Maybe the foreign replacements who are being trained should be required to STAY here for more than a few days. Then their cost of living would go up drastically and be on par with the American workers they are replacing. They wouldn’t be able to come in the first place.
Hard to believe companies are so short sighted as to not want loyal employees.
Seems employees in the future need to negotiate termination contracts before they even get hired. “If you lay me off to save yourself a buck, there is no way I’m training my replacement–and if I do, you’ll probably regret it.”
The entire H1B visa program has to be dismantled and reevaluated, then possibly replaced with a system that does allow employers to hire talent that is not available otherwise. These visas get snatched by consulting firms for their drones, and some small innovators cannot bring in foreign scientists with truly unique skill sets, background, and training.
The h1b program was changed more than a few years ago, and it led to what you see. Originally the H1 was for unique skills, usually it was people with advanced degrees with unique skill sets, that was changed to simply being having a degree suitable for the job, so suddenly, IT support, java programmers, QA, you name it, you started seeing a flood of overseas visa holders taking these kind of jobs, and yes, despite the hoopla, at waged well below what they would pay a native worker with the same background Worse, these H1’s are often held by consulting firms, whether traditional consulting companies like Accenture, or by the Infosys/Wipro guys. A lot of this is drone labor, this is not specialized talent, these aren’t the guys coming from schools like IIT, they are drones coming from basically the equivalent of a two year technical program. The reason for this insourcing and outsourcing is money, if they hire from the consulting firms, they aren’t paying benefits, and if they hire directly they aren’t paying them near what they would a permanent resident. Worse, many of the consulting ones are sent from job to job, 9 months here, 8 months there, and they don’t pick up knowledge of how the industry works. I have heard the morons in the government talking about getting talented labor, how there is a shortage because “americans don’t want to go into this”, the reality is a lot of the H1b “talent” is not, they are drone labor, where often others have to pretty much tell them how to do the job, then they grind through it.
It especially gets me angry when I hear politicians and such say “oh, we are getting talent that isn’t here, these are people who have gone to competitive schools, did well on international exams, etc”…if that is the case, then why are people from India for example, hiring out to companies from overseas? Why is it that most of the labor in India in the tech fields is outsourced from companies from the rest of the world.
I have seen real talent get hired via the H1B, some of the people are very skilled and it would be hard to find their skills, but much of it, despite what Microsoft and the rest claim, is wanting basically cheap labor. H1B workers can’t just walk out and get another job, they pretty much get paid what the company wants to pay them, and can be let go and sent back home at any point. I was just reading something,that said that before 2000 there was a movement out of the middle and upper classes, and the movement was upwards more than downwards, since then it has been downwards for the most part. One of the things the article pointed out (It was the NY Times I recall) was that after Nafta and then the rise of Chinese manufacturing, the claim was that this kind of trade would generate jobs in high paying industries, either things like aircraft manufacturing, or technical services, that jobs in manufacturing would be replaces by these kind of jobs…except guess what, many of those jobs went overseas, too, the ‘job transfer’ they promised didnt happen. For example, when Boeing builds planes for India and China, they often have to build many of the components and such locally.
The same trend of outsourcing has hit other areas. Lawyers, for example, found themselves outsourced when legal research was sent overseas. CPA’s doing tax returns and the like saw their jobs sent to places like India, where people with American CPA’s could do the work a lot cheaper. In drugs, most of the components are made in India, and even the routine research has been outsourced there. In investment banking and in the financial industry, a lot of the financial research has been outsourced to India especially, these used to provide more than a few decent paying jobs.
It is one of the reasons that Trump for example is not just getting support from the working class, a lot of more liberal, upscale people, aware of the drain of white collar jobs through outsourcing and insourcing via H1B’s and the like, support him for talking about China and India and what they have helped do to the US economy.
Stories like this make me sick.
Americans need to start giving a hoot about fellow Americans and about this country in general. We’re hemorrhaging. Slowly but surely.
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
Well, even that was a bit too close to the line. Let’s keep politics out of the discussion, please.
The issue with currency manipulation is that we have ourselves to blame. We HAVE to sell billions of dollars of bonds to support the federal debt. If we got our financial house – and budget – in order, the bond sales would plummet, and the foreign governments would have less ‘control.’
Currency differences are not the only reason, the other factor is that China and such are not paying first world wages, pure and simple. Yes, a strong dollar helps the Chinese, for example, but that isn’t the only factor. China also plays around with the value of the currency (in a sense, they "print more money’), they manipulate money markets as well, to keep their currency cheaper than it should be. There is no doubt China buying US bonds poses problems, it is why the US may not defend itself the way it should with Chinese hacking or with industrial espionage, it is why we may not press unfair trade complaints, afraid of retaliation. However, the total picture is complex, and in many cases the situation has a lot to do with being able to cut costs rapidly and boost profits without thinking of consequences as much as the other factors.