Posted on 08/28/2002 10:03:57 PM PDT by Red Jones
IT workers win jobs battle
The IT labour market will be reviewed in 3 months
A group of computer consultants - who said their jobs were being taken by cheaper foreign workers - have won their battle with the government. The freelancers said they were suffering because the Home Office included IT specialists on a list of skills shortages.
This meant that companies could apply for fast-track visas to bring workers in from overseas.
British workers said the system was being abused.
Finding jobs became hard
Some companies, including big household names, were ending contracts then employing people on fast-track visas and lower salaries to do the same jobs.
Many of the overseas workers came from India.
Freelancers said they were finding it increasingly difficult to find new contracts, which suggested there was no skills shortage.
The Professional Contractors' Group collected evidence from its members and presented it to the Home Office.
After a series of discussions the government has agreed to remove all IT jobs from its skills shortage list and all IT work permit applications must show that the job has been advertised in either a national newspaper or a relevant trade journal.
But the Home Office said it would review the state of the labour market in about three months' time.
Could it have anything to do with your desire for the government to put Bill Gates in stocks?
Nah.
Of course! AT&T! Why didn't I think of that? Only a quarter of a million jobs lost in that sector over the last 20 months. No reason not to try that model in the OS industry, is there?
Could your statement be motivated by malice and ignorance? yeah.
We are familiar with the concept of creative destruction. The economists talk about this idea. This is when the free market destroys a part of one industry in order to create a whole new part to replace it. Usually the new section of industry is more productive or able to produce something people like for less that replaces the first section of industry that is destroyed through this creative process. This creative destruction we all accept. But government intervention into the marketplace to speed up in an unnatural way this creative destruction or even to create it whereas it would otherwise not occur, is fascism. The h1b program brings fascism down on many americans, in that it is a huge intervention into the job market for the purpose of picking winners and losers. This, we should all consider to be completely unacceptable.
If I am not correct in my assertion, then why is it that we do not have h1b like programs for other lines of work. We take one line of work and we make special labor market rules for that line of work and we call it fair.
For any industry, any line of work, if we tell the employers that they can have their choice of 2 labor sources; 1) is american labor that is free to seek another job as they see fit freely and 2) is a foreign sourced worker who works in america, but is told at the beginning of that arrangement that he must keep the one job for 5 consequtive years or else lose his chance to become US citizen. Well, of course they're going to all favor labor source #2 because they then have a kept person who is very unlikely to leave the job and will do anything to get through the 5 year indentured servant period.
if we institute this program for any other line of work, then that other line of work would be overwhelmed with the foreign labor as the employers would prefer it. We've made special rules to discriminate against those who have voluntarilly done the work to fill the need for IT people. These people of course are primarilly providers for families in america. Their replacements are not, their replacements don't even pay social security taxes. This program costs social security 5-10 billion a year in funding. It also lowers wages across the board and increases future social security obligations as it just increases the US population without increasing the economy proportionally. We are just moving one group of people out, by law, because they are americans, and moving another group in, because they are not americans.
This is a sick program, only the stupid and the malicious support it.
I'm merely suggesting you have a bit of an attitude about Microsoft which probably limits what IT industry positions you might take. And you have an attitude about h1b candidates. And, well, you just have an attitude.
Is that the best you can do? Come work with me for a day. See what IT is really all about. You sound like a lot of the whiners I come in contact with daily. It's all about you, isn't it?
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