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

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

#101

Post by douche »

Idontreddit wrote: post #27
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…

Assuming the off-shore worker is 10% as effective as the on-shore worker, which, I'll be blunt, I'm not so sure about considering the anecdata I've amassed over the years working with some of these outsourcing body shops, like Tata, HCL, Cognizant, Infosys, etc.

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

#102

Post by douche »

xenadu02 wrote: post #75
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…

One of the best developers I've ever worked with is here on an H1B. He's better than 95% of all the US Software Engineers I've ever worked with. He runs an open source project in his spare time and gives talks to educate the community. He's the kind of person the visa is for and he is paid appropriately for a senior engineer (not a cheap import). The problem is the mostly Indian outsourcing companies. They ballot-stu…

That low salary figure must be based off of homing them on some non-SF/Seattle/Austin/NYC city. There are a lot of places in the US where making 60-70k individually puts you into the top 5-10% of the populace.

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

#103

Post by niftich »

johndubchak wrote: post #35
revelation wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the idea was 0% H-1B labor? You can't replace an American job with H-1B? The requirements seem very stringent in writing but apparently utterly useless and ineffective in practice, or clearly both executives for Abott and Wipro would be facing criminal prosecution. You should not be able to circumvent the restrictions by a single layer of contract work.

>> You can't replace an American job with H-1B? The goal of the system is to use the guest worker program to augment your current workers with talent that you are unable to find and staff here in the US. The requirement is not at 40 - 60% of the cost you pay your US employees, but in skills that you cannot find or fill with US domestic workers.

These "scarce" skills and requirements are trivially gamed on a regular basis. Large numbers of positions that are eventually filled by H-1Bs don't, in truth, require skills and experience that you simply can't find domestically.

Sure, every once in a while you need a nuclear engineer or some other domain expert in a very, very narrow domain, and you may have a genuine shortage of talent. But for general-purpose IT and commodity development, these skill are not in short supply domestically if you're willing to pay market salaries.

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

#104

Post by sokoloff »

Clubber wrote: post #70
lazaroclapp wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that this is not really about offshoring. Offshoring falls under the "free movement of every form of capital and goods, except labor" that I mentioned and it is complicated for everyone involved. You get competition from labor without legal protections which can't move to places where they would have such protections, nor easily obtain them at home. We get companies that are pretty much untouchable by our legal…

Yes, H1B is a different animal than offshoring as it is much more fair to the worker. Funny that the H1B has much more regulation than offshoring. That's probably why it's more fair. Also, tech workers uses computers and do have free movement by remoting. Managers typically don't allow it. Economically, that's a heck of a lot of power. Anyway, I'm pretty content with the current status of H1B in spirit. This company…

Has anyone really faced trial for theft of a $1 candy bar? I'd imagine that turns out to be a ticket, a barring from that store, and on your way...

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

#105

Post by sokoloff »

lazaroclapp wrote: post #37
WalterBright wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not narrowly defined (as in, it is not the government preventing you from expressing a political opinion). But it does have the whiff of a coerced surrendering of one's rights. Suppose you could sign a completely unbreakable "indentured servitude" contract with another person, whereby by a specific payment now, you are required to work for them exclusively for the next 10 years in whichever capacity they so chose (as…

Such a contract would (almost surely) be barred by the 13th Amendment in the US.

The 13th Amendment language is much broader than the 1st.

"Shall [not] exist" coupled with "Congress shall have the power to enforce this article" is much broader than "Congress shall make no law..."

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

#106

Post by Clubber »

sokoloff wrote: post #104
Clubber wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, H1B is a different animal than offshoring as it is much more fair to the worker. Funny that the H1B has much more regulation than offshoring. That's probably why it's more fair. Also, tech workers uses computers and do have free movement by remoting. Managers typically don't allow it. Economically, that's a heck of a lot of power. Anyway, I'm pretty content with the current status of H1B in spirit. This company…

Has anyone really faced trial for theft of a $1 candy bar? I'd imagine that turns out to be a ticket, a barring from that store, and on your way...

Absolutely, happens all the time. If a company security team catches you, it's up to the company to press charges, but they can and they do. It includes arrest and trial. Here's an NPR story on it I found with Google.

http://www.npr.org/2012/11/15/165218744/busted-what-happens-...

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

#107

Post by VladKovac »

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…

Ceteris paribus allowing anyone in the world to take a job if the employer wants them leads to better outcomes on average. That includes the situation where America is paying for global protection and other special negotiated treaties.

Even if you wanted to specially protect American workers, it would still be more beneficial to allow anyone to take the job then use the excess GDP to make up for the lost wages of Americans. The estimate by Borjas (the most anti-immigrant economist) is that wages would drop at most 5% (IIRC) if open borders happened.

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

#108

Post by ccrush »

Why not ask the recruiter or company you are applying for if they are willing to sponsor or work with an H1B visa (pretend you are in that position) and move on if they say yes. It will be interesting to see how well these companies do when all they can hire are H1B workers. After all, they can only get so many of those visas, and there is only a 30% chance that the application will actually be approved. They do need a certain number of US workers to have a stable workforce. With that gone, all their projects will be at risk of failure. How much of this risk do you think they can keep up before they are forced to give up these H1B abuses? I say abuses because there are clearly qualified local candidates willing to work at the market rate, but they lie about the market rate and lie about not finding local candidates to hire their cheap labor. Ideally, they should have a Job ID assigned to all jobs where they are considering H1Bs and post the name, wage, and qualifications of the hired candidate if they hire an H1B candidate. That way, potential employees that were passed up can see who they were passed up for, and complain to the right people if they were unfairly skipped on for a cheaper employee with poorer qualifications just because they were cheaper or would be cheaper in the long run because they would never get a raise or benefits or unemployment or pay into social security and medicaid.

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

#109

Post by garrettgrimsley »

DrScump wrote: post #97
dominotw wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You should be able to come to this country like my ancestors did -- pass a physical and get a green card. Like show up at the airport and get a green card?

It was never that automatic in the old days. From Ellis Island, for example, over 120,000 were sent back. "New arrivals were processed quickly. In the Registry Room, Public Health Service doctors looked to see if any of them wheezed, coughed, shuffled or limped. Children were asked their names to make sure they weren't deaf or dumb. Toddlers were taken from their mothers' arms and made to walk. As the line moved forw…

>More than 120,000 immigrants were sent back to their countries of origin

That doesn't sound like a lot, given the scale of immigration. Out of how many? This sounds like a good way to flood the labor market.

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

#110

Post by brendangregg »

pm90 wrote: post #83
dclowd9901 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it a common reaction to raise pitchforks at H1-B's? I mostly feel sorry for workers on visa. They don't have the flexibility I do to change jobs if they're not happy. That would be the absolute worst for me, as someone who is always looking for a better gig.

This is a common misconception. It is a very easy process to change jobs on an H1B. The difficult part is the Green Card process, which gets reset (IANAL) and currently getting a green card takes upto 10 years, if you're from India. The problem essentially is that many of these workers either don't know that they can switch jobs, don't have the skills relevant to get another job or, in many cases, have a sort of loya…

> This is a common misconception. It is a very easy process to change jobs on an H1B.

Have you tried changing jobs on a H-1B, with an employer who wants to stop you, and who gets legal advice on how to go about doing that? It SHOULD be an easy process to change jobs.

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