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Laid-Off Americans, Required to Zip Lips on Way Out, Grow Bolder

nytimes.com

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Re: Laid-Off Americans, Required to Zip Lips on Way Out, Grow Bolder

#21

Post by DrScump »

x0x0 wrote: post #4
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #2

I'm not sure I get this - are the workers coming in to replace them actually in the USA physically? Are they staying in the USA physically? I mean is this offshoring / outsourcing or is it replacing with cheaper workers? Why can't the existing employees compete for the jobs? I mean WIPRO must have going through some pretty big pre sales workups, so who else was competing? I think what I mean is that doing this in sec…

Abbott contracted with Wipro, who appears to be performing the work locally, though Wipro claims only 20% h1b labor. Abbott tried to reduce the role of foreigners in the layoffs. Only about 20 percent of the workers brought in by Wipro would be foreigners on H-1B visas, Mr. Stoffel said, while the rest would be American workers.

I'm skeptical that there wouldn't be a single foreign Wipro staffer there on a different visa (e.g. L1).

Re: Laid-Off Americans, Required to Zip Lips on Way Out, Grow Bolder

#22

Post by udkl »

johndubchak wrote: post #20

At this point, with both Corporate abuses from American corporations and the H1-B holding companies along with the frequency with which we've seen the more expensive American work replaced with a much cheaper "guest" worker, I believe we need to ask ourselves, do we not have enough surplus American workers that are unemployed such that the H1-B program might not be necessary for a year or two until we've managed to g…

From a cursory glance with my limited knowledge, that sounds like a very naive approach and one which will not pass a vote.

The problem is that of lower skilled (not low skilled) but cheaper labour from the body shop consultancies mixed with higher skilled ones in the same H1B pool.

As someone somewhere suggested, instead of a lottery, an auction of the seats would in a sense lead to lesser pay difference between the native and outsourced worker.

This is just theory that needs to be given a deep though.

The bottomline is that the H1B serves as a competitive advantage to the US. Software, now that it is eating the world, is a very important part of the economy... and the US needs to invest in giving it's corporation whatever advantages it can w.r.t technology.

The consequence of stopping the H1B altogether would be a shortage of technical workers, leading to the rise in software expenses for companies and maybe resulting in the US & US corporation to lose their technical advantage & leading positions globally.

Re: Laid-Off Americans, Required to Zip Lips on Way Out, Grow Bolder

#23

Post by triplesec »

Worth noting the headlines of the 'related coverage':

Lawsuits Claim Disney Colluded to Replace U.S. Workers With Immigrants JAN 25, 2016;

Large Companies Game H-1B Visa Program, Costing the U.S. Jobs NOV 10, 2015;

Toys ‘R’ Us Brings Temporary Foreign Workers to U.S. to Move Jobs Overseas SEP 29, 2015;

Pink Slips at Disney. But First, Training Foreign Replacements. JUN 3, 2015

Re: Laid-Off Americans, Required to Zip Lips on Way Out, Grow Bolder

#24

Post by WalterBright »

warcher wrote: post #19

Listen, there's no point claiming the H1 situation isn't a rampant clusterfuck. Actual skilled laborers lie in limbo while busloads of cheap, disposable foreign workers are brought over to get exploited and depress domestic wages. It's a full on disaster. If you have to have temporary worker visas, fine. But don't tie them to a company. If there's a legitimate need, and they're legitimately skilled, they'll find work…

> Actual skilled laborers lie in limbo ... good help is always hard to find

Sounds contradictory.

Re: Laid-Off Americans, Required to Zip Lips on Way Out, Grow Bolder

#25

Post by Dwolb »

colordrops wrote: post #15
lazaroclapp wrote: post #9

This causes some pretty strong mixed feelings for me. On the one hand, foreign workers are already disadvantaged compared with domestic workers and H1-B caps are absurdly low. I keep failing to see why we are all supposed to open world markets to the flow of every sort of capital and goods except labor, or why someone deserves a job for being born American, rather than Indian (Note that I feel the same way when Ameri…

These Carly Fiorina-style arguments that no one has a special right to a job are ignoring a lot of context. In a world with even handed regulation and no borders, that could make sense. But that is not the world we live in. The current situation is not that trade is completely deregulated and labor is tied up in red tape. What is really happening is that there is a complex surface area of varying degrees of regulatio…

Said in another way, capital is fungible but labor is not. This means capital can flow readily to the lowest cost suppliers and workers but workers cannot flow readily to higher paying employers.

This leads to a mismatch where, temporarily, employers can capture higher-skilled workers at lower costs.

Another comment, how are anti-disparagement clauses not a violation of first amendment rights?

Re: Laid-Off Americans, Required to Zip Lips on Way Out, Grow Bolder

#26

Post by tokensimian »

kazinator wrote: post #8

> Now some of the workers who were displaced are starting to speak out, despite severance agreements prohibiting them from criticizing their former employers. You can easily reveal the facts it in a totally non-critical way. At ABC Data, workers were encouraged to collaborate with management to come up with creative solutions to streamline processes and save costs. When I realized that ABC could save money by replaci…

IANAL but suspect disparagement is defined in such a way that a corporation's attorneys could prove this type of comment caused harm to the company, and thus meets the definition.

Re: Laid-Off Americans, Required to Zip Lips on Way Out, Grow Bolder

#27

Post by Idontreddit »

warcher wrote: post #19

Listen, there's no point claiming the H1 situation isn't a rampant clusterfuck. Actual skilled laborers lie in limbo while busloads of cheap, disposable foreign workers are brought over to get exploited and depress domestic wages. It's a full on disaster. If you have to have temporary worker visas, fine. But don't tie them to a company. If there's a legitimate need, and they're legitimately skilled, they'll find work…

Wait til TTIP and TPP becomes law. Times are good now, but once hilary gets elected and these "free" trade agreements gets signed, the monied masters will immediately raise interest rates and cause a recession which will give cover for businesses to lay off a large swathe of workers ( this time its going to be IT/developers/tech workers who are going to face the brunt of it ) and offshore a lot of these jobs.

H1B is a significant problem, but so is offshoring. From a business point of view, the cost savings are too immense to ignore. If you can pay a foreigner $5K to do something an american workers does for $50K and pocket the $45K annual difference, it's a no-brainer to corporate executives. The shareholders will benefits and the C-Suite will benefit, the workers will suffer.

There is a reason why the leftist and rightist establishment are working so hard to get hilary elected. The amount of pro-Hilary propaganda on NPR, NYTimes, LATimes, etc was nearly unbearable while she was fighting against Sanders. Now that Sanders is done, I might have to stop consuming these media for the next few months.

As much as we like to pretend, there isn't two parties. There is one party ( the elite ), that control both parties to gives an illusion of choice. Even the republican establishment are trying to undermine Trump to give Hilary the presidency.

Complete protectionism/isolation isn't a good thing. But extreme liberal trade policies aren't a good thing either. Thought maybe Trump will get the nod and push policies towards the center, but there is too much money at stake for the elite so they are going to force hilary, TTIP, TPP, etc on us no matter what.

We are going to replace one corrupt chicago politician with another.

Re: Laid-Off Americans, Required to Zip Lips on Way Out, Grow Bolder

#28

Post by arjie »

WalterBright wrote: post #24
warcher wrote: post #19

Listen, there's no point claiming the H1 situation isn't a rampant clusterfuck. Actual skilled laborers lie in limbo while busloads of cheap, disposable foreign workers are brought over to get exploited and depress domestic wages. It's a full on disaster. If you have to have temporary worker visas, fine. But don't tie them to a company. If there's a legitimate need, and they're legitimately skilled, they'll find work…

> Actual skilled laborers lie in limbo ... good help is always hard to find Sounds contradictory.

Trivially non-contradictory. Consider a hypothetical situation in which all the good skilled workers are on visa statuses that do not permit work and have missed the H-1B lottery. Both things are then true.

Re: Laid-Off Americans, Required to Zip Lips on Way Out, Grow Bolder

#29

Post by WalterBright »

lazaroclapp wrote: post #9

This causes some pretty strong mixed feelings for me. On the one hand, foreign workers are already disadvantaged compared with domestic workers and H1-B caps are absurdly low. I keep failing to see why we are all supposed to open world markets to the flow of every sort of capital and goods except labor, or why someone deserves a job for being born American, rather than Indian (Note that I feel the same way when Ameri…

Accepting money in exchange for not disparaging someone is not a violation of free speech rights.

Re: Laid-Off Americans, Required to Zip Lips on Way Out, Grow Bolder

#30

Post by _audakel »

warcher wrote: post #19

Listen, there's no point claiming the H1 situation isn't a rampant clusterfuck. Actual skilled laborers lie in limbo while busloads of cheap, disposable foreign workers are brought over to get exploited and depress domestic wages. It's a full on disaster. If you have to have temporary worker visas, fine. But don't tie them to a company. If there's a legitimate need, and they're legitimately skilled, they'll find work…

> disposable foreign workers are brought over to get exploited

"exploited" is a matter of perspective. To an onlooker who has lived their whole life in a first world country, seeing people work for $x - (less-significantlyLess) [where $x is what is "typical" for the job] can be seen as bad/wrong/sad etc...

I have spent time working in very poor parts of Mexico and Manila. Crime is rampant, I feared for my life at times. Polution/open sewage made my eyes burn. By the end of my job there (helping doing on site server data migration for a financial institution) I was willing to pay/do anything to get out.

We take many things for granted that foreign workers might consider "Perks of the job". $1 has far more buying power in Manila than a place like the Bay area, but I would live in the Bay over Manila, essentially taking a wage cut.

This does not condone the wage discrepancy btwn foreign/domestic workers, but offers a potential explanation why a person would happily take an apparent "pay cut", and even be better off.

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