While criticizing Sessions and Walker and insisting on the need for more foreign workers, the Journal editors failed to answer the obvious question: If Silicon Valley needs workers, why is it laying off thousands of Americans? Could it be, perhaps, that tech companies prefer foreign workers, who are younger, cheaper, and immobile (in that they cannot legally leave one job for another)? Further, what justification exists for the tech executives to engage in an anti-competitive wage-fixing conspiracy against their employees (more on this in a moment)? On this, too, the Journal is silent.
In that USA Today article, Hira et al. wrote, “The facts are that, excluding advocacy studies by those with industry funding, there is a remarkable concurrence among a wide range of researchers that there is an ample supply of American workers . . . who are willing and qualified to fill high-skill jobs in this country.” One of the authors of that article, Professor Salzman, notes that “guest workers make up two-thirds of all new IT hires.” Another of the authors, Professor Hira, bluntly states: “Most of the H-1B program is now being used to import cheaper foreign guestworkers, replacing American workers, and undercutting their wages.”
A Senate Judiciary hearing run by Grassley and Sessions highlighted rampant abuses in the H-1B program. Fired American workers were forced to train their own foreign replacements. This is not what Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg likes to call the race for global “talent.” The new foreign workers were less skilled in terms of experience and education than the Americans they replaced. Further, Computerworld has revealed how fired American IT workers are “silenced” and kept from publicly complaining by the tech companies, which force them to sign non-disparagement agreements or lose severance pay and the chance of reemployment.
Worst of all, Silicon Valley moguls have conspired in anti-market, anti-competitive, monopolistic practices to keep their employees’ wages down. The New York Times reported that federal judge Lucy Koh declared that the executives of seven major Silicon Valley companies (Apple, Google, Adobe, Intel, two Disney subsidiaries, and Intuit) were engaged in “an overarching conspiracy” against their own employees. E-mails revealed that top executives, including Eric Schmidt of Google and the late Steve Jobs of Apple, were personally involved in “no-poaching” arrangements in which the tech oligarchs agreed not to recruit each other’s employees with offers of higher wages. The purpose of the conspiracy was to stagnate the wages of 64,000 employees, who then filed a $3 billion class-action law suit to recoup their wage losses under antitrust laws. Put bluntly, the actions of the tech oligarchs could be described as deliberately “hollowing out the middle class.” In the end, the tech companies paid $415 million to end the suit.
Thanks.
zeestephen