Free Republic

“Carly Fiorina pioneered– pioneered– the practice of outsourcing jobs,” Miller said. “Her great legacy in business has been in finding a way to shift jobs to lower wage countries and replacing American workers with foreign workers. So I think we can all say that Ted Cruz, who supports offshoring jobs, and Carly Fiorina, who supports offshoring jobs, they’re now officially the outsourcing ticket.” “A critical issue for the state of Indiana is steel production and manufacturing,” Miller said, noting that, “on the crucial trade vote in 2015, Ted Cruz voted for Barack Obama’s trade bill that would destroy… the middle...

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced on April 7 that the H-1B cap for fiscal year 2017 was reached—meaning that in five business days, U.S. employers filed more petitions for an H-1B visa to hire a skilled foreign worker than the entire year’s allocation of visas available under current law. This means that USCIS will conduct a lottery to determine which employers will get the visas they need. Every year, U.S. employers seeking highly-skilled foreign professionals submit their applications for the pool of H-1B visas beginning on April 1 each year. U.S. businesses use the H-1B program to employ...

A key issue raised by labor unions in their weeklong strike against Verizon is the offshoring of work. The unions say Verizon has plans to send more jobs overseas. Verizon isn't saying what it is doing in this respect, but there is a paper trail of documents filed by its employees that point to offshoring. The union contends that Verizon wants, in a labor contract, to shift more jobs to contractors. Nearly 40,000 Verizon workers are on strike. "They want the ability to contract work -- as much as 50% -- the great majority of that is offshore," said Marilyn...

IT employees at EmblemHealth are organizing to stop the New York-based employer from outsourcing their jobs to offshore provider Cognizant. Employees say the insurer is on the verge of signing a contract with Cognizant, an IT services firm and one of the largest users of H-1B workers. They say the contract may be signed as early as this week. m.2 SSD shootout: PCI Express blows away SATA and M.2 in throughput testing For the better part of a decade now, the traditional interface for hard drives has been Serial ATA READ NOW They fear what a contract with an IT...

A fifteen dollar per hour minimum wage is coming to California, so break out the champagne and let’s get this party started! Unless you work in the apparel manufacturing industry, that is, in which case you may want to start looking for some cheaper drinks since you’ll likely be out of a job soon. Once the home to a large segment of the American clothing manufacturing industry, California apparel manufacturers have already been hit by skyrocketing commercial real estate value and rising supply chain costs, but another spike in their labor rates will apparently be the final straw for some...

As cities contemplated doubling their minimum wage, conservatives warned that employers would flee. And that’s exactly what happened. Then as states contemplated doubling their statewide minimum wage, conservatives warned them again; but again their warnings were drowned out in the cacophonies of popular liberalism. So now California companies are already collecting bids from moving companies, and ordering new stationery for new digs in Arizona, Nevada, and of course, Texas. The destruction that minimum wage increases cause is no longer even denied by the left. Their politicians happily proudly admit the damage they do, even as they inflict these pains on...

The annual gold rush in Silicon Valley to fill out applications for guest worker visas began Friday, as the federal government began distributing some of the 85,000 H1B visas it is authorized to issue this year. But the dash to grab visas is set against the backdrop of a political debate both within the United States and abroad about the regulations surrounding H1B visas, the government designation for visas designed for highly-skilled employees in "specialty occupations." Just weeks ago, India filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization over an increase in fees on H1B visasthat the US imposed on...

When Donald Trump threatened to “break” the North American Free Trade Agreement, auto industry workers offered up some of the loudest cheers. Mr. Trump easily won the Republican primary in Michigan this month. The state, home base for the American auto industry, also delivered an upset victory to Bernie Sanders, the Democratic anti-NAFTA standard-bearer. But the autoworkers’ animosity is aiming at the wrong target. There are still more than 800,000 jobs in the American auto sector. And there is a good case to be made that without NAFTA, there might not be much left of Detroit at all. “Without the...

H-1B visas are designed to bring foreign professionals with college degrees and specialized skills to fill jobs when qualified Americans cannot be found. But in recent years, global outsourcing companies have dominated the program, winning tens of thousands of visas and squeezing out many American companies, including smaller start-ups. Congress set a limit of 85,000 visas annually, and more than 10,000 companies applied in 2014. But just 20 companies received more than 32,000 visas, according to Ronil Hira, a professor at Howard University who studies visa programs and analyzed federal H-1B data. The top 20 included several large outsourcing firms...

Jo-Ann was a child prodigy who went to college at age 14. She graduated and landed a coveted job at Citigroup. Soon she was flying around the world leading meetings. Then she jumped to a management role at a financial printer. She was middle class, maybe even on her way to the upper middle class ... until the tech bubble burst. And September 11th hit. The U.S. fell into a recession and companies cut back. In 2002, Jo-Ann was forced to train the Indian workers that would replace her. After she was laid off, she struggled to find a good...

Sometimes the two parties just aren’t that far apart during campaign season, and in a populist moment such as the one we’re experiencing right now that axiom is being proven true on the subject of free trade and job outsourcing. Currently, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders seem to be in a battle to see which one of them can sound the most like Donald Trump when it comes to offshoring American jobs, but Clinton is being hit with yet another vignette from her long history of paid speeches. Fox News dredged up an old clip of her from 2005 speaking...

There’s been a growing sense of desperation among the #NeverTrump forces for a few weeks now, and as we move closer to largely winner take all states in the primary line-up it was inevitable that full blown panic would set in. One side effect of this increased feeling of urgency is that critics of The Donald have increasingly given up on critiquing the business mogul’s record and frequently mystifying comments, choosing to focus their attacks on his supporters instead. While a seemingly self-defeating strategy, that movement has hit its full stride this weekend with National Review’s endless fountain of Trump...

Mass IT layoffs are often small and unnoticed. They are not on the scale of the Carrier air conditioning plant layoff; its Indianapolis facility, which currently employs 2,000 people, is moving to Mexico. Hertz IT employees share two things with the Carrier workers: They were also angry, and they got the news on the same day, Feb. 10. The Carrier layoffs arrived guillotine-like; the plant is closing, period. But IT layoffs are rarely like that. There are ambiguities and uncertainties and lifeboats for some, and so it was at Hertz. In an early morning conference call, Hertz's IT employees were...

Jobs to be bundled on a plane and flown to lower labour cost countries ... He highlighted a $1bn Japanese tax gain Big Blue has received, and pointed out that in the past the company had matched the proceeds from dispositions or IP sales with workforce restructuring expense.

Donald Trump’s appeal is said to be his straight talk. But when it comes to international trade, he sounds like a hypocrite, the classic “Do what I say, not what I do” politician. While bashing companies for investing in foreign countries, Donald Trump’s own company has shown no inclination to invest and build only in America. In fact, a significant percentage of his company’s hotels and major real estate properties are located abroad. “Mr. Trump is either inexcusably hypocritical or inexcusably ignorant of economics,” according to Donald J. Boudreaux, a professor of economics at George Mason University. “There is zero...

We hear terrible things about outsourcing jobs--how sending work outside of our companies is contributing to the demise of American businesses. But in this instance I have to take the unpopular stance that it is not always a terrible thing. I understand that outsourcing means that employees lose jobs. Because work is often outsourced to other countries, it means Americans lose jobs. In other cases, nonunion employees get the work. Losing jobs is never a good thing, but we have to look at the bigger picture. Last year, Nobel Prize-winning economist Dr. Lawrence R. Klein, the founder of Wharton Econometric...

Every major presidential candidate, even those most beholden to Wall Street, says he or she opposes the offshoring of American jobs. Like vows to "defeat ISIS" and "repair our crumbling infrastructure," the nationalist cri de couer against "shipping jobs overseas" has become a bipartisan catchphrase of the 2016 race. But political rhetoric is one thing and economic reality is another. Offshoring has become an effective way for U.S. companies to build and manage their products and services. Look at Apple Computer. Except for the Mac Pro personal computer, possibly the best company in the history of American business doesn't produce...

House GOP Leadership: Foreign Worker Increase Needed Because of “Labor Shortage” by MARK KRIKORIAN December 17, 2015 House GOP Whip Steve Scalise sent an e-mail to his members this morning defending the immigration increase that the Republican leadership had secretly slipped into the omnibus funding bill. (It is shown below.) The provision would potentially quadruple the issuance of H-2B worker visas, which are for non-agricultural seasonal jobs. The visas are used to import cheap labor for ski resorts, hotels, factories, landscapers, and others. (See this 2010 paper on this racket by a former State department visa officer.) Most of the...

Another touching story from the American heartland crosses our desk this morning, dealing with the dedicated efforts of labor unions to care for their workers and ensure the prosperity of the working class. The United Auto Workers have been in a long series of negotiations with the nation’s auto manufacturers in the latest round of contract wrangling. The result was a deal which should make everyone happy, if by “everyone” you mean the people running the unions. At the heart of the debate was the issue of outsourcing, where American companies ship their facilities (and all of the associated jobs)...

Théo Négri, a young software engineer from France, had come up with so many novel ideas at his job at an Internet start-up in San Francisco that the American entrepreneur who hired him wanted to keep him on. So he helped Mr. Négri apply for a three-year work visa for foreign professionals with college degrees and specialized skills, mainly in technology and science. With his master’s degree from a French university and advanced computer abilities, Mr. Négri seemed to fit the bill. But his application for the H-1B visa was denied, and he had to leave the United States. Back...