Hertz Is Pulling a Disney 420
New submitter wcrowe writes: Hertz is laying off over 200 IT employees, outsourcing the work to IBM India Private Limited, which has filed paperwork for H1-B visas to bring in replacements from overseas. This sounds pretty similar to what Disney did a year ago.
They don't even care about appearances anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing? (Score:5, Insightful)
How about a few hundred mil in "campaign contributions"?
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It's probably not even one hundred million. I've seen politicians take a firm stance and vote for or against legislation with only a few thousand dollars in contribution on the table.
A lot of things happen for not a lot of money,
Re:They don't even care about appearances anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought the whole point of H1-Bs was to fill jobs that they couldn't find qualified applicants for? But now they are firing (excuse me, 'laying off') the workers, then turning around and claiming they need to import people? If this doesn't get rid of the excuses for the H1-B program, NOTHING will...
I think what companies like this do is redefine the job so their current workers are "no longer qualified", then refuse to "retrain" them, then *have* to fill those positions with H1-B people 'cause, you know, they can't find qualified US workers. Moral? No. Currently, barely legal? Seems so.
Blame Congress for listening to companies clamoring for more H1-B visas. Then blame ourselves for electing those in Congress.
No longer qualified means: (Score:5, Insightful)
The current workers won't take a 50% pay cut and we can't find qualified workers for what we are now offering so we need to fill the positions with H1-B visa holding workers.
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That and the corporation = a person are at significant contributors to your political problems.
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If they are "no longer qualified" then how do you explain them having to train their replacements in most cases?
A company I worked at gave the help desk contract to an Indian contractor, which didn't have enough H1-B workers to fill out the headcount. So American employees from the old contract were kept on. Everything stayed the same for the first month with business as usual. The contractor then implemented a three shift schedule that started at 8AM, 10AM and 12PM, and the shift assignment for each worker rotated every week. All the American workers were eventually let go and replaced by H1-B workers who have no tr
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I'm afraid there are subtly different reasons for different situations. Many companies have become expert at manipulating the procedures and the rules to hire the type of personnel they want. There was a horrifying but quite straightforward video about precisely how to do this posted to Youtube some time ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
The video is about 8 years old. More of the presentation is available, but the emplo
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No, the point of H-1B is to replace high salary US employees with cheaper labor. Normally H-1Bs have to be paid the "prevailing wage" UNLESS they are paid at least $60k per year...that last part is what makes it so attractive to bean counters.
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Or just make sure that H-1B is only given to people that have the same salary level as in the US when they are in their home country. It would shorten the list of countries where the people are eligible for that visa to a quite short list essentially only make it worthwhile to offer that visa to specialists.
Re:They don't even care about appearances anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought the whole point of H1-Bs was to fill jobs that they couldn't find qualified applicants for?
That's just what they told everybody to get it in the door.
It's really about enriching companies by allowing them to undermine the labor market.
This is all about maximizing shareholder value, and fuck the people who actually live in your country ... unless they're willing to compete for wages with people from India that is.
Welcome to the race to the bottom. The only winners are the corporations.
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Why should they? What are voters going to do? Start voting based on economic policy?
This H1-B Visa stuff has got to stop. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: This H1-B Visa stuff has got to stop. (Score:5, Insightful)
Congress is doing exactly what Disney paid them to do.
Re:This H1-B Visa stuff has got to stop. (Score:5, Insightful)
The H1-B program was designed by big companies. There is no 'abuse'.
Time for congress to step back and rethink.
First, you have to elect one that would do that. It simply ain't gonna happen with the bunch that is always reelected. Every single election brings an opportunity to completely purge the House. If it doesn't get done, I cannot sympathize. Sweep 'em all out!
Down with Hertz (Score:5, Funny)
This sort of thing is happening at too high a frequency.
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Thanx for the chuckle.
Re:Down with Hertz (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, it's a bad sine for the local economy.
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This discussion has gone off on a tangent.
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Thank your republican Congress... (Score:3)
And the Democrats as well....
All of those assholes in washington keep allowing this to happen. Until we get representation for the people and not the corporations, it will only get worse.
Re:Thank your republican Congress... (Score:4, Insightful)
You gotta vote for it. A 95% reelection rate is a reflection of voters who don't give a damn or are corrupt themselves, not the corporations.
Voting for Democrats has consequences (Score:2)
Or for Republicans, for that matter.
It does not matter how you vote, but every time elected are the clowns who promise free stuff (be it Obamacare, free education, free phones, free house, free security), that free stuff needs to be taken in the form of taxes, fees or higher fees from artificial monopolies, from somebody.
Sooner or later those evil entrepreneurs will re-run the numbers and will pluck the plug.
The cries of dissatisfaction for migrating the jobs are only from the ignorant ones. All large corpo
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Haven't you noticed that when you call Citi, Microsoft, or HP, for support, your representative "Jessica" after some questions tells about nice weather in Jaipur, and lovely "Ben" is from Bangalore working his first hour on his shift.
And, you see, I don't have a problem with this.
If I want to outsource work to people working overseas (in environments with a lower cost of living) and I'm willing to put up with the hassles of dealing with people on the other side of the planet, that's a legitimate choice for a company to make. If I call phone support, I'm looking to get assistance with a problem and if they can help me, it doesn't matter if they're in sunny California or rainy Manila.
Where I have an issue is that the jobs aren't moving--
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Perhaps Obamacare became affordable for a small percentage, but for my business it is a significant and incremental expense. Expenses are shared by both the employer and by employee. Employees have considerably higher out-of pocket expenses. So when you say that nobody said that ACA will be free, then spend some time and find that impersonator in suite who said that ACA will cost cheaper than my cable ($30 per month).
My business, has made plans to expand and to create jobs in India and Argentina. At the sam
Clinton vs Sanders (Score:5, Insightful)
Clinton wants to raise the cap and allow more stories like this to happen.
This isn't just a Republican/Democrat debate, it's a more complex split.
Drat, that won't work (Score:2)
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Either of them would have to work with a Republican Congress to get anything done. Who thinks one of them can? Which one?
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Raise the salaries and require the company to pay for an American citizen to train. That was the proposal in the UK, but it got watered down to nothing.
"Falling Down" (Score:2)
Boycott Hertz. (Score:3)
Every American IT worker should boycott Hertz in solidarity and trash them online whenever possible.
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Hertz is already doing pretty bad. Uber and Lyft are a huge problem for the rental car companies. And Hertz in particular has accounting irregularities [wsj.com]. They're going to have to redo the last 5 years of their financials.
Their only saving grace is that car rental has become an oligopoly [thetruthaboutcars.com]. The Obama Administration allowed Avis to merge with Budget and Hertz to merge with Dollar/Thrifty. Avis also bought Zipcar. The other company in the 3-way oligopoly is Enterprise/National. Car rental pricing has been a
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Slight mistake in the article (Score:3)
The article has some small, honest mistakes. The paragraphs:
Hertz is trying to improve its IT operations. It hired a new CIO last year with experience in the car rental industry, Tyler Best.
The firm seeks a "transformative IT agenda," said Hertz CEO John Tague, in a conference call with analysts last year, according to a transcript at Seeking Alpha.
Tom Kennedy, Hertz CFO, told analysts in an earning call last year that "we have 1,500 people in the back office, which is quite double what it should be. Our call centers are probably double what they should be," according to the Seeking Alpha transcript. He said the firm's IT spend is over $400 million a year.
should actually read
Hertz is sacrificing customer service for short-term profits. It hired a new CIO last year with experience in the car rental industry, Tyler Best.
The firm seeks a "seppuku IT agenda," said Hertz CEO John Tague, in a conference call with analysts last year, according to a transcript at Seeking Alpha.
Tom Kennedy, Hertz CFO, told analysts in an earning call last year that "we have 1,500 people in the back office. We can reduce that by 750 people by eliminating time spent actually doing things. We need to completely change that to people filling out forms to get IBM to do things for us vastly slower and for vastly higher costs. Ideally, once this is done, our change control costs will drop because nothing will ever get done. Our call centers are probably double what they should be -- having enough staff to serve customers is so 1990," according to the Seeking Alpha transcript. He said the firm's IT spend is over $400 million a year. "Tyler and I should be able to get at least a few million of that as a kickback from IBM, once we're parachuted out for destroying the company."
Free and Fair Trade = More Jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
I realize this is a News for Nerds site, and many nerds fear losing their jobs in the short term to places like India. But 15 years ago /. used to have a lot more vocal free trade thinkers. The concept is that India gets richer, China gets richer, and that leads to peace and more net jobs (for example, Hollywood movies earn much higher international sales, USA chicken and corn exports go through the roof, Buick triples its exports). If this makes Hertz rentals cheaper, that income goes to something else in the USA, probably.
I explain it to my kids this way. Your cell phone was assembled by Taiwanese owned companies in China. That alone 1) reduces chance of war between China and Taiwan, and 2) reduces the cost of your cell phone by 400%, so 3) Chinese people can now afford to buy the cell phones, and 4) the cost of the cell phone falls another 400% because of scale of manufacture (as Chinese can now afford them). Would you rather live in a USA where the cell phones are assembled in California and cost $8000 and the Chinese are working in rice fields? Sacrificing the 1000 California assembly line jobs creates about 10,000 Chinese jobs (from the increased production due to cheaper phones) and creates programming jobs for cell phones - in California.
The same people who got alarmed by outsourced phone assembly jobs now express alarm about the programming jobs. And they sound like the same people who were alarmed in the 1970s when Hertz started buying more Japanese cars, so the cost of cars went down and the quality came up and Japan became wealthy and peaceful and eventually opened Toyota and Honda factories in the USA.
Trump says China and Mexico stole your jobs, Bernie says corporations sent your jobs to China and Mexico. They are both old enough to remember how utterly stupid the anti-Japanese-car kerfluffle turned out to be, shame on both.
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reduces the cost of your cell phone by 400%
Marvelous. When can I expect their check?
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Yeah. More jobs. Just not for you, or your kids.
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You missed the elephant in the room. What maintains peace? Among other things, a populace who is otherwise engaged in things that keep them from thinking about war. Namely, having a job, food on the table, a home, and the levels of property and prosperity that their particular culture or society has decided are normal.
For Americans, this is something like mom and dad both educated and employed in good jobs with decent benefits, and they own a house in the suburbs stocked with the latest gadgets and plenty
Okay, I'll bite (Score:2)
The concept is that India gets richer, China gets richer, and that leads to peace and more net jobs (for example, Hollywood movies earn much higher international sales
Okay, I'll bite.
Economists tout free trade as benefiting everyone because of rationalizations and predictions. There's no strict math involved, and it is based on flawed assumptions.
In the case of recent outsourcing, two decades ago the populists pointed out that domestic salaries would stay flat or go down.
Economists agreed, but pointed out that because the imported goods would be much cheaper, your purchasing power would actually go up.
And now we see that this actually happened: salaries have largely stag
Economics challenge (Score:2)
Economists tout free trade as benefiting everyone because of rationalizations and predictions. There's no strict math involved, and it is based on flawed assumptions.
I predict that economists will get their dander up and respond with "Nuh-uh!", so here's a challenge.
Without appealing to the argument of "current school of thought holds that...", answer the following questions:
1) What is the right formula for calculating inflation?
2) What's the right value of inflation to have?
3) How important is it to hit this value exactly (ie - is it catastrophic or minor to be off by a percent?)
If you say you can't give a numerical value because "it depends", or "it's complicated", th
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To me there's a difference between outsourcing and what we see here.
I don't have a problem with outsourcing. Sending work to India, China, Cleveland, or places with a lower cost of living where you don't have to pay people quite so much to get a job done is perfectly legitimate. Heck, IBM used to have lots of R&D-type offices in inexpensive places. This way they didn't have to pay people a lot of money but those employees could buy a nice house in that inexpensive area. There are advantages to doing
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The global free market equalises. If you've got a region of very high wages, and a region of very low wages, and you allow jobs to suddenly travel freely - then soon trade occurs and the market starts to correct the discrepancy. This is a great thing from the perspective of all mankind as a collective - but it is not so great if you happen to live in one of those regions of very high wages and find your job has relocated to Bangladesh.
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It might help if the Obama Administration hadn't allowed most of the competing rental car companies to merge, creating an oligopoly that keeps prices high [thetruthaboutcars.com].
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If he'd blocked it (assuming he even can) you'd be complaining about him interfering with the market.
Is there anyone left on /. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm curious. Not too long ago when a story like this hit all the posts chimed in about how they'd just leave and go to another better paying company that doesn't do this stuff. Nobody thought it would even catch up with them and they all thought they were irreplaceable. Me being me I knew sooner or later they'd get around to everybody except a few MIT geniuses (who have better things to do than bitch on
Basically, I think the
Can someone clarify this? (Score:2)
I thought it was illegal to replace workers for a specified period of time after a layoff. For example, If I lay off Joan the Accountant, I can't hire another accountant to take her place for a fixed period unless I specifically offer the job back to Joan first.
Is my understanding of labor law incorrect?
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I'm sure there are many lawyers making sure this works - but at a guess, those workers weren't actually replaced. Their job was instead outsourced to another company, that hired new workers on H1-B visas. Different company, different contract.
It's not uncommon. You should see the tangle that is Ark Experience, the creationist theme park - they've structured it in a manner that might be termed 'tax efficient.' Employees are actually under contract with a church in order to avoid state non-discrimination laws
Make IT a real profession (Score:4, Insightful)
People are arguing this as if it's a political football and furcrissakes turning it into capitalism-vs-communism.
It's about trade vs profession.
This isn't a serious problem with doctors, dentists, lawyers, accountants, or teachers. Why? They're real professions, licensed by the local state. This isn't an inherent barrier to foreigners - if they meet the qualifications, it's a fraction of a year's effort and pay to get certified - but it's a huge barrier to the underqualified.
The hirers here are hoping that (a) the new-hires can pick it up well enough that with a few extra staff (and still cheaper) they can keep up production and (b) that the cracks won't show until they're on to their next promotion.
IT needs to be a Real Profession for about six reasons, but as a side-effect, it would end this continual pressure downward on the salaries of everybody in the industry by various efforts to dilute the talent pool with poorly-qualified competitors. Hiring kids away from college is another.
Just about anybody used to be able to hang out a shingle and be a dentist or doctor; engineering was a trade you picked up on the job working under a builder. Anybody want to go back to that? If not, support professionalising IT.
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Medicine is full of foreigners who manage to get some kind of accreditation to practice in the US. I've been to urgent care offices in Minnesota and had doctors with accents so thick I could hardly understand them. Obviously they are here and working the Wal Mart of medicine because they are cheaper than some American educated doctor.
And what you're really asking is for is trade unionism in IT, because that's what licensed professional associations end up being without being called trade unions. They use
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a) You haven't been to a hospital recently. I randomly googled lists of doctors' names: http://www.healthgrades.com/ho... [healthgrades.com] It is hard for foreign doctors to get accredited though, often they will have to take courses for US-specific stuff.
b) Many people don't like life-event specialists that aren't 'similar' to themselves. Therefore, a lot of doctors etc. will remain natives. IT professionals are considered to be the plumbers of electronics, not the doctors.
You're right though, this is very short term thinki
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Yes, it's possible to chip away at the value of a profession, laws that allow "peers accredited by other countries" to do, say, radiology over the internet from Chennai.
But the professional organizations double as unions of a sort. They are dedicated to protecting the public, not their members. (Most frequent question at the professional engineer's association where I live, "What do I get for my dues?" A: "Nothing. We require you to pay them so we can protect the public from bad engineers.")...but in th
Obligatory xk.. errrrr...... Dilbert (Score:2)
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/eb/20/e3/eb20e3369cdd65c9bf54736294b98fc2.jpg
(Uranus-Hertz)
Why is this news? Tech cos doing worse for decades (Score:2)
Microsoft has laid off US workers by the thousands, while simultaneous sitting before congress and insisting more offshore visa workers were needed to make up for "sever shortages" of US workers. Microsoft probably has tens of thousands of visa workers in the US, and it's been going on for decades.
The number of US workers hired by IBM fell every years. Finally the number of US workers at IBM dropped below 25%, and IBM stopped publishing the numbers.
Many other US tech companies have been replacing US workers
this is capitalism (Score:3)
capitalism is the continuous cycle of optimization resulting in a survival of the fittest situation for businesses with the most fit being fully automated. outsourcing to a country with lower wages is simply an optimization. the question is how long we can sustain an economy by using such practices before it either collapses or a secondary post-scarcity economy springs up.
Here's the real issue: (Score:4, Insightful)
_American business tax laws actually encourage this type of activity_.
Why do you think Ford and just recently Carrier decided to move thousands of jobs to Mexico? Or the fact here in the USA, the states with the lowest tax burden are attracting many thousands of jobs? Or why in their (in my humble opinion) insanity in raising business income taxes, the state of Connecticut is losing thousands of jobs (GE just announced they're moving a lot of their operations out of the state)? Or why Apple has 70% of its $218 billion liquid asset hoard sitting in non-US banks? Or why American tech companies engage in that highly complex "Double Irish with Dutch Sandwich" accounting scheme to substantially lower their tax burden for European operations?
That's why I strongly support radical tax reform in the USA _so it encourages savings and capital formation staying in the country_. Business income should be taxed at a no-loophole flat rate of around 12%, which would make it among the lowest business tax rates on Earth and because the taxation is simple, save hundreds of billions per year in compliance costs, which could encourage businesses to far less likely export jobs for tax reasons.
Keep telling yourself that. (Score:5, Informative)
If you think "all companies that do this are run by Republicans," you really need to think "the few Republican-run companies that do this are joining the long list of Democrat-run ones."
Silicon Valley has the highest H-1B use in the US, and they're primarily left-wingers out there.
There are also a lot of H-1B recipients at colleges and universities, which are by no means right-wing enclaves.
Re:Keep telling yourself that - Fact check? (Score:3, Informative)
"Silicon Valley has the highest H-1B use in the US, and they're primarily left-wingers out there."
Got any proof to support that assertion?
California (and SiValley) companies are generally quite right-wing - the MBAs have a pretty firm foothold there.
It's because of the entertainment industry that people think that the state is very socialist/left wing.
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When you don't know the difference between party and beliefs, you'll get confused.
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I'd like to use that claim to bash the Democrats. Got any evidence to back it up? I'd be particularly interested in companies run by Democratic executives who are big campaign contributors.
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http://news.slashdot.org/comme... [slashdot.org]
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Not quite. Nothing in that link specifically says that those billionaires hire H1-Bs.
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There is no left (Score:5, Interesting)
That's sort of the problem. There are lots of folks who are left wing socially (pro-gun control, pro-gay rights, pro-choice, etc) but get real right wing real fast when they think they're taxes are going up. Our Media is left wing on social issues but hard right on economics. Free Trade, Trickle Down economics and Austerity are practically gospel in American media.
Part of the problem is folks look at just about every expense that isn't food as taxes. I've caught lots of folks doing it. Insurance? Tax. Phone Bill? Tax. etc, etc. The other problem is that after the Iraqi War Americans aren't seeing good returns on their taxes. Literally Trillions of wealth was just handed to a lucky few in exchange for nothing. We've let large scale corruption slide for so long that folks have lost confidence in the gov't. They've also forgotten what America was like before the Feds stepped in and started preventing super fund sites from happening (Flint Michigan Water Supply anyone?).
The other problem is Bill Clinton. He moved the country hard right so he could forge an alliance to get into the prez office. Again, left on social issues hard right on the economy. Trump brought up Tariffs but made it a point not to use the "T" word. What's funny is watching all the folks out there who know something is wrong but can't figure out what to do about it pushing Trump and Sanders up in the polls. It's gonna be funnier when Rubio or Bush gets the election despite popular vote thanks to hard right stuff like Citizens United.
Oh, and the colleges have been moving hard right too. Where do you think those $10,000/semester tuition bills came from?
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Re: There is no left (Score:2)
Universal healthcare applies to everyone. A welfare state is available to anyone who needs it, and unless you're clairvoyant and know that you're going to live forever, be employed forever and never suffer any illness, why are you against a safety net that doesn't come with a copay or a three month qualification time.
The answer is pride (Score:3)
None of this is by accident. This is how the ruling class stay in power. It's part of what keeps the pitch forks at bay. When FDR & Co pushed
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Possibly help you? That depends upon your health for the rest of your life. Sure, you could live without health problems until you are eighty, then get hit by a truck. But you might also find yourself in future suffering from a series of very expensive life-threatening illnesses.
Remember, cancer *will* hit everyone, eventually, unless they die of something else first.
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But Americans that claim the Democratic party is left have a warped idea of politics, on a world scale your Democrats are fully right of center.
But specifically these hi-tech billionaires are way more progressive (forward thinking) than the conservatives in the Republican party and would never want to be associated with creationists, a Tea Party, Bush family or the likes of Trump.
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Silicon Valley though is also (for the most part) the perfect example of companies *not* abusing H1Bs though.
In general, tech sector H1Bs in the bay area are extremely highly paid specialists who have been brought in to solve problems that require a very specific skill set. The problem of companies bringing in unskilled indian "contractors" to replace american workers en-mass has really not sprung up there.
Notice how neither Hertz nor Disney is a Silicon Valley tech company ;).
Re:Keep telling yourself that. (Score:4, Insightful)
100% bullshit.
as a bay area resident for the past quarter century, and as someone who is born/raised in the US, I call bullshit in your entire statement about h1b being 'used appropriately' in the bay area.
I recently spent time at cisco and also at intel. nothing but indian faces, there. and I'm not talking about super smart people; but ordinary common people, like me and probably you - but THEY get hired and I don't.
don't lie about the bay area. maybe you are new or maybe you simply are so shielded from reality, you don't know how things are for most of us. I hope you are not lying on purpose to serve an agenda...
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No, it's the future that both Republicans AND Democrats are going to both claim they don't want, but will give us anyway because they're both addicted to sucking corporate dick now.
This has always been the future. (Score:3)
I've been out in industry for exactly a decade. I know who they are laying off. I would bet heavily that these are the guys that like doing things the way they have always done things and are content on not improving it. They're the drafters that refused to learn "that CAD thing". You see it all over Slashdot. You guys sure like things the way you used to do them. "Why kids these days don't need to learn Assembly".
I spent a recent layoff learning Python 3.4. It's near impossible to get people off of 2.7 at
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It isn't just computer programing that is doing that.
I took over some of the finance reporting at my work. Just one example. Every month we have to file sales taxes and pay them to the state. So every month the previous guy would run a report, import it into excel and manually add, subtract and count the numbers for the return on a calculator. He spent 30-45 minutes every month doing something excel was designed to do.
I spent three hours I set up all the math, added in history, and some other useful info
Re:This is the future... (Score:5, Insightful)
>Republicans want for us all.
And Democrat presidents passed TPP and NAFTA ... Google outsources and uses contractors that outsource, and Google isn't right wing, not even close.
http://www.alternet.org/labor/... [alternet.org]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... [huffingtonpost.com]
How about we stop spreading lies that is a republican issue when both parties are fucking everyone over for profits. Voting for a democrat or republican isn't going to fix the corporate cronies who own both parties. Lets not excuse corruption and bad behavior for whatever party you belong too, because they are your party.
Until we start holding our own accountable, nothing will ever change.
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H1-B is a non-immigrant visa .
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So then attach the conditions for that visa that the employees getting it has to be paid at least the same level as domestic employees.
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Unlimited immigration would actually be *better* than this. Immigrants would at least keep the money in the country.
Re: This is the future... (Score:4)
You know what would be better still? A balanced policy designed to help all Americans rather than one designed to help the Zuckerbergs and the other rich campaign donors.
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The game is rigged.
Re: This is the future... (Score:5, Interesting)
"There is truth to that. I know one Indian guy at my company who has said before that he sends most of his salary back to his bank in India and intends to go back home and retire early there."
They all say that. After 2 dozen years they can't stand the unpaved roads, the dirt and the rest at their former home and they'll just do a vacation there each year.
Not to mention, their kids don't want to be caught dead at their dad's former homeland.
Re: This is the future... (Score:5, Interesting)
Not to mention, their kids don't want to be caught dead at their dad's former homeland.
Or the wife and kids don't want the guy to return home from the US because they're too busy living off the money he sends back home. I knew a guy from the Philippines who got caught in that situation. After working 20 years in the US, he went back home unannounced and told his family that he retired from working. His family hated him and the village vilified him for being a lazy bastard for cutting off the cash flow. Last I heard he got divorced and bought a fishing boat to live on.
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Many have no intention of staying in the US.
I've heard stories of American men in Silicon Valley who saved up their money after working 20 years to retire in Mexico or Central America, buying a lot to build a mansion by local standards and marrying sweet little nothing from a nearby village. The locals don't mind because the "rich man" will keel over from having too much sex with the sweet little nothing and everything he owns will stay in the village.
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My son, he's a smart bastard. He has a trust that doesn't really pay that much. He'd be able to survive and live in the US but he'd not be able to have all the toys a guy might want, he wouldn't live in luxury, and so he'd still be motivated to work and be productive. I thought it was a good idea but the kid's smart. He's been living in Peru for almost a year now. He supports himself, a girlfriend, and helps his girlfriend's family out - and he's still saving money.
It's a managed trust and I don't know exac
Re:Clinton in GOP? (Score:4, Insightful)
Clinton gets financed by Wall Street, and what they profit from is what she will have as an opinion.
This is not a partisan issue, never has been (Score:2)
Repubs, and dems, alike take big $$ from corporations, and help those corporations bash US workers. It has been going on for decades, at least.
Making this a partisan issue insures no progress will be made. We will just keep blaming the other party - when it is plainly obvious that both parties have sold out the US worker.
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If one takes off the team R or team D goggles and thinks about recent history, it becomes clear:
"The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies... is a foolish idea. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can throw the rascals out at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party which will be none of these things b
Re: Either the workers of the world unite (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, just look at how awesome the Soviet Union is..... Oh, wait.
Re: Either the workers of the world unite (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody's suggesting communism, which like pure capitalism just doesn't scale well. This is proof of the latter--capitalist companies scale very well indeed, but the benefits of capitalism for the average person go down as the average company size goes up. One huge national company in any industry simply needs fewer support people, customer service people, lawyers, accountants, custodial workers, etc. than the same geographic footprint served by multiple smaller businesses. This is the still heart and black dead soul of the mergers and acquisitions game. It's why small businesses owned by people relatively local to the area(s) served are good for communities and why huge corporations tend to be parasitic instead. First, small businesses employ actual people and second, small business owners are to a much larger extent than corporate shareholders socially accountable to the communities they live in. Offshoring is simply not in the small business playbook.
I'm not a fan of the communist ideal either, but let's face some uncomfortable facts: the Soviet Union suffered near its start from a paranoid dictator (Stalin) who didn't give a crap about communism or any other kind of -ism other than his own power, it was devastated in a war in which it sustained vastly more casualties than we did and which in the US did not touch our industrial infrastructure, plus after that war it had to endure literally decades of economic warfare from the west. If there's one thing western countries, governments, and companies know how to do it's wage economic warfare. In that narrow regard, there is a similarity: people who work for a living have endured economic warfare levied against them since Reagan and Thatcher's times and yes, it's time to change the economic rules to no longer literally favor the outsourcing and offshoring of jobs.
It's funny--what the Nazi regime and the Japanese military dictatorship could not destroy we've allowed our own capitalists to dismantle and we've not fought them with even a fraction of the vigor we prosecuted World War II with. That needs to change.
A centralized economy doomed the USSR (Score:3)
I'm not quite sure why you're brining up the soviet union's problems, but I (perhaps incorrectly) get the sense that you're brining it up to suggest that external factors--rather than internal economic policy--were the major causes (or even the root cause) of economic problems in the soviet union. I'm only responding to that point.
the Soviet Union suffered near its start from a paranoid dictator (Stalin) who didn't give a crap about communism or any other kind of -ism other than his own power, it was devastated in a war in which it sustained vastly more casualties than we did and which in the US did not touch our industrial infrastructure, plus after that war it had to endure literally decades of economic warfare from the west. If there's one thing western countries, governments, and companies know how to do it's wage economic warfare.
These things sure hurt, but it doesn't fully explain the soviet union's economic problems or why the soviet union was unable to overcome them.
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I wouldn't call it active encouragement. Only passive encouragement.
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How is this even legal? Is there not a requirement to prove that the required skilled labour cannot be sourced locally? The race to the bottom how really moved into the final stretch!
Read http://smile.amazon.com/gp/pro... [amazon.com] and you'll see that the government isn't allowed to investigate, nor is there any obligation for companies to prove it. It's truly a racket designed to enrich the businesses.
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Revolution is unlikely so long as the masses are kept well-fed and entertained. Panem et television.
Re:I wonder how replacement (Score:5, Interesting)
of American IT workers with South Asians IT workers have worked out for the corporations that have done so.
I've had the "pleasure" of having to work with a major American IT vendor who recently outsourced most of their services to Indian subcontractors. The crap the Indian staff tries to slip under our radar is just appalling. They are breaking things that are not broken and are completely incapable of producing any original solutions. All they can do is Google around a bit and copypaste a solution, and if that doesn't work they come back to us, the customer begging for help.
That's not all. When someone from our office gives them a working solution, they come back to us and present it as their own and try to bill us for it. It's just amazing and I've heard countless similar stories so it's not just this particular vendor, it's *everybody* there doing this. All the bright minds in the IT sector in India have long gone abroad, the remaining IT workers are the ones who didn't make it to the top and are left doing the shitty jobs. They got nice titles, though. You could accidentally mistake the local janitor for a CEO if you went solely by the titles.
So yeah, it hasn't worked out that well for pretty much anybody in the IT sector yet everybody still keeps doing it.