Posted on 09/19/2016 1:26:47 AM PDT by Enlightened1
An iconic American company, McDonald’s, has quietly outsourced the jobs of 70 white-collar professionals in Ohio to foreign H-1B workers.
The H-1Bs outsourcing in the nation’s heartland showcases the growing corporate effort to use foreign H-1B workers to cut workforces of American white-collar professionals, and it comes after companies have used waves of legal and illegal migrants to slash blue-collar jobs and wages in Ohio and around the country.
Also, the 70 Ohio jobs that McDonalds outsourced to lower wage foreign graduates are not Silicon Valley technology and software jobs — they’re white-collar accounting jobs performed by graduates from mainstream business schools. That outsourcing of mainstream business jobs spotlights the growing movement of foreign workers into all corners of the nation’s white-collar professional economy.
White-collar outsourcing “is not just a Silicon Valley thing anymore, it is happening all over” the country, said Steve Camarota, head of research at the Center for Immigration Studies.
The outsourcing in Columbus, Ohio, was explained as a cost saving effort by a McDonald’s spokeswoman. “To deliver $500 million in savings, the vast majority by the end of 2017, we are restructuring many aspects of our business, including an accounting function,” said spokeswoman Terri Hickey.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
Well there are big AmErican companies they could get jobs at like Ford Motor Company. ...oh...wait....
Companies like McDonalds and others are perhaps skirting the “spirit” of the law but they get around it by eliminating their payrolled positions and hiring an outside firm (in this case to an outside (outsourcing) company that provides accounting services) who already has or hires the new H1B replacements. So McDonalds is not hiring (at least not technically nor directly) the H1B replacement workers.
Perhaps that is a loophole that needs to be addressed and changed. But on the other hand if I own a company and find that I can cut costs by outsourcing some positions or entire departments to an outside firm, I’m not sure I want the federal government, under even more regulations, to tell me I can’t.
The real root of the problem is onerous government regulations, H-1B visas are merely a solution for them. Do not mistake that as me being in favor of H-1B visas because I am not. Just pointing out the economic reasons as to why they are attractive to corporations. In reality corporations could care less where their workforce comes from. All that matters to them is can the do the job at hand and can they make the company more profitable.
So, the reality is that it is our government who is responsible for the loss of jobs for Americans in America. Businesses as just trying to stay in business and remain profitable. Two options to accomplish that are to hire H-1B visa holders, and/or relocate businesses outside of American borders.
The ACA alone has resulted in tremendous costs, not just in the increased insurance premiums and requiring more employees to be covered, but also the costs of the day to day administration.
At my last company the Benefits Manager and I (as the PR and HRIS Manager) spent untold hours implementing the required ACA changes, not just in the benefits plans themselves, but the changes, the population of the new required fields in our HRIS system and the required reporting and preparation of the required tax forms that went into effect last year; the additional costs we had to pay to ADP for the implementation and preparation of the new tax forms and to our benefits broker for consulting, on the training classes and seminars both the Benefits Manager and I attended just to understand what was needed - all on just the reporting and administrative and compliance burdens alone.
And while a subsidiary of a much larger US based subsidiary and our parent company being based in the UK, we only had around 200 employees, so in that respect, we were small to mid-sized. I don’t know how smaller companies not part of a larger corporation dealt with the ACA changes but I do know from my professional networking contacts those working for smaller companies, that it was a “cluster”.
Add to that things like the increase of the minimum wage in many states, the recent change in what employees now have to be paid overtime, the increased EEOC and AA reporting requirements, changes to what you can and can’t ask on employment applications, OSHA reporting regs, changes in how 401k plans are to be administered (ERISA changes), etc…. Nearly every day brought some sort of new state and or federal regulatory burden we in HR and Payroll had to deal with.
One of the ways our divisional office was looking to cut costs, recoup the benefit cost increases under ACA, was not only to consolidate benefit plans across all the companies within in our division, (companies that had be operating fairly autonomously in this regard and located across the country), because the bigger the “group” the more the risks are spread out and hence the lower the premiums and ease and costs of administration, but they were also looking to outsource some the day to day benefits administration and some of basic HR functions. I was on this team and we looked at, vetted and interviewed several firms that could do this.
One of the functions would be for this outsourcing company to handle all our annual open enrollments - soup to nuts, enrolling new hires and administering COBRA for terminated employees, they would also provide day to day benefit questions through a call center. If an employee had a question about their benefits plans, needed to add a new baby or drop a dependent, etc. had a claims issue, needed to enroll in COBRA, etc. they would no longer go to and speak directly with their on-site HR office, speak to their HR or Benefits rep in person, they would have to call a 1-800 number going to the outsourcing company.
They were also looking to consolidate the payroll function either through outsourcing some of it or bringing into a centralized divisional office.
While the divisional, the top level executives said that they were not looking to eliminate any internal HR or PR positions, we all knew that this would be the ultimate result. My only hope was that as I was on the “team” as a subject matter expert on PR and HRIS and close to the divisional office, that I might get bumped up to the divisional office and not be one of those to lose my job.
The outsourcing companies we looked at were all American companies BTW, most of them based here in PA where like my company, our divisional office was also based, but I don’t know if they hired any H1B employees – and it wasn’t our concern, not even a question we asked as part of the vetting process, as long as they could meet our goals and the contract requirements and come in at a cost savings to the division.
And in all fairness, while I didn’t like some of the proposed changes, I understood this need to cut costs. This multi-national company provided OEM components to the manufacturing sectors and also to the oil and gas and mining industries. While my company was one of the most profitable within in our division, we had to bare some of the burden of cost cutting necessities because of the big economic hits and losses our “sister” companies in the oil and mining industries were experiencing.
Our parent company based in the UK was publically traded on the London Exchange and therefore had an obligation to their stock holders to do what was necessary to hold the bottom line and keep profits high or at least not to bleed to death.
The problem is always government. That's why illegal immigration needs to stop and the H1-B program needs to make companies pay more for these foreign workers than they would for a suitable American.
As for small companies complying to ACA I believe outside payrolls companies or packages were the solution for the majority, along with outside administrators for benefits.
I always loved McD’s ... This move just netted them a YUGE lawsuit by abusing the process... TRUMP’s DOJ will be all over this like ketchup on a quarter pounder..
They contracted with an outside company to perform their accounting functions, thus eliminating 70 jobs. It is the outsoucing company, Genpact, that is bringing in the H-1Bs and that’s probably just for knowledge transfer.
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So an illegal straw man in the form of “Genpact” is A-OK with you... this still violates the H1-b visa laws.
The article goes on to say that the US is effectively paying a “Diversity Tax” that amounts to $400 BILLION EVERY YEAR for the wages paid to legal visa holders and illegals within the country.
$400 BILLION in wages that CITIZENS DON’T RECEIVE.
Right you are.
Far too many American corporations don’t care that their most-expeditent self-interest actions are killing Capitalism and our Republic’s future.
Bernie and fellow democrats gain Great strength for their socialist regulatory agenda because sh1t like H1-B visa abuse.
Marxists point to outsourcing jobs, vindicated in saying Free market economy doesn’t work, and “Capitalists sell the very rope in which they hang themselves”.
Conservatives really need to rise up and constructively engage industries about longterm damage to our country and their future.
RE: “This obnoxious sh*t just needs to end. Companies so greedy that they prefer indentured servant foreigners to Americans when it comes to handing out jobs. You’d have to think there’s more than a reasonable supply of accountants of all things in the US where you don’t need to bring in a foreigner.”
Right you are.
Far too many American corporations don’t care that their most-expeditent self-interest actions are killing Capitalism and our Republic’s future.
Bernie and fellow democrats gain Great strength for their socialist regulatory agenda because sh1t like H1-B visa abuse.
Marxists point to outsourcing jobs, vindicated in saying Free market economy doesn’t work, and “Capitalists sell the very rope in which they hang themselves”.
Conservatives really need to rise up and constructively engage industries about longterm damage to our country and their future.
RE: “This obnoxious sh*t just needs to end. Companies so greedy that they prefer indentured servant foreigners to Americans when it comes to handing out jobs. You’d have to think there’s more than a reasonable supply of accountants of all things in the US where you don’t need to bring in a foreigner.”
Some people just aren't ever going to get it. There was essentially no regulation at all when companies paid employees in company scrip, forced them to live in a company house paying the company rent if they wanted a job, and purchasing everything at the company store. When the locals wouldn't work under those conditions the companies recruited people from Europe under false pretenses and never naturalized them so they were even more of a slave to the companies than locals had been.
Regulations are a factor, but they're not the primary factor whether the sort of people who would have worked for Baldwin-Felts willing to shoot amd kill anyone the company told them to want to admit that or not.
No one at McDonalds in LA speaks English!
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What is the language most spoken in LA?
Has another news source picked this story up? Mentioning Breitbart in front of Liberals is a nightmare to deal with.
“Bad idea; Trump should not have the power to issue decisions without the approval of Congress “
The H-1B program IS under the authority of the president per congress. The President has ever power to curtail its use.
It is a GREAT idea to halt it immediately!
To some extent I would agree with you.
However, companies like ADP who provide PR and also HRIS and benefit enrollments via EDI connections to insurers, setting up benefit plans, setting up self-service enrollment; from my many years (25+) of dealing with ADP (and also with Ceridian and Paychex), in not only in those areas but also in areas of tax and HR and benefit compliance; they will not give advice nor will they consult, nor will they ultimately take any responsibly for any compliance issues. They provide the software platform, they can do tax filings, tax remittances and tax reporting (probably the best of what these companies do), but it is always the customer who is ultimately responsible for the approving the setup, the data integrity and to sign off on any of the tax or for other types of reporting (annual EEOC and VETS reporting for a few examples).
And unless you can prove that they made a mistake on any tax filings, they will charge you, and not a small amount, for filing amended returns.
And over the years I’ve dealt with them, I’ve had more than one ADP customer service rep in either their PR or HR or even their Time & Attendance platform support centers who had absolutely no idea of what they were talking about, didn’t even seem to be knowledgeable on their own systems or the interaction between their PR HR and T&A platforms or who gave me completely incorrect guidance or set things up incorrectly.
And it has only gotten much worse since many calls to ADP client services now go to their call centers in the Philippines or India. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve hung up on ADP service reps and called back hoping to get someone either US based or more knowledgeable. My payroll admin and the HR admin used to laugh when they heard me pretending to have a bad connection as an excuse to hang up. And that’s not to say that all the US based reps were much better. And I know for a fact that ADP hires first line customer service reps who have no experience in PR, nor with any business or accounting degrees or even with much customer service experience, both here and abroad.
For instance, in just the last two years, ADP failed to properly set up for the W-2 reporting our new HSA plan and our new Roth 401k plan and for the credit we set up for those participating in our wellness program (ADP a initially set it up as a non-taxable deduction when it should have been set up as taxable fringe benefit and it took me many hours and at least 4 phone calls to finally get it corrected), and they would have completely screwed that up, if not for me reading up on, educating myself, consulting with our plan administrator and testing beforehand on several test PR previews, on our new executive deferred compensation plan – ADP got the tax withholding completely backwards for one thing (Federal and state and most local taxes are deferred but they pay SS and Medicare and when they take a qualified distribution, the taxes withheld are the opposite), and they didn’t exclude 401k deferrals from gross income after the deferred comp was deducted (you can’t “double dip” for tax deferrals on both types of deferred comp plans) and ADP would have gotten the W-2 wrong as well. And the last thing you want to do is screw up the PR and tax filings (W-2’s) for company’s most senior executives.
And I was dumbfounded as these are not at all unusual types of plans and benefits to have set up, so why did such a big company like ADP get it so screwed up especially when I filled out their own forms for setting up a deferred comp plan and also provided them with our plan documents? I was even more amazed that the ADP rep (Abdul) setting up our deferred comp plan continued to argue with me even after I, our benefits manager, our consultant, the plan administrator (Fidelity) and finally a senior ADP client service VP who I knew and called in a favor to help us out, proved to him the tax withholding was set up wrong. I was finally assigned a senior ADP person in their programming department who had to set up “special programing” routines which still took several attempts to finally get right.
For those executives in the executive deferred comp plan (about 10), on every payroll preview I had to manually check and manually calculate the tax withholding and 401k deferrals to make sure it stayed correct and I created a spreadsheet for that purpose. And it was a good thing I did because near the end of the year, when some executives maxed out their 401k contributions, a glitch in ADP’s special programing didn’t stop their deductions as it should have. Fortunately, I caught it and got it corrected before the last payroll of the year but it was still embarrassing to explain to my boss and to the other senior executives why we had to take back their 401k contribution from their prior pay and why on their next pay, they would see additional taxes withheld.
Even with outsourcing for ACA and benefits administration, it is still the small company owners and the first line HR benefits and PR folks who have to provide the critical information and do much of the day to day “heavy lifting” and who ultimately bear the burden of providing clean and accurate information to the outsourcing company and who ultimately are responsible for any filings.
And as to ACA, our implementation with ADP was a nightmare. We signed up early but couldn’t get a hold of anyone from the ACA implementation team for many months, in fact we didn’t hear from then until late November, and then the first 3 batches of our test 1095’s was all wrong. The only good thing was that the IRS extended the deadline for distributing and filing the ACA forms.
But then part of the problem was because the government, the IRS, didn’t finalize nor clarify the reporting rules and regulations until a few months before the end of the year.
And ADP wasn’t the only provider who was struggling with it and even our benefits consulting firm was perplexed as to a lot of our questions, especially when it came to more complex issues like a part-time employee moving to full time mid-year and visa versa, how to handle someone who left the company but was re-hired during the calendar year and how to handle employees who worked flexible and temporary schedules or for seasonal interns (determining if they met the 30-hour threshold and how they needed to be reported on the 1095’s, if we needed to offer them benefits or not).
At least at my company, we had a knowledgeable and experienced Benefits Manager and myself with my many years of experience in corporate payroll and HR and HRIS management and an HR Director, who could dedicate ourselves and put in the extra time to make sure it was done correctly. And I had to rely on my payroll admin to take up some of my duties during this time when I had to put in extra time and effort on ACA compliance issues.
But at many much smaller companies where you have a single person, a bookkeeper/office manager/benefits/secretary/receptionist type role but not someone necessarily with a lot of deep knowledge nor the time (and bless those folks - they often have a tough enough job as it is); depending on companies like ADP or on outsourcing for benefits administration can be a nightmare. You really have to trust that 1) the company’s internal person has the PR and benefits knowledge to know how to keep accurate records, what information to provide to the consultants and how it should be done and 2) that the outsourcing company does also.
And oh the stories I could tell you about the incompetent consultants I’ve had to deal with over the years, and of incompetent CPA firms and of the degreed accounting folks - people with MBA’s who couldn’t even do even the simplest of journal entries and didn’t have the first clue as to payroll or payroll taxes. Heck I’ve even had HR directors who are pretty clueless on PR compliance.
My first exposure to PR was when I was a teenager (mid 70’s) helping my SIL who did bookkeeping for a small construction company. Back then PR was done on one-write ledger sheets and with an adding machine, taxes were deducted based on a paper schedules and a check was cut either by hand or with an encoding machine. It was all much simpler back then but not so much anymore, even for small companies.
Remove the federal pre-emption and make it illegal granting the replaced American workers a right to sue civilly for treble damages, counsel fees and all expenses of litigation. Watch how quickly the practice will end.
Sadly, I agree with your understanding of Cruz.
English. Obis many Mexicans still speak Spanish.
Some of the posts on here sound as bad as the left. Again I say that too much government is the problem. Companies are like people. They strive to live and grow—even to make a profit—and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. I don’t think it’s a conservative value to tell companies how much profit is fair.
Our government creates all sorts of market distortions in so many different ways, and then some of us blame the companies? I’m not saying companies are pure of heart. Some of them use government to carve out special advantages, but that is the fault of us Americans who allow our government to grow into so many areas where it has no business in the interest of fairness or whatever.
Any company that doesn’t play the same game of trying to find a way through the byzantine mess of rules and regulations our federal government creates, including H-1Bs, is at a distinct disadvantage, and going out of business by losing money doesn’t take care of American employees any better.
Oh, but these companies make too much money, some on this forum might say. Profit is not immoral! It pays to expand the business and reward investors who assume the risk.
Honestly, some of you posters should move to Venezuala.
It's not OK with me. And how does it violate H-1B visa laws?
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