Posted on 01/30/2016 6:35:25 PM PST by Enlightened1
In 2014, the Northeast Utilities Company in Connecticut -- now known as Eversource Energy -- allegedly laid off around 200 of its American tech workers and replaced them with low-wage foreigners admitted on H-1B guest worker visas.
Now a photo has emerged depicted the workers' final, silent patriotic protest -- silent because the workers reportedly were forced to sign non-disparagement agreements to shield their employer.
The image depicts the display of American flags around cubicles of the company's IT department -- circulated by trade magazine ComputerWorld -- before the Americans were replaced with foreign labor.
The powerful image seems to have taken on fresh significance in light of the news that American tech workers have launched their discrimination lawsuit against Florida Disney. Like Northeast Utilities, Disney similarly laid off scores of American workers -- Sen. Marco Rubio's constituents -- and replaced them with low-wage foreign laborers.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
Over ten years ago.
And a follow up.
(Vanity) A Falling Tide Grounds All Boats.
Little did I know, that it was just the beginning...
And somehow the GOP thinks we want this BS.
They do not understand that their phony free market philosophy ends at our national sovereignty and our jobs.
They want to totally turn off working class Americans, then let them continue in this vein. These tech workers are not stupid people; they are extremely bright beyond probably these politicians themselves. If they want to fight, then by God, they’ll get a fight.
These folks have the ability to turn out the lights, Mr Politician. You want a nationwide Tech protest, then keep up this crap.
The USA has more than enough STEM grads to fill all positions in the USA. Salares would go up enticing more to enter the field.
H-1b KILL IT.
Correct. They are not needed nor beneficial.
I am prepared to argue the merits of H-1b with anyone foolish enough to accept my challenge.
H-1B visa program is codified corruption. That can’t be fixed. It must be deleted.
It is being abused. It is not working as intended. Shut it down until they figure out how the hell to fix it.
Yep.
I still don’t understand the cost savings.
Reality dictates that all IT people wear several hats. In large, Fortune 100 companies they might be more specialized, in smaller companies less so. But they all have multiple skills that typically have been learned via OJT.
If you want to outsource someone who wears, say 5 hats, you will not find a cheap H1B worker who can do all five things. They don’t exist, because if they did they’d be paid the same as a native worker. So, the reality is that the company winds up with 5 H1Bs, each wearing one hat. And the TRUTHFUL reality is that of those five, maybe three are ok at what they do, one is marginal, and one gets carried by the other four.
I’ve been in senior IT for a long time, and I’ve never made enough money so that it’s cheaper to replace me with multiple workers. One for one? Sure, but they can’t do what I do. Two or three entry level people? Maybe, but they can’t do what I do. Two or three senior engineers? Sure, but even at cut rates, they’ll make more than me.
I’ve seen this happen multiple times. The hubris of execs - “This has never worked before, but only because I haven’t tried it” - never ceases to amaze me.
It’s all about a one world government.
Free market works ONLY when everyone is playing by the same rules.
Right now the Trade Agreements are just like playing a rigged poker game.
There’s absolutely no way we can win it the way it’s set up.
Amen. Anyone obtaining benefits in a free market without also being open themselves is robbing the other participants.
Free trade to the founding fathers was simple:
1). A high tariff on imported goods to fund the federal government without taxing citizens directly. One positive side effect of this tariff was protecting developing US manufacturing from cheap European imports. As a result the US had the strongest industrial economy on the planet by 1900 and a rapidly growing middle class. In addition, reliance on tariffs for funding had the benefit of keeping the federal government small.
2). US merchants were free to trade with any nation on any terms these private actors, not the government, could negotiate with their foreign trade partners. Freedom of trade meant no government restrictions on who you traded with. It had nothing to do with tariffs (taxes on imports).
It is interesting that even with high tariffs the US developed the largest economy in the world and became a great trading nation. Yankee clipper ships plied the oceans carrying US goods abroad and returning with products not produced in the US. Despite what today’s free traders tell us, America became the most prosperous nation in the world with very high tariffs and no trade deals with foreign powers.
All government negotiated trade deals and regulations are anti competitive. They benefit foreign nations, domestic special interests and entrenched government bureaucracies, not the American people. It is long past time to learn from policies that really worked as opposed to the theories of academics and promoters of special interests. We need to raise tariffs and scrap all the trade agreements and rules negotiated over the last century. End taxpayer funded subsidies such as the Import-Export Bank. Let American business compete in the global economy (or not) through private deals and negotiations. If US multinationals can’t compete without US government help and intervention with foreign powers they should redirect their activities to the domestic market or fail.
Immigration policy is a different issue than trade. The first responsibility of any national government is to protect its citizens, not to take in the world’s refugees, benefit private industry by bringing in foreign workers to undercut the wages of citizens, or changing the ethnic mix of society in order to change its culture and values. Free immigration is as dangerous to the nation’s economy and welfare as “free” trade deals encompassing thousands of pages of rules and regulations delineating special privileges.
Outstanding post! You nailed it!
Even worse, after outsourcing jobs and importing Asian gito do them here, Bill Gates with a straight face says he’s disappointed young Americans don’t study computers anymore.
Who wouldn’t want to invest the time and money just to have the jobs given to other people anyway?
These gloBULList billionaires have huge balls if nothing else.
Of course they do; they own the politicians (and therefore the law enforcement). They can do as they please.
Yes they do. The job market has been awful the past 7 years.
[I’ve seen this happen multiple times. The hubris of execs - “This has never worked before, but only because I haven’t tried it†- never ceases to amaze me.]
I was always amazed at the proud look of some fool who came up ‘What if we got one guy to do the job of two? (or three)”.
I would LOL and tell them a) that guy doesn’t exist and/or is not available and b) even a marginal candidate lacking one of them will not come nor stay for what you’re offering when they get two or three times that hourly rate.
But they always think they’re the first genius to come up with this “strategy”.
Fantasy world.
In the places where I've been outsourced, execs already had exactly that. In my own example, I was doing the work of 3 to 5 people (depending). Not bragging, I was just able to do it - I had put in many of the systems and pretty much ran them on autopilot. Most of my time was spent doing break-fix and implanting changes/new systems.
Then, I assume that execs came in and said, "This WBill, we know he's senior, but he's making way, way, WAY too much money. Let's dump him and bring in some flunkies. All of his systems run on autopilot, and he doesn't seem to be working all that hard anyway."
And I'm sure that outsourcing worked, for a period of time, anyway. Just as a plane can pretty much fly itself with minimal pilot input, IT automated jobs will keep running, equipment will stay turned on, and so forth. The execs, I'm sure, spent their large bonuses and congratulated themselves on their high intelligence, good looks, and low golf scores.....Until..... they wanted to make a change, or something broke. Then they discovered WHY they pay IT guys.
Hint: We're not paid for doing the boring, day-to-day stuff that you always see IT guys doing - changing tapes, running scripts, installing PCs. We're paid to handle it when 1/2 of a multi-million dollar SAN goes down, and the vendor says, "Well, how good are your backups?". Or when thieves break in to the corporate HQ and loot every piece of electronic equipment that there is, and the business needs to be up and going the next day.
My personal favorite was handling a virus outbreak at a Fortune 500 company a long, long time ago. I had the easy part - I only had to work a patch into the login script, make it run within the first 17 seconds of login, and ensure that the new scripts and patch were distributed out to all of the company's DCs. My co-workers needed to figure out a way to reboot 12,000 PCs globally - with no centralized management software, and minimal network infrastructure (many of the PCs were in 3rd world countries) - so that the patch would get picked up. And, we needed to do it ASAP, as each PC that was infected would jabber uncontrollably and take its entire local subnet down so that no one on it could work. That problem, in particular, was challenging.
I've told enough war stories, I suppose. My point is that the top guys already HAD exactly what you described, and didn't recognize it. Promoted to the level of their incompetence, I suppose. That, and the outsourcing companies have slick salespeople, and generous kickbacks, I mean perqs. :-)
War stories are good.
Even smashed the glass on the vending machines and stole all of the money out of them, along with the snacks ...... Except....
They left the packages of the mini powdered sugar donuts for the cops.
Even as I was walking around the building and airing out every 4-letter word that I could think of to describe the perps....I had to admit that the touch had penache.
FWIW, the way the idiots got caught is they sold the laptops at an electronics swap meet. The suckers they sold them to started to call the manufacturer for help. Of course, the first thing that we did after the break-in was notify the manufacturer to stay on the lookout for laptop #QZ3342P (or whatever).
Once the manufacturer notified us, it was pretty simple for the cops to run down the criminals. Apparently, it was a quite a ring of them, they'd hit a number of local businesses. Good riddance.
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