Facebook:
"Fire
Americans”
“The industry also
hopes to get more from the deal by working to remove some regulatory
restrictions in the proposal, including on hiring foreign workers
and firing Americans.” NY
Times
Remember
that the H-1B visa program was
designed in 1989 to depress US wages for
tech firms and the National Science Foundation (NSF) said that this
would distort the market, turn U.S. citizens away from science and
math,yet we still graduate twice as many STEM students as the
industry will hire, hundreds of thousandsare out of work, and still Facebook will
not hire US engineers, and Microsft allows H-1B visa holders to
choose which Americans are laid off.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/06/tech-lobby-pushes-for-tweaks-to-immigration-bill/
Tech
Lobby Pushes for Tweaks to Immigration Bill
By SOMINI
SENGUPTA
“Lobbyists for the technology industry, having gained much of their wish list in the immigration bill drafted in the Senate, are now pushing to modify language they consider onerous.
“The Senate bill, which is scheduled for markup in the Judiciary Committee on Thursday[9 May], would allow Silicon Valley companies to bring in many more foreign computer specialists on temporary work visas through a program known as H-1B. The bill also places restrictions on how companies can hire and fire employees, which the industry’s representatives in Washington are trying to massage.
“For one, the industry is worried about a provision, inserted by some Senate Democrats, that would allow companies to hire a foreigner only if “an equally qualified American” is not available. The draft allows the Department of Labor to scrutinize hiring decisions, which the industry calls undue interference.
“The bill also contains language that compels companies to promise not to lay off American workers within three months of hiring foreign guest workers. Additionally, if a company like I.B.M. places a foreign worker at a client company’s site for a short-term project, the bill also requires the bank to prove it did not displace an American worker in the process.
“The advertising blitz reflects the sophisticated lobbying campaign being waged by technology companies and their executives.
“They have managed to secure much of what they want in the landmark immigration bill now pending in Congress, provisions that would allow them to fill thousands of vacant jobs with foreign engineers. At the same time, they have openly encouraged lawmakers to make it harder for consulting companies in India and elsewhere to provide foreign workers temporarily to this country.
“Those deals were worked out through what Senate negotiators acknowledged was extraordinary access by American technology companies to staff members who drafted the bill. The companies often learned about detailed provisions even before all the members of the so-called Gang of Eight senators who worked out the package were informed.
“We are very pleased with the progress and happy with what’s in the bill,” said Peter J. Muller, a former House aide who now works as the director of government relations at Intel. “It addresses many of the issues we’ve been advocating for years.”
Now, along with other industry heavyweights, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the technology companies are trying to make sure the law gets passed — which explains the political-style television advertising campaign, sponsored by a group that has revealed no details about how much money it gets from its individual supporters.
The industry also hopes to get more from the deal by working to remove some regulatory restrictions in the proposal, including on hiring foreign workers and firing Americans.
Three weeks later, Artech Information Systems, a staffing firm, offered the product manager a three-month contract at Microsoft for what was essentially the same job she had left. The pay was $32 an hour, half her old salary.
Case 3 How to underpay H-1B workers; call them “beginning level”.
http://www.programmersguild.org/archives/howtounderpay.htm
In 2002, Bank of America replaced in-house programmers, earning salaries $70,000-$90,000, with H-1B workers they said were Beginning Level. Do you trust a bank that uses beginning level workers to program software to handle your accounts? In order to receive severance pay, the then current employees had to train their replacements.
“The Department of Labor provides an additional service to assist employers to depress wages in their on-line LCA system. There, employers can get a prevailing wage for Level 1 ("Beginning level employees") workers and Level 2 ("Fully competent employees") workers, which in this example are $41,246 and $69,618 respectively. So now the employer claims the H-1B workers are "Beginning level employees" and uses the lower wage as the prevailing wage.”
Dr. Norman Matloff, UC Davis:
Case 7 Kirk Doran, an economist at the University of Notre Dame
"It is
extraordinarily unlikely for a severe shortage to happen in a way
that doesn't result in very large wage increases," said Kirk
Doran, an economist at the University of Notre Dame who studies
immigration and labor.
"We know what a labor shortage looks like: there should be both much lower unemployment than other professions and much higher wage growth. If either of these are not present, then I don't buy the shortage hypothesis."
Case 8 Do you think the 28-year-old inventor of an electronic hula hoop that is already losing market share, but has made him $13 billion, should also get to make immigration decisions that will cut your pay? He could not even get his own stock price set so that investors did not immediately lose money.
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/03/hed-facebook-founder-mark-zuckerberg-eyes-dc-push-89245.html#ixzz2OYqiE2Im
“Lobbyists for the technology industry, having gained much of their wish list in the immigration bill drafted in the Senate, are now pushing to modify language they consider onerous.
“The Senate bill, which is scheduled for markup in the Judiciary Committee on Thursday[9 May], would allow Silicon Valley companies to bring in many more foreign computer specialists on temporary work visas through a program known as H-1B. The bill also places restrictions on how companies can hire and fire employees, which the industry’s representatives in Washington are trying to massage.
“For one, the industry is worried about a provision, inserted by some Senate Democrats, that would allow companies to hire a foreigner only if “an equally qualified American” is not available. The draft allows the Department of Labor to scrutinize hiring decisions, which the industry calls undue interference.
“The bill also contains language that compels companies to promise not to lay off American workers within three months of hiring foreign guest workers. Additionally, if a company like I.B.M. places a foreign worker at a client company’s site for a short-term project, the bill also requires the bank to prove it did not displace an American worker in the process.
“Lobbyists
for Silicon Valley say those provisions are unworkable. They hope to
persuade lawmakers to tweak the language to their advantage, even as
they continue to aggressively lobby for the passage of the overall
immigration package.”
Since 2004
foreign IT engineers have been the MAJORITY in the USA and there
have been fewer jobs open to US citizens each year. Some
organizations like Fannie,Mae, Homeland Security, and Facebook hire
almost no American citizen engineers. We are clearly facing the loss
of high technology as an American industry. You can't just sell it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2h013/05/05/us/politics/tech-firms-take-lead-in-lobbying-on-immigration.html?ref=sominisenguppta&_r=0
Latesttt
Product From Tech Firms: An Immigration Bill
By ERIC
LIPTON and SOMINI
SENGUPTA
“The advertising blitz reflects the sophisticated lobbying campaign being waged by technology companies and their executives.
“They have managed to secure much of what they want in the landmark immigration bill now pending in Congress, provisions that would allow them to fill thousands of vacant jobs with foreign engineers. At the same time, they have openly encouraged lawmakers to make it harder for consulting companies in India and elsewhere to provide foreign workers temporarily to this country.
“Those deals were worked out through what Senate negotiators acknowledged was extraordinary access by American technology companies to staff members who drafted the bill. The companies often learned about detailed provisions even before all the members of the so-called Gang of Eight senators who worked out the package were informed.
“We are very pleased with the progress and happy with what’s in the bill,” said Peter J. Muller, a former House aide who now works as the director of government relations at Intel. “It addresses many of the issues we’ve been advocating for years.”
Now, along with other industry heavyweights, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the technology companies are trying to make sure the law gets passed — which explains the political-style television advertising campaign, sponsored by a group that has revealed no details about how much money it gets from its individual supporters.
The industry also hopes to get more from the deal by working to remove some regulatory restrictions in the proposal, including on hiring foreign workers and firing Americans.
The
profound transition under way inside Silicon Valley companies is
illustrated by their lobbying disclosure reports filed in Congress.
Facebook’s lobbying
budget swelled from $351,000 in 2010 to $2.45 million in the
first three months of this year, while Google
spent a record $18 million last year.
The
inconvenient facts that Congress ignores.
Case
1 2001 California
CPA magazine article by Laurie Mason
(This article still exists, but access is limited to members of Calcpa. )
(This article still exists, but access is limited to members of Calcpa. )
"A year ago Dinesh Ghandi, with a
master's degree in computer science and six years of experience as a
programmer went looking for job in the high tech industry. He posted
his resume on various job Web sites. “To be frank, I got a lot of
responses” says, Ghandi, 33. No surprise there, at the time the
computer industry was begging for skilled programmers.
"The only thing that seemed to stand
between Ghandi and his dream job, was his American citizenship. “I
look like and H-1B person, and they called me because of my name”
the native of India explains, “Then they asked me 'What is your
status?' and I said, 'I am an American citizen.'” Once the
companies learned that , he said the stopped calling. “It made me
frustrated because I went through all the interviews, and then my
final citizenship status comes into the picture.”
Case
2 Seattle Times May
4, 2013
...Erickson,
who graduated with a 3.52 GPA, has applied for more than 150 jobs,
several of them at Microsoft. In February, he finally landed a job he
enjoys as project manager for a Web-development company. But it’s
only part time...A former Microsoft product manager was one of 1,400
people cut from the payroll in January 2009 as part of Microsoft’s
first-ever company wide layoffs in the recession. The supervisors who
eliminated her position were here on visas, as were two recent hires
in her work group who dodged the downsizing.
Three weeks later, Artech Information Systems, a staffing firm, offered the product manager a three-month contract at Microsoft for what was essentially the same job she had left. The pay was $32 an hour, half her old salary.
Case 3 How to underpay H-1B workers; call them “beginning level”.
http://www.programmersguild.org/archives/howtounderpay.htm
In 2002, Bank of America replaced in-house programmers, earning salaries $70,000-$90,000, with H-1B workers they said were Beginning Level. Do you trust a bank that uses beginning level workers to program software to handle your accounts? In order to receive severance pay, the then current employees had to train their replacements.
“The Department of Labor provides an additional service to assist employers to depress wages in their on-line LCA system. There, employers can get a prevailing wage for Level 1 ("Beginning level employees") workers and Level 2 ("Fully competent employees") workers, which in this example are $41,246 and $69,618 respectively. So now the employer claims the H-1B workers are "Beginning level employees" and uses the lower wage as the prevailing wage.”
Case
4 Is Walmart in the “high tech, innovation,best and brightest
industry?
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/WalmartsVsWipros.txtDr. Norman Matloff, UC Davis:
“It
turns out that Walmart is hiring, or at least asking DOL permission
to hire, a number of H-1Bs under the job title Programmer Analyst.
In fact, the firm has asked for more of them each year, 130 in the
last year shown, 2011.
“Moreover,
Walmart is using as its prevailing wage rate figures in the $50K and
even $40K range. These are well below the average starting salary of
new graduates in computer science, though as almost always is the
case, fully legal.
“Interestingly,
in this time of alleged tech labor shortage, the prevailing wage
Walmart uses for Programmer Analyst has been pretty much on a
DOWNWARD trend in the last five years.”
(if
there was a labor shortage, in a capitalist economic system, don't
the prices go up? Of course in a socialist system, you would pay with
green cards giving them access to public benefits,)
Case
5 If There’s a Gap, Blame It on the Employer
Peter
Cappelli is a professor of management and director of the Center for
Human Resources at the Wharton School and the author of "Why
Good People Can’t Get Hired: The Myth of the Skills Gap."
“Have
you tried raising wages? If you could get what you want by paying
more, the problem is just that you are cheap. The fact that I cannot
find the car I want at the price I want to pay does not constitute a
car shortage, yet a large number of employers claiming they face a
skills shortage admit that the problem is getting candidates to
accept their wage rates. If you can't find the right person for the
job, chances are you're a bad manager, and maybe a bit too cheap.”
Case
6 It doesn’t add up. The press ignore hundreds of thousands
unemployed.
http://www.cjr.org/essay/it_doesnt_add_up.php
Shah,
an Indian-born US citizen with degrees in physics and engineering,
had been laid off earlier by a computer company that was
simultaneously hiring foreign workers on temporary visas...Figures
from the National
Institutes of Health, the National
Academies, the National Science Foundation, and other sources
indicate that hundreds of thousands of STEM workers in the US are
unemployed or underemployed. But they are not organized, and their
story is being largely ignored in the debate over immigration reform.
Case 7 Kirk Doran, an economist at the University of Notre Dame
"We know what a labor shortage looks like: there should be both much lower unemployment than other professions and much higher wage growth. If either of these are not present, then I don't buy the shortage hypothesis."
Case 8 Do you think the 28-year-old inventor of an electronic hula hoop that is already losing market share, but has made him $13 billion, should also get to make immigration decisions that will cut your pay? He could not even get his own stock price set so that investors did not immediately lose money.
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/03/hed-facebook-founder-mark-zuckerberg-eyes-dc-push-89245.html#ixzz2OYqiE2Im
I am P.
Harrison Picot, I have lived in Prince William County, Virginia, for
the last 30 years. I was born in Richmond, VA, and have lived in this
area most of my life. After getting out of college, I taught in high
schools in New York City, and Alexandria, Va, for five years and then
went into the construction industry, as an estimator, contractor, and
later as a software programmer. I worked as a database administrator
for many years, first with Oracle Corporation, and last with IRS at
New Carrollton, MD, until I was displaced by a contractor using lower
cost labor, likely on H-1B visas. I am concerned about jobs and the
security of this nation in an age when technology is critical and we
are denying our own best a brightest access to the community of
technology workers on which our future security will be based.
This
is Part 3 All parts
are expanded and have live links on-line.
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