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Outsourced IT Workers Ask Sen Feinstein For Help, Get Form Letter in Return (computerworld.com)
Reader dcblogs writes: A University of California IT employee whose job is being outsourced to India recently wrote Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) for help. Feinstein's office sent back a letter addressing manufacturing job losses, not IT, and offered the worker no assistance. "I am being asked to do knowledge transfer to a foreigner so they can take over my job in February of 2017," the employee, wrote in part. The employee is part of a group of 50 IT workers and another 30 contractors facing layoffs after the university hired an offshore outsourcing firm. The firm, India-based HCL, won a contract to manage infrastructure services. Since the layoffs became public, the school has posted Labor Condition Applications (LCA) notices -- as required by federal law when H-1B workers are being placed. UCSF employees have seen these notices and made some available to Computerworld. They show that the jobs posted are for programmer analyst II and network administrator IV. For the existing UCSF employees, the notices were disheartening. "Many of us can easily fill the job. We are training them to replace us," said one employee who requested anonymity because he is still employed by the university.
Yeah I spent my 4 weeks notice once having to train a Ukrainian to do my job (whole office got closed and outsourced). A few weeks later the Russians annex Crimea, not so far from where the office was moved to.
Democrats tagline about being the party for the little guy is every bit as truthful as Republicans ideas about being the party of fiscal responsibility. They're both so full of shit that they could make billions in the fertilizer business. Lets be clear - all politicians today are there for their own personal enrichment and power. If you ain't the one who paid their bribes, you ain't getting anything back except maybe a form letter.
H-1B abuse like this is one of many reasons why some people feel that their only choice is to vote for Trump's insanity. Desperate people do desperate things.
H-1B Visas are meant to cover skills not readily available in this country. I would argue that if the current workers are training their replacements, then the skill set is readily available in this country. To quote Wiki :
The regulations define a "specialty occupation" as requiring theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge in a field of human endeavor[1] including but not limited to biotechnology, chemistry, architecture, engineering, mathematics, physical sciences, social sciences, medicine and health, education, law, accounting, business specialties, theology, and the arts, and requiring the attainment of a bachelor's degree or its equivalent as a minimum[2] (with the exception of fashion models, who must be "of distinguished merit and ability").[3] Likewise, the foreign worker must possess at least a bachelor's degree or its equivalent and state licensure, if required to practice in that field.
Tell the university that you simply don't have the skill set required to train your replacement...
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
I wonder how much Feinstein gets from various pro-offshoring groups to be completely tone-deaf to her own constituents.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
People in India need to eat something, too, and most of them are piss poor in comparison to US standards anyway. It's hard to find a reason why they shouldn't deserve to get work on an international labor market. I bet I'm going to be downvoted for this, and fully understand the personal problems of the workers who get fired, of course, but there is also another side to these kind of stories.
She's 50% of Silicon Valley's home state senate team. Expecting her to take a position anywhere remotely opposed to H1B seems as likely as a NY Senator opposing Wall Street.
It hits too close to home.
This may be a silly question since I've never been in this kind of situation, but why doesn't the IT staff all collectively refuse to train their outsourced replacements? Or go on strike? Even if they aren't unionized, they could go on strike (I assume). Am I just making some bad assumptions here?
Sorry for the AC posting, but...
My company worked with HCL. Not a bad company in their own right. They took over our tech debt so we could, in theory, focus on building new things. Started off with a big seminar about how indian culture is different from american culture. Uhhh, OK, informative I guess.
It lasted about 9 months before we dropped them. We had to wait a full year for the contract to run out. Their coding was decent, language was decent. Time was the real barrier here. They were working when we were asleep and vice versa. It's just not an ideal setup to try and have people submitting code and doing QA work in the middle of the night. Because if you have a question on why they did what they did, you send out an e-mail, wait a day, get a response, send it back. Everything just grinds to a halt.
It might be cheaper on paper, but it's fucking stupid. It creates to much of a time barrier between you and the people doing the work.
Farm jobs, 1790, 90% of the labor force. Manufacturing took all our hard-working farm jobs.
Dock and rail worker jobs, 1920. The shipping pallet cut 4 days work down to 4 hours.
Manufacturing jobs, 1990. Globalization took away all our jobs.
IT jobs, 2015. H1B foreigners are taking our jobs.
Long-term result has been expansion of population, increase in per-capita GDP, increase in the buying power of the middle- and lower-class families, a stronger job market, people spending less on food and clothing and more on entertainment and HEALTHCARE of all things, and the development of things like IT jobs instead of just a bunch of factory workers and shit shovelers. The long-term result has ALSO been the creation of a lot of retail and service (fast food) jobs, and a lot of domestic shipping jobs.
The short-term result has always been a displacement of workers. 40% of the U.S. workforce turns over every year (which is why there's always Help Wanted signs--no, folks, the 5% unemployed aren't lazy drug addicts abusing the welfare system; there are legitimately just not jobs for everyone), and some 1.5%-2% retire and get replaced by new workers (college graduates), which means a skill replacement rate of some 1%-2% is safe. Still, those displaced workers mean the rest of us get richer, and even they benefit in the long run; but 6 months from now is a distant thought when you've just lost your job.
I get it, really. I don't want to lose my job. You don't want to lose your job. I also don't want to live in 1990 forever. You see all these cell phones, high-speed Internet, and all the cheap food? The sheer buying power of the middle-class, the increase in available health care, and the massive amount of shit like video games and tablets and audiobooks we buy? Netflix, the entire IT industry (which only exists because it can sell things like Netflix), the like? That's the result of people losing their jobs for a little while along the way. What brought us from 1990 to 2016 is this kind of shit.
Yes, it's irritating. It's sad. It's unfair. It's ALL unfair. We either kick a few good people out on the street and wait for the economy to cycle around and get them (or a proportional number of others who were facing terminal unemployment) back into new jobs to enjoy the new economy; or we protect their jobs and make *everyone* suffer a stagnant, decaying economy until, 50 years from now, we look like North Korea. Which is fair?
I keep pushing for a Universal Social Security. No tax increase required. Remediates the welfare system completely. Gives everyone an absolute share of technical progress--the savings these steps forward bring us, the new wealth, has a fraction cleaved off and distributed equally to all Americans. The poorest benefit most; the richest aren't taxed anything more for it; everyone else kind of scales.
It's a contemporary fix. If we did it in 1950, everyone from the lower-middle-class up would have to give up nearly *all* their money and receive the standard stipend; the richest of rich would be barely more wealthy than the poorest-of-poor, and we'd collapse like the USSR. Since 2013, it's been doable without cutting the rich down, and without substantially narrowing the income distribution. This creates a firm, stable basis for the poorest-of-poor and, importantly, for the people who lose their jobs to these things.
No, it's not fair. The system I propose is better than today, doesn't cut into anyone, lowers business taxes, reduces the cost of paying employees (read: more jobs, cheaper products), and lessens the financial damage done to an individual who loses his job. It's still not fair, because that guy is still (temporarily) the sacrificial lamb that takes us all into a better future. It's less-bad, and more-optimal. That happens to be important.
Yes, I found a way to at least give the child of Omelas better food without destroying society, even if we still have to keep him locked up in the basement.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Why would you then train him at all? You got your 4 weeks notice, go to work, throw them a manual and let them figure it out. If they complain, say "he doesn't understand me very well".
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At this point it's better to actively sabotage the effort while you look for other employment and then quit. I've fought this battle in a different field, it didn't do anyone any favors to go along with it, including the corporate masters who thought they were saving money. The best policy is subtle sabotage: make enemies, say vague things, give wrong directions when someone talks to you without a paper trail then deny or dissemble. The government has sold you out, unions won't work here, so at this point misbehaving and taking their money for as long as it lasts is the best policy.
Easy to say, not so easy to do when it happens to you.
For starters, having a job makes it much, much easier to find a new one. Telling your employer to go pound sand has a way of leading to unemployment in short order.
Second, very few Americans have any sort of massive bank of accrued leave; meaning unless they keep working, two weeks from now, they stop getting paid.
And finally, companies often make these situations too good to turn down - Train your replacement, and we'll give you a bonus of six+ months' salary, but only if you stay until they tell you to.
Sure, we may all feel morally indignant about these situations, but how many of us would really choose "unemployment" over a check for $80k? I'd dare say not very many.
Usually they make your severance dependent upon it.
Haven't been in exactly the same situation, but was given three months notice when the US branch of a UK company decided it was time to shut down the US branch and have the development be centralized at the UK offices. I had to train my UK counterparts during that three months, or else not get severance.
In my case the situation was understandable (which is not to say I agreed with it), and we went our separate ways on good terms. I can't imagine how horrible the workers described above felt, and Diane Feinstein is up there with DWS as one of the worst Democrats ever.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Trump's clarification of that question. Why you gotta lie and make it seem like he was talking about H1-Bs? This is why Trump is winning. All his opponents can do is be OUTRAGED but can't argue the issues without lying about his positions. People notice and then they hate you and support Trump. Making your own monsters, kid.
"Megyn Kelly asked about highly-skilled immigration. The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: these are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay. I remain totally committed to eliminating rampant, widespread H-1B abuse and ending outrageous practices such as those that occurred at Disney in Florida when Americans were forced to train their foreign replacements. I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions."
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Getting to see or talk to a senator is dang near impossible. (Unless of course, you've donated large sums of money to the campaign or money-laundering foundation.)
I know this first-hand from when I was starting a company and trying to get support for a particular program. It took us several weeks of trying, and the best we could do was fly to D.C. to meet with a mid-level staffer for 20 minutes.
I'm sure that senators are busy people. Listening to their constituents ranks right up with answering robo calls.
You probably had grounds to force the payment of the severance anyway, in your case, as its a UK company and under British rules severance is not contingent on anything - the company makes you redundant and pays your severance, they cannot put strings on it. You would probably have had to file in a UK court, but thats not much of an issue.
That is why you don't hear of these horror stories of "I had to train my replacement" in the UK - we simply don't have to do that.
Why should she help you? What are you going to do, vote Republican?
You made yourself a captive and an enabler of a one-party system. Don't be surprised when you end up taken for granted and your concerns are ignored.
Scott Adams (who writes Dilbert) is on vacation in Switzerland, and his recent blog post had this snippet, which got me really angry:
[...] I also asked the Swiss man what kind of problems they have in Switzerland. He laughed again. The answer is “none.” Literally.
Good economy.
Plenty of jobs.
No racial strife.
Low crime rate.
Highest standard of living.
No real pollution.
No litter.
No homeless that I could see.
The reason it angered me is that here's a country where the government tries to give the citizens a good life. They have fixed all of the major problems and are just letting their citizens live in quiet enjoyment.
The Swiss government is considering implementing a guaranteed minimum income.
Over here in the US, our infrastructure is crumbling, our healthcare is at 3rd world level, jobs are scarce (and we're outsourcing more and more), and two thirds of the people are on the brink of poverty, and the government spies on and opresses everyone.
It's as if the government sees the people as some sort of harvest-able crop whose purpose is to provide taxes, where their only efforts are towards maximum yield.
Pick up the phone. The UC system is a government (cf. political) entity that relies on federal largesse. After her phone call a behind the scenes scramble would secure these particular jobs. It would not solve the problem in general of course but a Senators influence is formidable.
That is why you don't hear of these horror stories of "I had to train my replacement" in the UK - we simply don't have to do that.
Also our companies for the most part aren't farming out work to cheap foreign labour on the basis that locals can't do the work even though they are doing it and have to train the people that are apparently more capable of said work, all while having to pay them the same anyway because that makes no fucking sense. As I understand it that's pretty much the h1b situation. If I'm wrong please correct me.
Wanna buy a shirt?
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>> If you are losing your job, you at leasy want to get some money to survive.
Thats why you need to never take on debt unless absolutely necessary, then pay it off ASAP and save while you are working.
My biggest life rule is to ensure I always have an emergency fund that is a minimum of 6 months (ideally a year) of pay (after tax/deductions), I maintain a minimal lifestyle (no "toys" or luxuries) until I have that in the bank, and I never touch it for ANY reason other than to absolute emergencies to keep myself alive/fed/housed/clothed.
A side-effect of doing that is that you become free to live like a man, with some self-respect, not a corporate slave/sheep.
If Sen. Feinstein paid her outsourcer a little more, they could write up custom replies instead of canned ones:
"It's needful to the university's bottom line that you be shit-canned. Raj in Mumbai."
Table-ized A.I.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity..."
Three things. Karma to burn. Going off topic.
First off, you're absolutely correct that the lizard people have been lying through their teeth about Trump and twisting his words around and taking shit out of context. It's cringe-worthy many days, because I want to actually talk about shit that matters rather than needing to constantly get mired down in "Un-Correcting the Record" as it were. (i.e. After the lizard people Correct the Record* so that the version presented in the daily moon matrix [CNN, WaPo, etc] bears very little resemblance to reality it can use a little un-correcting.)
Second thing. I'm changing the subject because I have nothing to add about H1Bs. Clinton is sure to roll TPP and TTIP into some other package that will probably also include TISA. I think there's going to be a serious push in the next few years for a half-world government that includes the USA, Canada, Japan, Australia, and Europe. And we're all going to lose fucking bigtime.
Trump believes that trans women have authentic identities and you clearly do not. You won't have any MRI evidence I could post showing that yep, it's how folks are born, physically so that's a moot point. Trump seems to be all for gender equality outside of overhyped locker room banter. We've got Thiel and Milo over there as well. There's clearly something going on here I'm missing.
Here's the question: how much do I have to worry about President Trump signing legislation and using executive orders to enforce your backwards understanding of gender and sexuality? Will I wish I had voted for Clinton^H^H^H^H^H^H^HFEMA concentration camps and Nuclear Armageddon 2016?
I'd like to be clear. I was doing just fucking fine before Obama decided to make a fucking federal policy out of that area as well. I was doing better than I currently am. Obama didn't help me one fucking bit, but the retaliation sure as hell hurt me. (Go figure, how the hell could the federal government possibly help in this arena? I'm not surprised, but I'm angry nonetheless.) But if the "pendulum" swings at the federal level the way it has at the local level, I'm going to lose even more. It won't fucking matter to me what jobs there are if the pendulum swings. And I see no reason to vote against my own best interest.
Third thing. Oh, and any chance you think, despite everything I've read that the alt-right views ending the drug war, closing the DEA, and massively shrinking the size of government and the prison-industrial complex as some kind of politically correct nonsense, that Trump would also support ending the drug war? (I heaven't really heard much of anything on that front and time's coming and gotta make a choice!)
As is hopefully apparent, my political positions are more clearly in line with the Libertarian Party.
* Correct the Record is Clinton's social media astroturf campaign for the extra-dense in the peanut gallery. Pretty sure we've got a few members here and even one on the other site.
I just saw this in the captiva screen they have in our office building elevators: more than half the US millenials who have bank accounts, have less than $1000 in their savings account, as in emergency funds. To top it off, close to 1/3 of those people do not have a red penny saved. This is what you get by raising sheep by instant gratification, telling them, "Don't worry, government has your back" And we see the government who has your back in people like Diane Fu(%stein idiot, whose main purpose for being in senate is to get re-elected, not representing her constituents. Vote liberal you idiot millenials.
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
It's not like India.
Oh... Give it a few years.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
And if they need it in English, translate it back.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
What he doesn't know about the Swiss is they regulate the crap out of everyone. Health Insurance must be not for profit and the Gov't have price controls on the fees doctors and hospitals can charge insurance. The Swiss are the most capitalistic lot in Europe and even they recognize when you're injured or hurt you're in no position to negotiate. I don't see conservatives (or Scott Adams) lining up behind gov't mandated price controls.
"he _says_ he intends to fix the rules" " in their(his) best interest"
Actually, the thing that Trump was talking about was US companies being able to hire foreign students here legally on F1 visas, when they go on OPT (Optional Practical Training). OPT is only valid for a maximum of 2 years, after which one has to get an H1B visa to continue working legally. In this case, it is an apples to apples - American citizen and permanent resident students who graduate from various colleges and universities are level w/ foreign students graduating from there, and companies get the same skills regardless of who they are hiring.
The issue at Disney was foreign workers replacing US workers, and needing to be trained by the workers they were replacing. If the workers in question were sitting in Bangalore or Noida and being trained by US workers, it would not be illegal, since no immigration is involved. But if they were H1B employees of HCL or Cognizant who needed to be trained, that would be illegal, and an abuse of the visa program, since Labor Certification laws require that the company applying for them demonstrate that it can't find US workers willing to do the same job. Note that the price of doing that job is not a factor as far as the law goes, much as it might be w/ either the clients or the offshoring companies.
But the H1B visa - the way it was designed - is for skilled labor. Companies, while applying for labor certification, are required to demonstrate that they've advertised that job publicly for at least 8 weeks, and that they couldn't find citizens or permanent residents capable of or willing to do it. Of course, you have companies apply for them when they can't find locals willing to do it at the given prices, which leads to all the abuse. The above proposal by Trump covers H1B abuse, but can't cover companies offshoring their work to India, Poland, Ukraine, Romania or any other country - that'll still be there.
.... If they illegally refuse to pay you what was agreed upon, go file a judgment against the company.
Having had several friends go through filing lawsuits for restitution against actions that were clearly, obviously, and evidently illegal... I'd say your advice is idiotic.
A friend of mine once explained how a lawsuit works. Your lawyer and the opposition lawyer have a stack of hundred-dollar bills in front of them, and each is given a lighter. They take turns flaring off the hundreds in front of the judge. The one whose pile runs out first looses.
Most companies won't try to fight you in court, they'll just pay you off to get rid of you.
Most companies will fight just on general principles, and because they figure you will fold, and in any case won't have the resources to take it all the way to trial. They have in-house lawyers who are being paid anyway.
That's interesting, but I fail to see the difference between that and white nationalism. They even have the "secure the future for white children" thing. He goes an awful lot into genetic heritage, which might be workable for European nations, but silly for the US. The US can't be a nation with a shared genetic lineage without genocide or population displacement on a scale that would make Hitler blush. And this certainly isn't anything like Trump's policies, or attitude.
It's also dated august 2016. This looks to me like the kind of thing where a "movement" happens, and then someone tries to cash in by coming out as a leader for it and steering it some way or another. Or just LARPers, who want a governmental system that is unattainable like Anarcho-Capitalism or something so they can sit around and talk about how much better things would be if everyone magically adopted their system, which will never happen.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
I find that consistently being a thorn in their side gets good results. My soon to be former congress critter John Kline suffered from this. I was invited to one of his constituent town halls once and he was on a tear about bringing out troops home from Obama's wars and I asked him when we would be bringing all of our troops home. He blathered on about how he agreed with this and that we should bring troops home from Obama's wars as soon as possible. I responded that I was referring to bring all of our troops home that we also have stationed in Europe and Asia as Europe are big boys and that China, Japan, Korea, and India need to step up and take care of their parts of the world and that we don't need to play world police. I never got invited back to one of his town halls but he has called me personally twice since then when I have written him and after the first call has always responded to my letters personally. The first time he called me was about my letter on the USA FREEDOM act where he disagreed with my assessment of what it would do and said that the law didn't say that. My response that he was either retarded or willfully ignorant and then I read him the part of the proposed law that said exactly what I was complaining about. I pointed out that I would be informing everyone I know about this and working diligently to show that he is unfit for office. The thing is that you have to keep after them and follow through otherwise they forget and I usually send about one letter a week to my US elected officials. I feel that I am somewhat responsible for his decision to not run again and the world may be a better place, but neither Angie Craig, or Jason Lewis seem all that great either but at least Lewis has taken a stance on things instead of offering platitudes.
Time to offend someone
Best severance deal I ever got was 90 days notice, immediate release to 100% job-hunting (i.e. Cube, Net, and Phone, but outside the work area), and 6 months benefits after my last day. That was a major US corp, rhymes with "Going". . .
Most places I've worked didn't give ANY severance..
1. An awful lot of the stuff Trump wants to do is already within the powers of the executive branch of government. For instance, telling ICE to deport illegals instead of ignoring the problem is a day 1 deal. Same with triggering provisions of our trade deals to cause re-evaluations, like declaring China a currency manipulator.
2. Trump is leading a populist movement. If he introduces legislation to fix the H1-B visa program, expect him to call on his supporters to flood their representatives with demands they pass it. When there are extremely few citizens who would oppose such a thing, the only opposition you'll see will be from lobbyists, and that's very bad optics for Congress.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
The other employees knowing they will be treated decently in the event they are not needed is important. Talent retention is often hard. If you know that the company you would for would cut you lose without so much as a few months pay would you stay if you saw a similarly compensated job offer available at another firm who had a positive reputation for taking care of employees?
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
It's kinda funny too - as I've had to train my Indian replacements (at Adobe). I heard from the layoff survivors that not a single one of them had any clue what I was talking about or showing them.
In other words - its a pointless waste of time. You simply can't uproot a whole office and replace everyone and expect smooth sailing.
and to make matters even more confusing
There's nothing confusing about employment law. It doesn't matter where you physically work or where your company is incorporated, all that matters is where you get paid and to whom you owe taxes.
I worked for a British company in China, yet all the Australian employment laws applied because that's where I got paid.
Probably negotiated by a union. One of the few things they're useful for, although you may well have paid more than that in dues over the years.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Um...
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
But in my MBA courses they said workers are interchangeable cogs to be moved about as the enlightened management sees fit! Modern management theory couldn't possibly be complete bullshit, could it??
In IT? Shit, anybody competent can get a job in a few weeks, not months. Anybody sensible (especially in the US where there are minimal employment protections) has a few months worth saved up.
It's 15 years since I didn't have at least 3 months running costs tucked away. I'm absolutely certain I can find a job in 3 months, and pretty confident I can find a good one too in that timeframe in the current economy.
Ford recognised that if he paid his workers enough to buy his cars, they'd both be better off.
The companies offshoring their labour aren't selling into the Indian market (at least not primarily). They are selling into the much more lucrative US market. That market is lucrative, in part, because of the strong middle-class which, in turn, is supported by higher wages (to grossly over simplify).
The offshoring company is essentially exploiting _other_ companies who hire locally and hence have to pay a higher wage. They are the ones who are sustaining the market that the offshoring company wants to sell to, but isn't, themselves, prepared to sustain.
It takes a remarkably short-sighted view point as well as a nearly rabid 'profit above all else' attitude to see large scale offshoring as anything other than detrimental.