Posted on 12/26/2002 9:38:29 AM PST by FlyingA
With over 16 million people unemployed, I guess you're correct that a few hundred thousand is just a drop in the bucket.
In my opinion, there is not and has not been any labor shortage, in any field, which has been used to justify the H1B program. H1B workers I have seen possess no advanced skills unavailable among the American work force, and they require continuing on-the-job, training just as any American hiree.
As to whether the economy is, indeed, "in shreds", I have two thoughts:
I work at an organization that has used H1B workers for several years. The occupations are not limited to IT, and we in fact do not hire H1B's into IT very often. My organization has upwards of 10,000 employees. Of those, maybe 25-30 are H1Bs, if that many.
An organization of this size is the poster-user for H1B. It is typically the primary employer or at least one of the largest in its community. It recruits nationally, but receives international resumes fairly regularly. The international candidates requiring sponsorship are rejected without contact 99.99% of the time. Reason? H1B hiring is a gigantic pain in the ass. You must demonstrate recruitment efforts to the federal government through copies of advertisements, their dates, the names of all respondents to ads (qualified or not), and reason for rejection. This takes time. It is not convenient, and saves no one any money. And in the end, you must pay the H1B the equitable amount compared to the worker beside him or her.
There was/is NO H1B conspiracy. It can be useful, but it is not taking thousands of jobs away from Americans.
One of my all time favorites!
Not true, the new economy debate started in 1997 with data from 1996 and persists...."In 1997, the debate on Productivity Growth in the 1990s took a new twist as data for 1996 and 1997 appeared to show a significant increase in the rate of productivity growth."(1, 2, 3, 4, 5).
S 1723, The American Competitiveness Act, sponsored by Sen. Spencer Abraham (R-MI).
S 1878, High Tech Immigration and United States Worker Protection Act, sponsored by Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA).
HR 3736, Workforce Improvement and Protection Act of 1998, sponsored by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX).
Overview. S 1723 passed the Senate on May 18, 1998. On September 24, the House passed a compromise version endorsed by House and Senate negotiators, and belatedly, by President Clinton. The bill was passed as a part of the Omnibus Appropriations Bill in October 1999, and signed by Clinton.(1)
As you know, one needs a sponsor for H1B, which means that the employers wanted to hire and had a shortage.
That would have been true had the appropriate protections been in place rather than allowing their use as a reorganizing tool and growth tool by companies looking to expand while showing no profitability, or replace older workers without retraining.
Further, you somehow equate H1B with IT. This is false: many in the medical field and the academe are hired wih H1B as well.
I never mentioned IT.
You are confusing the stock prices with profitability of the underlying company.
No I'm not, but please, if you have an example of a list of companies that took advantage of the H1-B progarm and show profitable growth (with recently ammended returns) as a result, I would like to see it.
You misunderstand the economic notion of labor and commodity. There is no such commodity as "sugar:" there is sugar in a particular point in space and at a particular point in time, packages in a bag of a particular size. Change one of these and you have different sugar.
The same is true for labor: it's not "persons" but those with a particular skill level willing to work at a particular price (wage). There was a shotage of those willing to work at wages offered to foreigners.
You can deduce it also form the fact: the market has spoken. If a company goes through the trouble of sponsorign H1B, it means it cannot fill that slot otherwise.
So they hired them to save money. Exactly. Why hire a substitute of what you need?
PLease see #30.
But H1B was available long before that.
No I'm not, You are. A company may be very profitable yet its stock afforded low P/E because of perceptions of future events, and conversely. IN addition, this P/E depends on the opportunities forgone in other areas. The functioning of the company is entirely unrelated to these, except for the obvious fact that the cost of borrowing depends on the stock price.
but please, if you have an example of a list of companies that took advantage of the H1-B progarm and show profitable growth (with recently ammended returns) as a result, I would like to see it. I tries to explain that the question you pose has no anser because it is ill-constructed: to confirm or refute the hypthesis being discussed one has to look not at the profitability but only that portion of it that resulted from the use of H1B.
Glad you enjoyed it.
Much of what happened in the 1990s also happened in the 1980s. Here's hoping we don't do it again.
Julia Homer, CFO Magazine October 01, 2002
I don't buy certain generics at the store, because of inferior quality. The companies were not offering positions at those wages before cheap H1b workers. The salaries are artificially low -- it's like price dumping in the market.
I think your reasoning that they are only sponsoring H1b's because they have not been able to fill the job otherwise needs some kind of statistical support. Upper management sees cheap labor, and they will do anything to get it. This isn't the market.
There was an interesting article the other day -- i think it was posted here -- about the only failing with the free market system is that people don't make the right choices.
"Rubin, secretary of the Treasury from 1995 to 1999, is no longer in government. He is a director of the Citigroup financial conglomerate. Rubin is the ne plus ultra of eminent Clintonians. Indeed, after Alan Greenspan, he is the most respected figure in international financial markets.
"The casual reader of the business press might assume that Rubin, whose firm is a major lender to Enron, asked Fisher for the same thing that Kenneth Lay asked Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill for: a bailout, some form of government financing. Not so — the request was both more subtle and potentially more damaging to the good health of America's markets. What Rubin asked for, by all accounts, was for Fisher to call the debt rating agencies and ask them to find an "alternative" to a downgrade of Enron's securities. (As a lender, Citigroup was bound to be injured by a downgrade.)
"This was an astounding request. The rating agencies are meant to be neutral arbiters of the financial strength of the entities they rate. The request Rubin made of Fisher was akin to the owner of a team faced with playoff elimination calling the league commissioner and asking him to see if he can get the referees to call the next game so that the owner's team doesn't lose. This request was coming from the man who personified the Clinton-era financial establishment. Rubin reportedly prefaced his request to Fisher with the phrase, "This may not be the best idea, but..." Students of Watergate will recall that Richard Nixon once instructed his subordinates in how to gather hush money for the Watergate burglars, then ended the explanation with the phrase, "But it would be wrong." Nixon later pointed to that sentence as evidence of his innocence. Plus ca change."*
"Only last week, as the bill was being pushed through a congressional conference committee, Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers rushed back from a trip to China to huddle with lobbyists representing Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and other financial giants. The meeting was closed to the media and public, but one participant told the New York Times that Summers lectured the lobbyists on how to spin this bill so it appears to be in the public interest. "He said it would be very unfortunate if any financial institution were to suggest that they do not see the broad public purpose of this legislation," the lobbyist reported.
"Also last week, it was announced that Robert E. Rubin, the man who handpicked Summers to replace him as secretary of the Treasury, will take a position as co-chairman of Citigroup, which lobbied heavily for this legislation, as did Goldman Sachs, Rubin's company before joining the Clinton administration.
"Citigroup was formed last year in a $ 37.4 billion merger of Citicorp bank and the Travelers Group insurance company, which was tentatively approved on a two-year waiver from existing law forbidding the bank from selling insurance. Under the new law, Citigroup will be made fully legit. This legislation was dead until Rubin, as Treasury secretary, worked out a crucial compromise with Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan last February that allowed the bill to move ahead in Congress.
"Federal law prohibits government officials from lobbying their former agencies for a year after leaving their government positions. The Clinton administration has extended that to two years. But Rubin has admitted in interviews that he pushed for this bill's passage in the months after resigning from the Cabinet. Why is no one calling him on that?" *
Not the H1B program that went into effect in 1999 and persists today. If it was, why the new law in 1999?
Actually, no. Usually, an H1B is working alongside several US citizens. The company is not replacing US workers, it is supplementing them. Because of this, the labor costs are the same, as mandated by law. Example: if you pay a programmer with 5 years experience $40/hour, you must pay the H1B with the same experience the same wage.
I think your reasoning that they are only sponsoring H1b's because they have not been able to fill the job otherwise needs some kind of statistical support.
Though not "statistical", the raw data is available through the Dept. of Labor and the INS. As I noted in a previous post, the documentation requirements for hiring H1B's are extensive, and detailed. A simple FOIA request can get you all the info you'd like.
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