Posted on 06/22/2003 12:48:06 AM PDT by sarcasm
WASHINGTON -- Already short on jobs, some American high-tech workers are mobilizing against a growing threat that they will be replaced by foreign workers arriving on a once-obscure visa.
Across the country, U.S. workers who once protested that H-1b visa holders were displacing them are now focusing on the growing use of the less-restrictive L-1 visa to bring bargain-priced foreign labor to major corporations.
Even in the sinking U.S. job market after the high-tech bubble went bust, the number of L-1 visas has risen and is now estimated at 325,000 temporary workers, who are allowed to stay between five and seven years.
The most controversial of those visas go to a handful of consulting firms based in India, where high-tech workers are plentiful, English is spoken and salary expectations are low. Once transferred here, these L-1 employees are contracted out to run computer operations for dozens of major companies.
Many multinational companies argue that they depend on the L-1 to bring new technologies and new operations to the United States. Among those who have "outsourcing" contracts are Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and Siemens Industries, in addition to state operations in New Mexico, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
As the Indian companies expand to new clients, they are leaving a trail of layoffs and increasingly vocal U.S. workers.
Software engineer Judy Shaw learned late last month that her entire unit of more than 30 workers at Cutler-Hammer, a Pittsburgh division of Cleveland-based Eaton Corp., was to be terminated by year's end.
The company announced that Tata Consultancy Services, one of the largest of the Indian companies operating here, would be taking over her team's projects. A senior company executive announced the contract, adding that it would save $1 million a year, Shaw said.
Gary Klasen, a spokesman for Eaton, said last week that hiring Tata was based on more than money. "I'm not speaking about cheaper labor," he said. "I'm speaking about an overall goal to remain competitive in quality, cost and technology."
Klasen said that Eaton was rehiring some of the high-tech workers for other posts "if their skills and capabilities match the jobs that are available."
Shaw was not among the few who qualified. And experiencing her second layoff in as many years has spurred her into activism.
"I am newly naturalized" as an American citizen, said Shaw, who was born in the Philippines and who now telecommutes from her home in Justin, Texas. "Now that I have a voice, I'm going to speak up."
She is among a growing number of high-tech workers who are telling their stories on Internet sites, knocking on congressional doors, organizing groups and planning demonstrations.
Glenn R. Jackson, a laid-off tech worker from Dawson, Ga., last week launched the Internet-based National Association for the Employment of Americans, with partners on both coasts, to build a grass-roots campaign against work visa programs.
"A lot of people are individually impacted but not organized enough to put pressure on the powers that be," said Jackson, who spent 20 years in information technology before being laid off more a year and a half ago by the Siemens Energy and Automation facility in Alpharetta.
Since then, Jackson has been contacting fellow tech workers, chiefly via the Internet, helping to circulate petitions and sending information to legislators.
Message received
The message is beginning to be heard in the nation's capital.
Prompted by workers laid off by a Siemens facility at Lake Mary in his Florida district, Rep. John Mica concluded that the expanded use of the L-1 "was a gray area of law," his spokesman Gary Burns said. Mica, a Republican, became the first lawmaker to introduce legislation aimed at curbing the L-1.
Rep. Rosa L. DeLaro, a Democrat whose state of Connecticut has been a target for foreign outsourcers, followed last week by announcing that she will offer a bill, as well.
Also last week, Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, announced he would hold a hearing this summer "so that we can better understand both the many concerns about misuse of the L-1 visa as well as the legitimate, important role the L-1 visa can play in promoting American businesses in our global economy."
Although Chambliss stopped short of saying the law should be rewritten, a fellow Georgia Republican, Rep. Nathan Deal, said Congress should close "a big loophole" in the L-1 program.
The Homeland Security Department, which oversees work visas, has ordered a probe into whether bringing in high-tech workers to provide basic services for other corporations is an abuse of the L-1 program -- originally designed to allow international companies to bring their top managers and a few company experts to assist their U.S. divisions.
"My understanding of L-1 is that no, that is not a legitimate use" if the workers are outsourced to another company, said Christopher Bentley, a spokesman for the department's Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Further, Bentley said, the L-1 visa holder must be an intracompany transfer of a worker with "special knowledge" of the company's products, management or procedures. "We're not talking about people who are just Microsoft Windows experts," he said.
For employers, the L-1 has growing appeal because it is far less regulated than the H-1b worker visa, which requires certification that American workers will not be displaced as well as pay that matches the prevailing wage. Moreover, the number of H-1b visas per year is capped. Starting next October, the limit for H-1bs will go down from 195,000 to 65,000 annually.
L-1 visas have none of those restrictions and no cap.
Girish Surendran, resident manager of immigration and human resources for Tata, or TCS as the company's American division is called, defended his company's use of the L-1.
"It's a misconception is that TCS contracts employees to other companies or to third parties," he said. "When we go to a total outsourcing contract with any company ... the company has selected us to do the job because of the expertise that TCS carries with us."
Clinton a backer
Tata, which has more than 50 offices in the United States, also has a key supporter in Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), who claimed credit for encouraging the company to open an office in Buffalo. Asked about the company's practice of replacing U.S. workers, Clinton's office provided statements from the company promising to provide jobs in the Buffalo region.
Although the Tata executive declined to say how many L-1 visa holders are on its payroll, two other Indian outsourcing companies report increasing use of the visa in filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Infosys Technologies Ltd. said it had 1,760 L-1 visa holders, up from 425 in March 1999. Wipro Ltd. said it has 1,150 workers with L-1s now, compared with 321 two years ago.
The tech contractors appeared to have little support from Daryl Buffenstein, an Atlanta immigration lawyer who is also general counsel for the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
"No one should defend the use of the L-1 visa as a job shop," he said. "If that's being done, then that is hurting everybody."
However, Buffenstein also said immigration lawyers were "working very, very hard to make sure that whatever happens" to the L-1 visa, "it doesn't throw the baby out with the bath water."
Buffenstein says foreign companies in Georgia, for example, have brought an estimated $19 billion in manufacturing and facilities investments that have transformed Atlanta into an international city.
"The story of the L-1 in Georgia is one of investment, one of jobs, one of employment, one of money," he said. "It's a story of how this state has built itself into a haven for international companies."
These companies have brought in only a "tiny percentage" of foreign workers, while hiring thousands of Georgians, he said.
You're exactly right. New privacy laws have the potential to shut huge Indian operations down overnight. And that's not even counting simple bad PR from customers above and beyond the law. That's another "gotcha" plenty of companies don't see coming.
LOL... I swear I paraphrased this entire tirade over beers last week. Great points all!
What does one call it when one swears to something one knows is not a fact. I know perjury doesn't matter after Clinton was not removed from office maybe wer should try prosecuting some people for perjury.
The first sentence and the only one with which I disagree. That is the left wing view of things--those who equate corporations with fascism. In 1940s, Harry Dexter White, Launchin Curry, Alger Hiss and other Soviet agents in the FDR and Truman administrations were the people proposing one world government.
Do you mean a "free trader"?
That's the essence of the problem. It's real hard to manage a process that the manager does not himself understand.
Yet managers don't like to admit that, so they cover up their lack of understanding with PERT charts and such, so that they can maintain the pretense of having managerial control. Having no ability to actually compare and evaluate work quality, they go with lower price (the one thing they CAN quantify) and go offshore.
The awakening will come in a year or two, and it will be ugly. The senior managers won't care, though. They will already have moved onto their next thing, or retired on their stock options and bonuses (tenure for a CEO averages 5 years).
This is why Y2K was such a last-minute crisis: the ideal time to have invested the money in dealing with it was over the prior 10 years. But many managers were not interested in that, because the cost would have come during their tour of duty, but the payoff would come when someone else would likely be occupying the chair
The damage, however, will be very hard to repair. Any student smart enough to be able to succeed as an engineer or programmer, is smart enough to decide to go into some other field. The people laid off now, will have moved into other lines of work. If the corporations sudenly decide to try to reverse course, the people won't be there to hire back
A quote from one:
http://www.newsmax.com/commentarchive.shtml?a=2000/3/13/083321
[...]Here we find a group, who put aside every serious human rights violation in favor of one right only; the "right" to purchase every good at the lowest possible price.
No matter, apparently, that the good is tainted with the blood of martyrs, nor that it is tainted with the sweat of slaves, nor that it is tainted with the fingerprints of little children forced to work in appalling conditions.
No matter, either, that the goods were made with technology stolen from the true entrepreneurs who first took the risk and then paid the price for their development, manufacturing and marketing.
No matter that the profits for such goods never go to the common man, but to Communist Party bosses who laugh at our stupidity, to military establishments bent on intimidating and conquering their neighbors, and which, in fact, amount to treasonous donations to butchers fixed on the diabolical design of undermining and destroying the United States of America.
No, only money matters to such as these! Men and women who are the very beau ideal of the Capitalism Dickens suffered under as a young child, a Capitalism stripped of its Christianity.
Just dare to voice out loud, to such as these, your conviction that free governments and free markets that turn their back on religious and moral principle in favor of a money-matters-only approach know nothing of liberty, but only of a collision course with anarchy and tyranny, and you can be sure to be tersely bombarded with a hostile and hearty "Bah!" followed by "Humbug!"
To these lovers of a boundless laissez-faire, freedom of choice is the highest form of liberty; moral restraint is freedoms worst enemy and "free" trade is the guarantor of world freedom.
Thus, Most Favored Nation (MFN) Trade status for blood drenched Red China, makes sense to them. They are gluttons without eyes, slave traders without ears, and intellectuals without a conscience.[...]
What on earth is it that makes some people look at trade with economies regulated as severely as Communist China as inherently free, provided we don't impose regulation on our side? A market can only be free when both sides are free. And an argument can be made (the Libertarian Party has it built right into its platform) that a true free market also requires the free flow of labor, just like any other goods.
National sovereignty demands borders, and inevitably results in different market rules for different nations. This, of course, is why free markets virtually demand political unity, which is why free trade and global government so often go hand in hand.
[...] Let's ask a new question: Is outsourcing trade?
What is being traded when a U.S. firm or industry relocates its capital and technology in China, where it employs Chinese labor to produce goods for the U.S. market?
Adam Smith's argument for free trade is an argument against self-sufficiency in all goods and services. It is not an argument for exporting a country's productive capability to countries with the lowest labor costs.
[...]
Trade implies reciprocity. It is a two-way street. There is no reciprocity in outsourcing, only the export of domestic jobs. That's why the United States is currently running a $125 billion trade deficit with China alone, a Third World country. That's why the United States is turning over $1.5 billion per day in its accumulated wealth to pay for all the outsourced goods and services that return to our markets as imports.
One reason that trade between countries is not the same as trade within a country is that more than one currency is involved. A country that runs persistent trade deficits dispossesses itself of its wealth and the future income that flows to the new owners of that wealth.
A second blow falls when foreigners find themselves satiated with dollars, or overweight U.S. investments. Then the dollar devalues, and the outsourced goods and services on which the U.S. is import-dependent become expensive. [...]
More smoke and mirrors.
And now we know why we haven't heard from the esteemed junior senator from New York on this subject.
Yes. None. The offshoring phenomenon will accomplish two things. Make corporations rich beyond their wildest dreams of avarice and turn the American middle class into a group of poverty-stricken wage slaves.
Second, if salaries are going overseas, does this mean that these companies no longer care about building up the economies of the communities they locate in, ie the American cities they locate in, or are they no longer in any sense American?
Right again. They don't care. About the local community, about the infrastrature, about America. . . about anything except the bottom line.
Third, if they pay out salaries overseas, does that mean that they expect their principal consumers to come from overseas, or do they expect other industries to continue to pay decent salaries in the US and maintain a middle class to purchase their products?
Here, I think, is the only Achilles heel in the scenario. Companies expect the American economy to keep humming along, for people to keep buying their (still) high-priced goods and services, while their production cost plummet, inflating their bottom lines. But that can't hold up. And they will have no such market overseas. I've mentioned it on these threads over and over -- the foreign governments who underwrite the foreign slave wages do not want a flood of American goods. They only want American dollars.
These companies have brought in only a "tiny percentage" of foreign workers, while hiring thousands of Georgians, he said.
What about this, Georgia Freepers? Is this BS, or what?
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