Posted on 06/22/2015 6:13:59 AM PDT by ConservingFreedom
It is an especially humiliating thing to lose your job overnight, kind of like being at the receiving end of a summary execution at the crack of dawn. But it must be an entirely different kind of feeling to be given delayed marching orders and then be forced to stick around to train your replacement, who has just been shipped in from a foreign country, under the additional threat that not doing so will cost you your severance. h1b-one.jpg
This is apparently what two companies -- Walt Disney and power utility Southern California Edison -- did over the last year, forcing the Department of Labour to open up investigations against Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys a few days ago for "possible violations of rules for visas for foreign technology workers under contracts" on the heels of a New York Times story on the Disney situation.
The Times is not the first to report these cases. Computerworld wrote a detailed story in February about how SCE, Southern California's largest utility, laid off around 400 people and hired their replacements from Infosys, based in Bangalore, and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), in Mumbai. The Times focused more on the fracas at Disney, where 250 people were told in October last year that they were going to lose their jobs to Indians, with the added ignominy of having to train them.
Both Infosys and TCS deny that the Labour Department has launched an investigation into them -- indeed, they say that they have not been informed of any sort of probe being conducted at all.
Meanwhile, Indian IT industry body Nasscom claims that the Indian IT sector is being unfairly tarred without any attention to "facts and logic". Nasscom president R Chandrashekhar said its members are, as they always have been in situations like this, cooperating with US authorities on requests for information.
The stakes are enormous. The US remains by far the bulk of the market for the more than $140 billion Indian IT services industry, where exports are over $98 billion.
American IT workers are naturally incensed at any reports of IT jobs being stolen from under their noses by companies that pay their replacements a fraction of the wage.
"The program has created a highly lucrative business model of bringing in cheaper H-1B workers to substitute for Americans," said Ron Hira, a professor of public policy at Howard University, who studies visa programs and has testified before Congress about H-1B visas (PDF), in the Times story.
After all, the H-1B visa on which these tech workers arrive are meant for "specialized" positions that require advanced science or computer skills, where American equivalents cannot be found. But critics say that because of legal loopholes, companies often do not have to prove that American workers are being displaced. Christina’s story of quality at home and work Check out how our Nestlé Pure Life Mom makes sure quality is a top priority at home and at work. Sponsored by: Nestle® Pure Life®
On the other side of the fence, defenders of H-1Bs doing outsourced work in the US say that many American workers with advanced skills do not gravitate towards these relatively lower-end positions, and that the churn rate amongst Americans is often high enough to be a hiring deterrent. And those who do apply for the job are often older and need to be extensively re-skilled in order to be able to function in the fast-paced world of evolving programming languages.
In the final analysis, the saga of Indian IT companies being scrutinized for unfair labour practices in my opinion is as much about these firms gaming the system as it is about the history of labour within the American capitalist machine, the nexus between politics and big business in the US and its priorities, the real impact of H-1B on American IT jobs and wages, as well as the future of work.
Stay tuned for the next article on the H-1B saga that examines all of these issues within the context of the recent alleged probe against Infosys and TCS.
I'll not name him.
He's a die-hard Cruz supporter.
I can testify.
I, of course said "sure thing" and immediately set my goal to be the first one out. With the exception of a DBA that had just been hired and was able to return to his prior employer, I succeeded and was able to give my notice within a few weeks.
TCS ended up having 3 people trying to do my job, unsuccessfully. My previous employer actually contacted my new employer in order to obtain my knowledge. It was fun answering thier questions, after asking for a billing code. LOL. That came to a screeching halt once my former employer got the first bill and realized that they were paying the same money for 15 hours per week of help as they were for me full time as an employee. That was 2008. I'm now making double my final salary there. Life is good!!
It starts with a help desk ticket for a service request. That ticket waits for 12 hours for the offshore worker to come to work. Invariably, they find some missing charge code or confusing wording and send back a request for clarification. Another 12 hours for you to come to work and reply. Another 12 hours for them to reply to your reply. Three days might go by before they close the ticket and say you sent it to the wrong team. Next week, you reopen the ticket and call a meeting with your experts and their experts to explain to them what the problem is, and what the fix is. Two weeks can go by to resolve a request that your prior staff could have done in half a day.
-PJ
Ted Cruz coming out in favor of a five fold increase of such Visas is a reflection of that big business wants and they want it now, before King Barry is out of office.
That way there's no chance that the next President can just yank 300,000+ Visas because by then companies can moan and complain about how they can't operate without them and it will take years to train their replacements. With wages lowering rather than rising, fewer people will go into those fields and their argument gains weight with every passing year..
If there's any shortage of qualified people it's a shortage of people who will move to the West Coast to live and work in the liberal chitholes so many tech companies are located in no matter what the pay.
Companies that don't care about the US any more than they care about Indonesia or China don't want to tolerate employees that won't live wherever the company tells them to in the US or in another country. People who consider what life is like for their families the overall environment they work in don't fit with the corporate view of the world. A whole lot of people who have ignored the deindustrialization while they cheerfully toddled along in their cubical are going to find that they're not immune from the same sort corporate attacks that destroyed industry in this country.
Bottom line, the H1-B Visa program is an integral part of driving US workers and wages down to the "World Class" standard of being willing, mobile, cheap, labor no matter what skills they've acquired.
JMHo
Hopefully, Ted Cruz will abandon his attack on American Workers.
I think we will find this has become very common
and many of these companies will be political darlings and big donors (Cronies)
A world without borders is the corporate fascist dream. I guess I am just old school jingoist.
That's it in a nutshell - back to a society of nobility and serfs.
Hopefully, yes, but IMHO, probably not. Based on a lifetime of watching politicians, I doubt he'll side with anyone except folks with the same background he has. Dancing with the one who brought you, as they say.
That means it once again comes down to a battle between what the majority want and what the Haaarvad minded crowd want.
Average folks have lost that battle every time it's been fought throughout the whole history of our decades long national deindustrialization.
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