foreigners become some buzzword for "evil racism" that every self-righteous liberal now feels the need to decry?
Every country in history has protected its borders and controlled immigration to some extent. Only in this weird modern era is that somehow viewed as a BAD thing.
And yes, when the U.S. was being settled, we were much more open to immigrants coming in. But that was back when we had tons of unsettled land available and plenty of jobs to spare, when infrastructure wasn't much needed, when there was no "social safety-net" to speak of, and when anyone who could handle a plow and work hard could make a go of it as a farmer.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Each party is stuck with a toxic candidate in part due to its own rules:
On the Republican side, they really want a way to get rid of Trump, but they chose to select most of their delegates by a reasonably democratic process.
On the Democrat side, they are stuck with Hillary because they decided to create enough superdelegates that they could override the democratic process.
If the parties had switched nominee selection processess, other than not being Trump I'm not sure who they would have picked, but for the Democrats we'd probably be seeing Sanders- or a lot of folks who didn't enter the race because of the superdelegates would have been there to consider.
Anyway, the whole thing leaves me looking at the third party candidates to decide who to vote for instead of Kang and Kodos
Hillary has a shameful history of corruption that goes back to the 1970s. Even Micheal Moore shamed Hillary for taking bribes from the health care industry.
The Clintons have been influence peddlers for decades.
Protectionism isn't good for the economy and won't create more jobs; this is simple radicalized middle-class politics. The ideal is to deceive people via their lack of knowledge, making them poorer and convincing them to worship you for it.
People don't realize *consumers* pay wages, not businesses. If it takes a sum total, through all levels of production, of $350 of paid wages to make a product, then that product costs no less than $350. That's why a cell phone in 1985 cost over $1,000, but in 2015 you can get a smart phone with a quad core processor and 64GB of storage for $300: there were over a thousand dollars of wages funneled into those old, enormous bricks, between mining raw materials and manufacturing silicone wafers and assembling the cases and all. Even if they slapped no profit margin on top at all, the phone would have been over a thousand dollars.
When you reduce the amount of per-unit labor costs to make a product, you eliminate some employment. Eliminate too much in a short time and you get the Industrial Revolution: 80% unemployment and a collapsed economy. Otherwise, you just get a few thousand unemployed and several hundred million (or, globally, several billion) consumers with a few unspent dollars left in their pockets that they didn't have before. Those unspent dollars are a market opportunity to sell a new product or bring a niche product (rich people toys) to the masses; but expanding that production capacity requires labor, so you create new jobs.
In domestic economics, you actually create more local jobs by aggressively outsourcing, so long as your labor balance slides more slowly than your wealth. That is: If 50% of your employment is domestic and you save enough money outsourcing to create 10% more jobs, you have the *same* number of domestic employees if you end with 45.45% of your employment domestic and the rest outsourced. You start with 50 Chinese and 50 American workers, you eliminate 10 American jobs in favor of 10 Chinese jobs, and you get 40 and 60; along the way you find you can sell 10% more stuff, so you employ 10% more workers, and end up with 50 and 60--10 new Chinese jobs overall, more stuff being made for the same amount of money, and the 50 American workers are living a higher standard-of-living because they can buy more stuff since it's all cheaper.
Obviously, if you start shoveling jobs out to China like crazy without creating new American jobs, this doesn't work. Historically, that's not how it's worked; it's not even how it works today. People cry because they say "that person's job was lost to that foreigner!", but they don't ask what happened next. They conveniently ignore that our GDP per capita has gone up by 6.3% in the past two years while expenses have gone up by 4.2%, and ignore that all this mass outsourcing has resulted in unemployment dropping to 5.5% from 8.5% (from a 4 year peak of 10%, even). They ignore that there are more jobs and more *income per person*, and engage in the trade of platitudes about someone losing their job once.
You may as well say that a doctor lost a patient in OR, so we should ban all surgery.
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Have you ever considered what it takes to "make your own job" even at, say, a consistent minimum wage level? It's not just that you have to afford the risks associated with competing in a crowded market, but you have an increasingly uphill battle against regulation and having enough to stay alive. It's even worse if you already have fixed costs based on a job that has suddenly gone away - I think you may be severely underestimating the personal financial risk to most people.
The current state of the world economy is such that it is actually very difficult to make your own job and have it be a going concern. Part of it is that we live in such an advanced economy already (close to saturation on most things, unless you get lucky) and are also under a fairly heavy regulatory environment (tax law, ACA, business licenses, inspections, etc.).
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
No, colonialism is when you strip-mine the resources of a foreign nation at far below market value, because the foreign citizens lack either the knowledge or power to resist your exploitation.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The real reason to vote for Trump? The political establishment is, for the first time in decades, genuinely frightened. They didn't really mind Bush because he was one of their own. Bush was in Skull and Bones at Yale. You think good ol' boys from Texas get into Yale, much less Skull and Bones? No the Bushes were Yankee bluebloods. But Trump? Nope. He can't be counted on to do the right thing for the establishment and they are really scared for the first time in their lives. You have to understand, these people have been wrongdoing for decades and now they have the very real consequence of going to prison for their crimes. They are going to scream and fight like a 3 year old who has just had her marshmallow taken away. All the doomsayers? LOL like the USA isn't strong enough to withstand a populist one termer. We just had 8 years of a Marxist racist divider who despises the American people, and we're still here. 16 if you include Bu$hitler. The hysteria emanating from the corridors of power is like what happened when Chavez and Evo Morales were in real danger of being elected. And guess what: things turned out fine for the people of those nations. Less well for their elites, many of whom are now in prison for their crimes.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Didn't Disney end up reverting a good portion of the layoffs?
Disney cancelled planned layoffs in New York and California after the earlier layoff of 200+ workers in Florida became public. The way the PR announcement got worded, those layoffs could still happen at a later date.
Didn't Disney end up reverting a good portion of the layoffs?
They did - when they got caught and called-out on it in public. Can't sell as many animated DVDs if you have a bad reputation, after all.
I'm fairly sure it has had another bad benefit for them as well. For instance, I remember a recruiter cold-calling me and asking if I wanted to work for them as a DevOps/Automation engineer. I politely told him that he can tell his client to collectively fuck themselves with a pole-ax, and specifically named their H1-B policy as the reason why.
I'm pretty sure that it wasn't the first time he's been turned down that day, and I'm very certain that Disney is going to have a damned hard time hiring anyone that they cannot-so-easily replace (seriously - would you work for them in a capacity where they've demonstrated a complete disregard for employee retention?)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
In domestic economics, you actually create more local jobs by aggressively outsourcing, so long as your labor balance slides more slowly than your wealth. That is: If 50% of your employment is domestic and you save enough money outsourcing to create 10% more jobs, you have the *same* number of domestic employees if you end with 45.45% of your employment domestic and the rest outsourced. You start with 50 Chinese and 50 American workers, you eliminate 10 American jobs in favor of 10 Chinese jobs, and you get 40 and 60; along the way you find you can sell 10% more stuff, so you employ 10% more workers, and end up with 50 and 60--10 new Chinese jobs overall, more stuff being made for the same amount of money, and the 50 American workers are living a higher standard-of-living because they can buy more stuff since it's all cheaper.
I see you drank the koolaid.
So I take 10 high paying american jobs, outsource them for 50% cost overseas. Optimistically those 10 high paying american jobs become a combination of 10 mid to low-paying jobs. They're still employed! Yay! Because unless you can prove concretely that outsourcing any high paying job results in a new higher paying job being created, what you're doing is lowering the pool. Your own logic states this unequivocally in that products are cheaper because of lowered labor costs. That only worked while we were over-employed. That is no longer the case, with the total labor force shrinking every year since 2006. It's actually worse than that, if you go further back. Then you look at what an individual makes, and that has shrunk if you clip the top couple of percent. Yes, they make so much it skews the entire result set, but take the median 90 or so percent, and you'll see that real earning power has shrunk. The reason this hasn't had the major negative impact you'd assume is because the family unit has gone from 1 to 2 workers supporting the family in many cases, or people are co-habiting more and sharing costs. It's not the rosy picture you're painting for sure.
Obviously, if you start shoveling jobs out to China like crazy without creating new American jobs, this doesn't work. Historically, that's not how it's worked; it's not even how it works today.
It's the only way it's worked. Initially we shipped labor intensive work like textiles out. Then more expensive jobs that included things like EPA restrictions. As the manufacturing base overseas ramped up, it wasn't long before more and more of those higher paying middle class jobs all left, if they could. There were some initial jobs created to build up the infrastructure to support the imports, but once done that number shrank again and now there are fewer total jobs. And lets not forget that the imports don't pay into the federal tax pool, leaving that burden more heavily weighed on the populace, as the production base which used to pay taxes now doesn't.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I assume only long-term economic behaviors which have operated as such since hunter-gatherer man.
the reduction in unemployment you refer to are people settling for (two or three) jobs as unskilled labor
The reduction in unemployment is per-capita, and you don't get -3 unemployment for 1 person getting 3 jobs. Employment is a function of job availability, not a function of how job-ready the populous is; and job availability is a function of what the populous can buy.
My logic successfully and correctly predicts all gross economic behaviors throughout human history. Your arguments are idealistic platitudes. Particularly of note:
you assume all profits are fed back into the local economy
That's not what happens. Various economic factors drive prices down. Let's explore some.
Competition is the biggest one: either direct (food producers are *common*, so you can't overcharge on food without losing customers) or indirect (smartphones are more popular than Crocs, so you can't have that huge mark-up on Crocs and expect people to buy your product when they won't have money left over after buying a smartphone). Goods with bigger markets--more demand--are more ripe for competition; low-demand and low-flexibility goods and services (rental housing is a notable one; diamonds are another) aren't, and tend to hold bigger margins and drive off price competition more readily.
A special case of competition is supply-chain competition. When GM wants to build cars, they find a contract for, say, 100 million tonnes of steel per year for 5 years. There are a dozen steel mills with that kind of output. Say they each charge $500/tonne for steel. A steel mill makes that steel at a cost of $430/tonne. When approached, the steel mill goes back to the steel ore mine and the coal mine (you need coal to make steel) and negotiates for a contract for massive amounts of ore and coal to ensure it won't breach contract. The same process occurs: the costs of these things drop from $200 of coal per steel-tonne and $150 of ore per steel-tonne to something closer to the *labor cost* of those products. In the end, the steel producer gets his costs down to $230/tonne, and sells steel to GM for $232/tonne, netting a $200 million per-year profit (thanks to the coal miners and steel ore miners also cutting their margins razor-thin to capture a $200 million per-year contract for 5 years--a billion dollar sale they'd otherwise miss out on).
That kind of supply-chain contracting drives prices for things like cars and buildings down toward labor costs.
Market saturation is another factor. 1TB SSDs cost about $200 to make last year, but had a price of $700; now they carry a price of $330. All the early adopters have thrown in their money, buying up drives with huge margins; it's no longer **profitable** to charge those big margins, so Samsung et al have backed down pricing to capture the next rung of the market. The prices will eventually settle closer to labor cost.
Consumer resistance to inflation is another factor. Each year, the amount of income per production increases, causing a rise in prices; consumers dislike rising prices, and so will slow their purchasing. This causes downward price pressure. Manufacturers have attempted downsizing on goods they can't adequately cut prices on.
Let's take some real data.
The Consumer Price Index shows a general increase in prices per unit good of 0.8% across 2014 and 0.7% across 2015; the CPI for food shows food has inflated much faster than general inflation, at 2.4% and 1.9%, with home-cooked meals experiencing a 2.4% and 1.2% price increase (eating out became a lot more expensive in 2014--2.9% over the year).
The GDP per capita in 2013 was $52,607.9
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Optimistically those 10 high paying american jobs become a combination of 10 mid to low-paying jobs. They're still employed! Yay!
Actually, it's not that simple.
When you outsource those 10 jobs to China, the products they make become cheaper. For example: manufacturing a shirt used to require 479 labor-hours pre-industrial-revolution, a cost of about $4,000 at $8.25/hr (my state minimum); today, such a shirt costs $15, or 6.67 hours at $2.25/hr Chinese labor.
Take it in reverse: a cheap t-shirt would cost $55 at local minimum wage. Clothing currently equates to 2.8% of annual household budgets; if, instead, it equated to 10.3%, what would happen to the 7.5% of products each household could no longer afford? What would happen to those jobs?
The answer is not that people would work more. We're not going back to an economy where we used a different technique; we're going to an economy where we've cut back working hours by a high-tech technique, but didn't cut back costs. This prevents consumers from purchasing new products, and that means labor to produce those products doesn't get paid because those products aren't bought, so we just don't hire those people.
This is well-understood economics. I wasn't the first to come up with it; I found out this was called Ricardo's Theory of Comparative Advantage after I designed my models, although my own models are more complete and more reliable than modern economic theory. I focus on macroeconomic form: most economists are bean counters trying to predict the stock market and commodities market, explaining what the so-called value of a particular good should be and what its correct price is; I focus on the broad movement of economics throughout history and the repeating patterns, identifying how wealth grows and what impacts the long-term changes in that respect. I don't care to say how rich we're going to be by doing X; just that X will occur and it will cause some effect to increase or decrease total wealth, employment, individual buying power, or the like.
That is no longer the case, with the total labor force shrinking every year since 2006 [bls.gov]. It's actually worse than that, if you go further back.
We've been in a labor force bubble since 1970. Housewives gave way to working couples and middle-class families living at an extended standard-of-living (two people work, draw more income, and buy more stuff, living like rich people--we've normalized this, so they're just middle-class). We didn't replace those housewives with maids and servants in every household; on the other hand, we *did* get nice dishwashers, washing machines, and other tools to dramatically reduce the domestic working hour load. Housewives don't have to slave over the kitchen sink for eight hours each week and then spend 12 more hours handling laundry; they spend an hour on these tasks combined and still take care of our domestic affairs. I won't paint a picture where women are now enslaved to two careers, because they're not.
It's the only way it's worked. Initially we shipped labor intensive work like textiles out. Then more expensive jobs that included things like EPA restrictions. As the manufacturing base overseas ramped up, it wasn't long before more and more of those higher paying middle class jobs all left, if they could. There were some initial jobs created to build up the infrastructure to support the imports, but once done that number shrank again and now there are fewer total jobs.
Yet a labor participation rate of about 60% is normal across all of human history, and unemployment rates of 4%-8% in healthy economies span back as far as the Roman Empire. Labor participation rates are higher in poorer societies, yet even serfs had women keeping house and raising children in
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