Posted on 07/22/2014 11:12:55 AM PDT by Kaslin
The shocking announcement that Microsoft is cutting 18,000 jobs is still sinking in. Most of those employees do not have a realistic chance of obtaining as good a job as the one they are losing.
In the United States, the number of engineering jobs has been sharply declining. In 2002 the number of electrical engineering jobs in the United States was 385,000, but despite increased demand for technology, the job total dropped to only 300,000 last year.
And that number is not even for American workers, because thousands of these jobs are soaked up by the H-1B visa racket, whereby companies like Microsoft can import and pay foreign workers less than it costs to hire an American. High-tech companies have thousands of foreign employees working on H-1B visas who are almost like indentured servants to the company, because they lose their right to be in our country if they leave their job.
Microsoft's massive layoff makes downright ridiculous the op-ed recently published by Bill Gates and his billionaire pals, Warren Buffett and Sheldon Adelson. They and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, who financed the lobby group FWD.us, demand immediate amnesty disguised as immigration reform in order to bring in more cheap labor.
The real shortage is in good jobs, but these visas flood the labor market and hold wages down, when wages should be climbing for American workers. Fewer Americans have a job today than just six years ago, even though the potential workforce has expanded during that time. One reason is the overuse of foreign labor by large companies.
Microsoft is highly profitable, breaking its own records for revenue and profits as recently as last year, with an effective tax rate of less than 20 percent. One of its directors has agreed to pay $2 billion for a basketball team, and Gates is often listed as the wealthiest man in the world.
In 2007, at a U.S. Senate committee hearing, Gates asked for permission to import "an infinite number" of foreign workers. "I don't think there should be any limit," he continued, but at any rate the cap should be "dramatically increased."
In 2008, before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Gates claimed he had jobs "going begging" that no American could be found to do, so he had no choice but to import workers from India. When Representative Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., suggested he might consider raising the pay for those jobs, Gates impatiently dismissed that option, saying: "No, it's not an issue of raising wages. These jobs are very, very high-paying jobs."
Economics 101 teaches that wages are a function of supply and demand. When the supply of labor is increased, such as by expanding immigration, then wages can and do decrease, despite increased productivity.
Recently a reporter caught up with the laid-off semiconductor engineer whose wife publicly challenged President Barack Obama in January 2012, "Why does the government continue to issue and extend H-1B visas when there are tons of Americans just like my husband with no job?" Darin Wedel eventually found a job in the health care industry, earning $40,000 a year less than before.
Obama is still deceiving the American public about the economy, bragging that 288,000 jobs were created last month. As Mortimer Zuckerman explained in The Wall Street Journal: "Most people will have the impression that the 288,000 jobs created last month were full-time. Not so." They were part-time jobs, which pay lower wages than the full-time jobs that have disappeared.
There are several reasons for this, such as employers' desire to avoid the Obamacare mandate to provide health insurance to anyone working 30 or more hours a week. Another is women's willingness to accept lower pay in exchange for a flexible schedule with fewer hours per day, per week and per year.
But now many breadwinners, including men, have been forced to take these jobs. Of men aged 25 to 54, one in six does not work; 50 years ago, only one in 20 was not working.
When we first brought the transformation of the American economy into a part-time-worker society in 2010, many scoffed and suggested that when the "recovery" really gets going, the temp jobs will all be morphed into high-paying full-time jobs. Instead, Zuckerman writes, "more than 24 million Americans remain jobless, working part-time involuntarily or having left the workforce."
Zuckerman hits us with the depressing conclusion: "Faith in the American dream is eroding fast. The feeling is that the rules aren't fair and the system has been rigged in favor of business and against the average person."
One senator who always speaks up for Americans, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, said, "I don't think you can make the argument that we have a labor shortage." The answer should be: close the border; absolutely no amnesty masquerading as "immigration reform."
'By 2002, the number of computer programmers in the United States had slipped to 499,000. That was down 12 percent from 1990 - not up. Nonetheless, the Labor Department was still optimistic that the field would create jobs. Wrong again. By 2006, when the number of jobs fell to 435,000 - 130,000 fewer than in 1990 - the Labor Department finally acknowledged that jobs in computer programming were "expected to decline slowly." It was a telling confession of a huge miscalculation: Computer programming and the kind of work it represented - skilled work that usually required a bachelor's or higher degree - had been assumed to be beyond the capabilities of competitors from abroad with their less vaunted educational systems and lack of English language skills. They couldn't take that away from Americans, could they? But they did.
The job opportunities for programmers have continued to decline: In 2008, the last year for which figures are available, the number had dropped to 427,000. Even that number masks the magnitude of the domestic job losses. For among those 427,000 programmers were thousands of H-1B guest workers - foreign nationals brought in by U.S. companies, as allowed by immigration law, to do programming, usually at much lower pay and benefits. Like the guest worker who took Kevin Flanagan's job.
In place of well-paid programming jobs in the United States, the growth fields in the two decades after 1990 were for home health aides, retail clerks, customer-service agents, truck drivers, security guards, and child-care workers - low-paying jobs with few opportunities for advancement or better pay.
Domestic programmers, like millions of workers in other fields, are casualties of a Congress long indifferent to the plight of American workers. Rather than create a level economic playing field, lawmakers and presidents, both Democratic and Republican, have permitted foreign governments to set American job policies by eroding this country's basic industries.'
--"The Betrayal of the American Dream," Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele
We need tighter controls on H1-B, not looser controls and higher numbers, so we are truly only bringing in very-high skill specialists instead of line technical workers. For any billionaire to claim we need this labor, when so many Americans are out of work and hurting - including technically-skilled workers - is truly a cruel, pathetic scam.
I was foreign contract worker in Japan for 14 years. They do their equivalent of the H1-B visa program right there. No set quotas for business, just a requirement that they pay foreign contract workers at least 10% more than the going wage.
It has a wonderful effect on limiting the number to those who are actually worth more than native workers doing the same job. When I was no longer worth the premium, they moved my family back to the U.S.A. including business class airfare and two cargo containers full of household belonging acquired during our time in Japan.
A side benefit for native workers is that the average wage level rises for industries using more foreign workers. Guess what that does to the supply of native workers?
Early on in the H-1B racket, Gates and others were complaining about experience in emerging technologies. Internet and web-based technologies were turning over very rapidly in the early 2000's, and people quickly became expert and then obsolete unless they retrained more frequently than big companies needed in the past.
So, those companies found themselves staffed with yesterday's experience, but unwilling to pay to retrain with tomorrow's skills. Instead, they decided to import current skills via the H-1B and L-1 visas instead.
Workers said they could retrain quickly enough, but were told that the need was immediate, not 6 months down the road.
So here we are a decade later, the H-1B's and L-1's are still here, and today's workers can still retrain to current standards anytime they want. But companies still want the excuse to offload the salary and benefit burden they accrue from employees, and move to a short-term expense model that involves non-employee "temporary" foreign workers who never seem to leave.
-PJ
Once I know a company is heavily outsourced, I just buy exclusively from its foreign competitors. I figure that if a company has no loyalty to America or her people, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t return the favor. Makes no difference to me if “US” companies that employ mostly foreigners go bankrupt.
You don’t get to be a billionaire by worrying about little things like ethics.
12,500 of them are related to Microsoft's purchase of Nokia.
Only a small percentage of the Nokia layoffs are based in the USA.
The remaining 5,500 will be laid off from Microsoft, and most of them will be USA based.
Microsoft also laid off 5,000 in 2009 during the Great Recession.
And, just so everyone knows, I completely agree with the author about work visas and Amnesty.
They are nothing but corporate welfare and a source of future voters for the Democrat Party.
The world belongs to the billionaires, they just let us rent some space.
I think Carlos Slim Helu actually said that.
High skilled specialists being brought in is a joke.
There is nobody that reviews the compatibility of foreign degrees. The US government flatly says on their websites that they don’t engage in accreditation of foreign degrees.
As it currently stands, acceptance of a foreign degree can be by an interested body. So, when you’re told you’re being replaced by a PhD, then it’s probably true that the Pakistan sleeper agent actually does have a PhD.
It’s just that no one might really care where or how he got it, and the body approving it might be an industry group put together by the people who want H1B visas.
Schlafy, as wise as she usually is, is taking a surprisingly naïve view of high tech job shortages. Rohrabacher is simply playing his designated role as token Republican in California. Here is a more realistic view:
Microsoft has five, and probably more since I was last involved, campuses in China, India four, France three, Israel three, four or five in Eastern Europe and at least two in Russia with more that I won’t try to recall, all connected to headquarters in Washington state. Their goal is to acquire talent more than to save money, because talent is the fuel for growth. Google is trying to decide what business to buy next, and Apple is desparate to get into the commercial sectors, thus its deal with IBM. For Apple or Google to hire in the nation with the highest corporate tax rate, with a three bedroom home in Silicon Valley around one million dollars, ten percent state income taxes on top of federal taxes, experienced and productive engineers will cost well over $100k/year,and a burdened cost of at least double that figure. Few good engineers would work at the bottom of that range, and few could afford a home. Tack healthcare costs on top and it is no wonder companies must move development offshore. Its been a while since I looked at where Adobe Acrobat was licensed, but last time I looked it was manufactured in Ireland, which also has at least one Microsoft campus. Ireland had, a few years ago, the largest percentage of citizens with advanced degrees in engineering of any British or European nation.
Washington state isn’t much better than California. Our companies are being priced out of opportunities, not that they can’t still sell products, but because the cost inflation is reducing the size of the market, company after company is leaving California. Next, they will need to go offshore to be globally competitive.
One solution would be to take Obama’s approach and require that all high tech employees join the SEIU. (If you don’t believe Obama could engineer unionization, look what he is doing to doctors.) That way we can hasten the globalization which is one of many threads of the change his controllers are imposing. Put the U.N. in charge of the Internet making Google a branch of a global Internet, and deploy the NSA “Cloud” as part of Google, which already has the (one of several)contract to manage and potentially control our energy usage through “smart meters”. We have to await Edward Snowden’s exposition of the current NSA relationship with Google, which is only a little sarcastic. All Class V switches have legal “eavesdropping” ports for our government agencies, as do wireless infrastructure. It would surprise me if the NSA were not already plugged in just as they provide data to the IRS.
Google helped to bring down Mubarak in Egypt because he wouldn’t cow to the Muslim Brotherhood. Just because our “conservative” CPAC is in bed with the Muslim Brotherhood, through Grover Norquist and Suhail Kahn, senior board members, Suhail’s father having founded the Islamic Society of North American, and Grover is married to a Muslim. We don’t know whether Grover has converted to Islam, like our CIA Director John Brennan, but it is no secret that Grover was a major supporter of Sammy Al-Arian, subsequently caught up as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial and deported from Florida, where he taught engineering.
Combine that with Hillary’s Chief Of Staff, Huma Abaden, hired from a Muslim Brotherhood “charity”, whose parents and brother were and are (father passed on) still working, along with Barck’s half brother, recruiting for the Muslim Brotherhood. We have Muslim Brotherhood sprinkled thoughout our government just as we once had Soviet agents all through our State Department (Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Harry Hopkins, John Stewart Service, ...)intelligence, and executive.
Yes, its partly about oil money, but probably more importantly, we can’t hope to compete with the burden of SEIU pension funds, hundreds of billions of dollars under-capitalized in most states. That is the more important reason behind illegal aliens. Every illegal expands the requirements for case workers in the welfare, healthcare, and law enforcement sectors, not to mention the votes they accrue to Democrats, if anyone believes votes are still counted (because SEIU workers tabulate votes in most every precinct and state in the nation).
Straight from technical graduate departments at Stanford and UC Berkeley, foreign students are, on average, about two years ahead -better prepared- than the best graduates from U.S. high schools, in their first years at grad schools. Our unionized teachers, are, and have for decades been those seeking the security of teaching rather than the performers in the technical fields they teach. America is an example of dangers to a society of organized mediocrity. Not China, nor Islam, nor Russia, but the drones in media and our government having learned the propaganda of those who want to harness our productivity and attain our lifestyle using the tools of repression and terror that have given them the power they wield in their own countries.
We need all the most capable people we can entice. Those whose entitlements are based upon “helping the poor” must make us poorer. The genius of Ayn Rand never ceases to amaze this writer. Is it any wonder that the utopian communists in the U.S. were so threatened by Rand, who experienced the Bolshevik revolution as a Jew? Gates built Microsoft on a policy few outside the industry understand. Ingrained in his hiring policy, though politically incorrect, was a mandate to grill candidates mercilessly (the stories abound of those with fabled names who didn’t make it through the interview process) and hire only the best. If the new CEO, an Indian, who certainly represents the culture, wants to trim the fat, and there is lots of it, I may repurchase some of the stock I sold while the company coasted on Dave Cutler’s genius; Cutler is the architect of NT, and of DEC’s RSX11M and VMS before that. And if Microsoft needs to separate himself from the Social Democrats in the U.S., so be it. Intellectual capital is portable, much as the parasites currently dominating nation’s government wish it weren’t.
We pay lip service but don’t obey and respect our Constitution which replaced a monarch as our foundation. Our Emperor, who told us all he was born a natural born subject of the British Commonwealth, one of few statements betraying his Saudi-sponsored Harvard degree in Constitutional Law. Obama/Soetoro has not needed nor claimed to wear new cloths. His subjects deny the truths he has put plainly on the table, while he plainly told us he considered our Constitution of mostly historical relevance.
It is government bureaucracy that is forcing many more than just Microsoft to look to talented immigrants. Cesar Chavez tried to protect his United Farm Workers from illegal immigrants because he needed a shortage of low-skilled workers to keep his worker’s salaries up. We need legal immigrants because human ingenuity is “The Ultimate Resource”, as Presidential Science Advisor John Holdren’s wallet learned when he challenged Julian Simon’s well reasoned study published with a challenge that Marxist Holdren took up. Gates is right - about this issue.
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