Savant needs to take it up with his fellow unions
Posted on 03/16/2015 2:18:10 PM PDT by Jim Robinson
A so-called “war on the American worker” has intensified in the Golden State.
Massive layoffs are being spearheaded by the multi-billion dollar Southern California Edison utilities company, which is terminating scores of American IT workers and replacing them with immigrant IT workers, from a slew of foreign counties, who are willing to work for far less compensation. These immigrants are in the U.S. on an H-1B visa program.
“We don’t need foreign workers. We have plenty of Americans who are fully capable and equipped to carry out these jobs. It’s an absolute issue of corporate greed; nothing more nothing less,” former Edison employee and Marine Pat Lavin told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview late last week.
Lavin is a stalwart Democrat who serves as a business manager and financial secretary for the the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local #47. “Edison are master liars,” Lavin cautioned, quipping that he “caught them telling the truth last week and they tried to lie their way out of it.”
Lavin spoke with Breitbart News as one of the California Edison workers laid off in the scandal that Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) have hammered the company for. Grassley called the layoffs “heartless” and Issa argued that this appears to be an abuse of the program.
America is facing a surplus of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) workers who are unemployed or have been laid off from work due to companies, like SoCal Edison, that have been outsourcing American jobs to immigrants. According to an article from Robert Charette in IEEE Spectrum, the so-called “STEM Crisis”—where tech leaders like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who claim they need to import cheap foreign labor—is a “myth.”
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
Amnesty / H1B bump for later...
nothing wrong with corporate greed. The problem comes when corporations and politicians work together to undermine US immigration by lying that it is broken.
I do think there is a fine line between union abuse and employer abuse. I’m not here on this issue to take unions to task specifically, although you and I seem to agree that they are major abusers.
I want reasoned profits for employers. I don’t even care if they make massive profits. I do care if they abuse their employees to get those massive profits.
Obviously the free enterprise system needs to work in order for there to be healthy business and employment. I just don’t want to see wages held down, or workers replaced because “healthy” profits were not enough profits.
To my way of thinking, this rampant movement of our manufacturing to China was simple treason, not much else.
This nation became second to none, without out-sourcing.
That should have told us all we had to know about whether out-surcing was necessary, or simply evil.
Thank you for your response. I appreciate it.
I’ve always thought that illegals and guest workers (such as H1-b’s) served the same purpose for different parts of the labor market. Both are used in a manner that work against the immediate participants in the labor pool as well as US citizens.
Never mind that it also demonstrates the “claim a shortage to deepen a surplus” concept that violates basic laws of economics.
” I want reasoned profits for employers. I don’t even care if they make massive profits. I do care if they abuse their employees to get those massive profits.
Obviously the free enterprise system needs to work in order for there to be healthy business and employment. I just don’t want to see wages held down, or workers replaced because “healthy” profits were not enough profits.
To my way of thinking, this rampant movement of our manufacturing to China was simple treason, not much else.
This nation became second to none, without out-sourcing.
That should have told us all we had to know about whether out-surcing was necessary, or simply evil.”
A+
Honestly, that gets high marks from me.
I agree with you.
I don’t like to lower the charge to this, but it’s simply corporate greed. It can be small business greed as well.
I want healthy businesses, but if that health is at the cost of making workers ill, no way.
I do respect management / ownership. Workers have to be respected too.
ping
And then Nixon went to China, and then Clinton made a deal between Sam Wall and China, and the rest is history.
There should be a penalty, but with our legislators, that ain't gonna happen any time soon.
Amen.
BTTT
IMHO, in parallel with this would be the need to get corporate taxation down to be competitive with the rest of the world, and ease a lot of the regulations, then the picture will be even clearer...
I know folks like to take Nixon to task for opening up China, but it was the middle of the cold war and he wanted to offset China against the U. S. S. R. It was a reasoned ploy.
It wasn’t until around 1992 that the nation went “loony toons” over China. At that time our trade deficits were about !00 billion per year. That was bad enough. I still didn’t like it.
Then we turned our trade deficits into close to $1 trillion yearly.
I believe it has deflated since.
At any rate, it’s this generation of presidents, Congress, Corporations, and small businesses that have sold out the American worker.
Placing that on Nixon’s back to me just seems like piling on, because everyone has their fair haired person today they don’t want to place the blame on.
All those entities since 1992 have played a major part.
Nixon was nowhere to be seen.
Nixon for all his faults, did everything he could to keep this nation strong in the face of the Cold War. He was nothing like Carter, Clinton, or Obama.
And yes, he did some things that I cringe about. He shouldn’t have. In history, Nixon goes down with enough trash talk, when you consider what Clinton and Obama have been given a pass on.
Nixon was more complex than our presidents today in either party.
One thing that has entered it’s ugly head here, is our international agreements. For instance, our corporations are taxed abroad, so the U. S. gives them a tax break here domestically.
France (I believe it was) filed suit before the WTC (I believe it was), and the U. S. lost.
These dumb a__ fools signed these agreements, and now they have trouble making our own rules here.
Just like we said they would.
I do agree that there is more that could be done along the lines you suggested, and it should be done now.
There are so many ways to improve this nation, if a good Conservative was installed as president with a decent Congress that would work with him.
Did the Union support Barack Obama?
If so the chickens have come home to roost.....
Savant needs to take it up with his fellow unions
My question is this: If the best and the brightest scientists and technical workers in India,China, Taiwan, Pakistan, and South Korea remain in their countries, then what level of workers is the United States importing from those Asian countries?
Such distorted logic and reasoning on the part of American technical firms like Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook makes no sense.
Have these greedy technical companies forgotten that America was made great by such programs like apprentice programs and internships? How do these technical companies think that American plumbers,electricians, and air-conditioning technicians learned their skills: Through apprentice programs.
We should encourage, maybe even demand, that technical companies like Microsoft, Apple, and FaceBooke develop strong apprentice and intern programs so that they wouldn't have to depend so much on HB technical workers from India, China, Taiwan, Pakistan, and South Korea.
I believe that the HB program should be immediately and drastically reduced or abolished completely.
My point is this: The HB program has done more harm than good in developing of technical skills among future American young people. The HB program is slowly destroying rather than helping America's ability to compete in the global market.
The severe problem of getting American young people to pursue technical skills goes something like this:
1. Schools throughout the country are working hard to encourage young people to enter the technical fields like working with computers.
2. Many young Americans are enthusiastic about entering the good-paying technical field.
3. But these same students look around and see that they have to compete not only with their fellow Americans but with technical workers imported from foreign countries, mostly Asian countries---for instance, you don't see a flood of HB workers coming from,say, Spain and England.
4. So what do these bright students end up doing? They become discouraged. They give up on their dreams to entire the fast growing amd good-paying technical field, and so they decide to go into some line of easier work where they don't have to compete with foreign technical workers.
5. Then what happens? What happens is that the United States demand for technical workers ends up caught in a vicious circle.
6. The vicious circle goes something like this: Now that more and more smart American students are discouraged from pursuing studies in the scientific and technical fields by such horrible self-defeating programs like the HB program, American companies claim that they can't find enough skilled American workers to meet their increasing demand for skilled technical workers.
7. So, argue American companies, they have no choice but to beg Congress to allow them to import more and more foreign technical workers from such Asian countries as India, China, Taiwan,Pakistan and South Korea so that they can compete on the global market with the highly skilled technical workers in Asian countries like India, China, Taiwan, Pakistan, and South Korea. Huh? Am I missing something here?
8. And round-and-round we go with no end in sight to this terrible, self-defeating HB foreign workers problem.
9. Meanwhile, executives at technical and rich companies like Microsoft , Apple, and FaceBook run all the way to the bank to deposit all the money they saved by bypassing highly-qualified American technical workers for foreign HB workers.
10. Yes. Let's drastically reduce or abolish the HB foreign workers program so that we can give American youths the chance to develop the technical skills that America will need for a long, long time.
Should be Lavin...
we need to create a tax on foreign workers so that companies see hiring Americans as being financially advantageous. I normally am not one who wants more taxes. I look at this more as a fine that the company is paying. the companies claim they need more foreign workers I would allow them to hire as many as they want but have them pay a tax that is as high as 200% of what they are paying the foreign worker.
*****
And to add insult to injury, I hear that in many places management orders the laid off worker to teach the new immigrant worker about his job before he leaves!
That is one thing the American techs should fight for at least: They must organize and tell management that they will no longer help or teach the new employee who is taking over their jobs.
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