Posted on 12/08/2014 6:45:38 AM PST by Ghost of SVR4
A major problem with the H-1B debate is the absence of displaced IT workers in news media accounts. Much of the reporting is one-sided -- and there's a reason for this. An IT worker who is fired because he or she has been replaced by a foreign, visa-holding employee of an offshore outsourcing firm will sign a severance agreement. This severance agreement will likely include a non-disparagement clause that will make the fired worker extremely cautious about what they say on Facebook, let alone to the media. On-the-record interviews with displaced workers are difficult to get. While a restrictive severance package may be one handcuff, some are simply fearful of jeopardizing future job prospects by talking to reporters. Now silenced, displaced IT workers become invisible and easy to ignore.
(Excerpt) Read more at computerworld.com ...
“That will do more than decimate IT, it will ripple through the economy and lower wages across the board.”
I think there’s a direct correlation between the first year of Obamacare and the 11% drop in Black Friday sales. Doubling or tripling health insurance costs has resulted in fewer purchases of all types. Seventy-percent of the economy relies on consumer spending. Obamacare sucked the wind out of the economy. It will be even worse next year and each year after that. Talk about your ripple-through...
Rolling Stone could have gone after this story hitting upon Silicon Valley billionaires who exploit the 99%.
Yup. And with the un-employment the way it is (I’m not talking about the overly massaged numbers, I am talking the real stats) and the “fines” of o-care, it will sink families and individuals across this nation. 2015 is going to be ugly in my guesstimation.
Republican honchos are big supporters of increasing H1b visas.
This is every bit as much of a problem as increasing the number of low skilled workers ... maybe more of a problem.
Also diminishing the number of American citizens choosing STEM as a career.
We are slowly being cranked back to a feudal state ruled by corporations and the wealthy, where the decimated middle class is corralled in areas tied down by laws and enslaved , and forced by an ever increasing bureaucratic police force. They will beg to become affiliated with the flag (corporation or family) who would take or employ them.
Rural areas become the “Kings lands owned by the wealthy and locked out by the masses. The poor will be enslaved, killed and locked away. But now they are being used to cower the middle class.
It is just as large a problem; 500K H1B workers means 500K more unemployed Americans.
The article says this group has been silenced; who hasn’t been? When is the last time anyone bothered to interview the loved ones of a white person killed by a black person?
Just doing the work that degreed/experienced professionals aren’t willing to do for $9/hour...
H1B workers have been driving wages down and displacing American workers since the late 1970s and early 1980s. It got worse under Clinton and ever since has just kept on rolling.
Americans seem bent on suicide
And that’s when they NEED to have the workers here stateside. Millions more are working for even less money (far below 50% of the going rate for employees) back home in India and elsewhere.
The more government requires of corporations, the more they will evade compliance.
And they don’t have to pay a dime of import duty on the goods (contracts, software, art layout, etc.) that is produced abroad for American companies and smuggled into this country through the internet.
Not too long ago, I got a call from some outfit that did IBM support for my state.
The guy tried a hard sell approach too. Anyway to handle about a page of responsibilities plus a lot of roadtrips, I was offered the princely sum of 12 an hour with no overtime. He thought I would be thrilled, it was all I could do not to laugh at him. I’m sure an H1b probably got pegged for the job for even less.
They still want some Americans in the tech sector. Their responsibility is to work with the team working abroad (at different hours, requiring you to be in the office before sunrise so that you can conference with them while they are still at their office), to be a fall guy when “the team” is behind schedule, and to communicate with the mid-level managers (and above) at meetings so they don’t have communication problems with persons with Indian accents.
I have actual experience in this and can say its not as you describe. Usually the onus is on the Indias to conform to the US work schedule. Yes accents are difficult at times but not an insurmountable hurdle. We never predicated our project schedules to anything going on in India. Thats a management problem in the US not some defect w/ the foreign workers.
The biggest problem Ive seen is lack of competence. There are VERY few that are truly technically excellent and even fewer who are motivated to excel. The later just isnt part of their culture. In the end it makes the end product iffy at best. That said, if you carefully manage whats going on the outcome can be OK.
In the end the problem of displaced domestic s/w engineers is home grown. Poor management is the root of it.
NO Americans are being hired for IT jobs. Companies decided years ago not to employ Americans.
We can thank both parties for this.
Maybe where you worked but I had a weekly pre-7am meeting I had to attend to be there to talk with the team in India.
I have also had a person from a foreign (Swedish) tech firm tell me that their VP wanted someone without the Indian accent to communicate with him and above.
May be discriminatory, may be “atypical” but one was a place I personally worked and the other was a position I was told about by a contractor.
Sounds to me like they need a UNION! /sarc
Massachusetts just deregulated registered the Board of TV and radio technicians. The master’s license that was needed to do/supervise the work has been done away with.
Understandably people in the workforce are frightened. But they need to be constantly updating their skill sets and be ready to adapt to a rapidly changing world.
The good news is that despite the doomsday predictions, the standard of living continues to rise for all. Even the so-called poor in 1st World countries (of which the United States is only one) are seeing their lot improved.
True, a lot of them are out of work but they are not starving. Instead, they are relaxing at home and queuing up the next binge-watching session on Netflix and deciding what pizza joint they are going to go to tonight. Actually their ability to do that is part of the reason we have such unemployment. For the first time in our civilization's history, large numbers of people are sitting idle and having all their basic needs met by the welfare state.
People don't like hearing that but it's true. A quick cure for unemployment would be to eliminate welfare tomorrow for all except those truly disabled. All those "HELP WANTED" signs will start disappearing as people will start taking the jobs they feel today they are too good for.
Getting back to the IT workers. Maybe 20 years ago you could get a high paying job in IT, helping end users navigate a spreadsheet or making sure their mouse is plugged in properly, etc. Or at a higher level, you could be running the network for a small company, backing up and restoring data, partitioning drives, adding storage, writing script files to deploy OS and application updates, etc.
But all that stuff is pretty much automated these days and it is cheaper for companies to outsource the "help desk" function overseas - even with the broken English and hard to understand accents.
That said, it's not exactly a "dream job" to strap on a headset and walk a bunch of cranky end users through performing an anti-virus update or remoting in to update a driver, etc. Let the overseas people do it and let's move on to more challenging types of work. Like building apps for the new mobile OS platform or something.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.