A Good Reason to Boycott Disney

musicprnt
Wed, 27 Jan 2016 14:43:19 +0000

The H1B was originally designed to allow companies to hire foreign workers who had skills not easily available in the US, I am talking things like solid state physicistc, advanced engineering degrees and the like. The rules on the H1B were pretty strict,you had to prove you tried to hire someone before using the visa, and it was required the job pay the prevailing rate.

That was changed, and today for an H1B all the person is required to have is a college degree or equivalent experience, and the looking for someone in the US first is pretty much a joke. More importantly, the salary being ‘at market’ has been left up to the company, which basically means they can pay what they want, no one checks it.

What made it worse is they allowed the H1B visa to be held by consulting firms, places like Wipro and Infosys, not to mention companies like Accenture and IBM in their consulting services. As a result, companies wishing to hire workers often can’t get an H1B, because they have been gobbled up by consulting companies.

As far as productivity goes, what that really means is cheap cost, when someone goes the H1B route they pretty much get whatever the holder wishes to pay them, and even if eventually they get a green card, they are already far behind the 8 ball. I have heard all the idiot set (usually the usual suspects who think it is their job to defend companies and bash US citizens) say that this is because foreign workers are better, they have better educations, etc, but that isn’t true in what I am talking about. I am not talking foreign graduate students who are getting advanced degrees in engineering and science, they are a small percent of H1B’s, most of the foreign workers are not the bright students from an IIT or whatnot, most of them have college degrees from universities and schools that often quite frankly are nothing more than the equivalent of 2 year Associates degree programs, basically trade schools, but I hear the gasbags in Congress telling me that these are the ‘cream of the crop’ who are ‘outdistancing’ (lazy) US students and so forth. We yell and scream about kids staying away from STEM, but this is one of the big reasons why, kids aren’t stupid, they know what is happening with those kind of jobs, so it is better to go into finance and be the person saying “send the jobs to India so we can boost the stock price”.

Technically, during the recession we had, the H1B should have been suspended, according to the rules if unemployment in those areas is above a certain level, the H1B should be suspended to give preference to US based workers, but guess what, didn’t happen. Worse, in the middle of the recession, the Obama administration proposed doubling the number of H1B’s, as part of the immigration bill (one of the few times I was grateful for the GOP stonewalling immigration bills).

And yes, those who are left after the outsourcing/insourcing often have very difficult jobs, I have been involved in outsourcing and it is a nightmare for those managing it, because you never know who you will have working on the project (the teams at the outsourcing firm are unstable, people leave, people they hire never show up), you have to deal with things like the power going out there, and also adjusting your job schedule to reflect Indian hours (or Russian or Chinese, though the bulk is in India). More importantly, you have people who might have the technical skills (key word might), but have no knowledge of the business, no understanding of how the thing will be used, so you have to pretty much tell them how to do their job down to pretty minute detail.

I can tell you that in my own area of IT, when we hire, there are very few native born candidates, most are Indian, with some Chinese or Russians, and most came in via the H1B process originally and most are making significantly less than they should be based on their experience (the other sad reality of the contract H1b guys is they flit from job to job, every 8-9 months or so, and because they are often doing drone jobs, they never really learn the skills needed to advance, very much drone work).

As someone else said, it is in some ways the tech equivalent of the day laborers they use in construction and such, it is a way to get cheap labor in something many companies see as being nothing but a cost center. If they are serious about the H1B, and also serious about trying to spur kids into going into the tech fields, the H1B should be reverted to what it is supposed to be, getting needed skills rather than being cheap labor for routine things like java programming or QA or IT network engineering, they should require advanced degrees to start with, and should tighten up the regulations on searching for US permanent residents or citizens first. More importantly, they should also outlaw where they replace US workers with H1B’s, that is supposed to be illegal as well, but the government looks the other way (if you think about it, if the H1B is for ‘needed skills’, why would replacing workers with those skills make sense).

It is globalization at its worst, which is basically the global search for the cheapest labor, and it relies on the fact that despite all the claims of how smart ‘their’ students are, countries like China and India don’t produce jobs at home, they are basically exporting jobs the way that China exports manufactured goods. It is telling that at one point some people in congress proposed cutting back the H1B program during the recession (why they had to propose it, I don’t know, since that is the law), and there were near riots in India among soon to graduate students and those wishing to come to the US, and there was a lot of anger, as if this was their right or something.My local congressman’s office, when I brought up the H1B issue, went into how this was about hiring the best in the world, etc, but they suddenly shut up when I said "if in fact we are talking the best in the world, how come they aren’t creating the next Microsoft or Google or whatnot in India?