The real issue is the industry's desire for lower-wage, more-exploitable guest workers, not a lack of available American staff. "It seems pretty clear that the industry just wants lower-cost labor," Dean Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, wrote in an e-mail. A 2011 review by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the H-1B visa program, which is what industry groups are lobbying to expand, had "fragmented and restricted" oversight that weakened its ostensible labor standards. "Many in the tech industry are using it for cheaper, indentured labor," says Rochester Institute of Technology public policy associate professor Ron Hira, an EPI research associate and co-author of the book Outsourcing America.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-11-24/the-tech-worker-shortage-doesnt-really-exist
Good article Finehoe,
I read this yesterday and agree with it 100%.
I could write a book as big as one of Ock's books on how this has been an issue for the past 15 years. It seems people are just beginning get a collective knowledge this silliness occurs.
The fact the author backs up his assertions with data supports the case even more.
Got the same "shortage" over here in Europe (they more generally call it a skilled worker shortage).
Funny enough, you'd expect salaries to increase (giving that demand is supposedly > supply) but no, not happening.
So I agree, it seems to be more of a low wage skilled worker shortage.
I agree. The intent is to either offshore tech work to India or elsewhere, or use H1B to import labor. The goal is to reduce labor costs, so the US workers are no longer needed. There is no proof needed to support 'there aren't any qualified US workers, so we have to import/offshore labor' and use H1-B labor. With this, there is no incentive for American to get degrees, or enter the tech fields as their used to be.
There never was a shortage, especially when the high paid tech workers were replaced with the much cheaper H1B1 Visa workers. Now big business has created a new dilemma, their remaining knowledge base has started retiring. Which means they will be at the mercy of the very companies they brought in to save costs. Hopefully, this will translate into some nice contract programming work once I retire. Work 6 months off 6 months. I could live with that.
Any employer would like to have equally-skilled workers for less money, no shocker there. Supply and demand drives the price of labor and in NEFL tech workers are at a premium. I know two tech company owners that struggle with hiring talented labor. And they pay well - $80-$100k is a common wage. Both recruit internationally and often hire from outside of NEFL area. Area schools are adding programs to help fill the need, but for the time being, qualified tech workers are in demand, and in Jax area, there is definitely a shortage. As "tech" infiltrates every aspect of our lives, tech-related workers will remain in demand.
Quote from: Edward on December 27, 2014, 10:08:40 PM
Supply and demand drives the price of labor and in NEFL tech workers are at a premium. I know two tech company owners that struggle with hiring talented labor. And they pay well - $80-$100k is a common wage.
Pay more.
Problem solved.
And - tell your kids to become "techies". The high-wage jobs of the present and future.
Quote from: finehoe on December 28, 2014, 09:56:54 AM
Quote from: Edward on December 27, 2014, 10:08:40 PM
Supply and demand drives the price of labor and in NEFL tech workers are at a premium. I know two tech company owners that struggle with hiring talented labor. And they pay well - $80-$100k is a common wage.
Pay more.
Problem solved.
If it were only that simple. There simply aren't enough people in the workforce.
Per Computerworld:
New Congress may move swiftly to raise H-1B cap
When the Republicans take control of Congress in January, they may act, with bipartisan support, to raise the H-1B cap.
It's going to be sticky because the Republicans will be working on parallel paths. They will be taking President Barack Obama to task over his executive actions on immigration reform, as they pull together votes for a separate, standalone bill on the H-1B visa, according to several Capitol Hill sources who spoke only on background.
The groundwork for a bipartisan bill is in place. The top legislative candidate is the I-Squared Act, which was introduced in the Senate by two Republicans and two Democrats, Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Chris Coons (D-Del.). The bill had 26 co-sponsors.
The I-Squared bill, first introduced in the Senate in 2013, did not advance because of the Senate's focus on comprehensive immigration reform. That bill is now seen as the leading legislative candidate in 2015 for raising the H-1B cap.
The Senate's Democratic leadership has traditionally opposed standalone H-1B bills because they didn't want to risk losing tech industry support for comprehensive immigration reform.
Just before the November election, Hatch, who become president pro tempore, the second most powerful position in the Senate, outlined the incoming Senate leadership's "innovation agenda." These are "priorities" that he plans to "help advance early in the next Congress." It includes support for the I-Squared bill.
The initial iteration of I-Squared called for raising the base H-1B cap from 65,000 to 115,000; another 20,000 H-1B visas are set aside for advanced degree graduates of U.S. schools. It also included mechanisms -- based on demand for the visa -- to allow the cap to rise to as much as 300,000.
There is no certainty that these efforts to raise the H-1B cap will succeed, and it's possible that acrimony with the White House over immigration will derail action on an H-1B-specific bill.
Another factor in the mix might be former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who may be about the closest thing to an announced candidate for the Republican presidential nomination that his party has right now. If Congress takes up any immigration issue, he may speak out.
Bush, who recently announced on Facebook that he has "decided to actively explore the possibility of running for President of the United States," is a strong advocate for raising the H-1B cap, much like his brother, former President George W. Bush.
Gov. Bush detailed his position in a book he co-authored with Clint Bolick, an attorney, Immigration Wars (Simon & Schuster, 2013). He also sketched out his views as co-chair of the Council on Foreign Relations' task force on immigration policy.
Bush wrote that the 85,000 H-1B cap is "hopelessly inadequate to preserve America's leadership role in technology."
Any H-1B legislation must get through U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), who will be heading the Senate Judiciary Committee. Grassley has been the leading critic of the H-1B visa and believes it is used to displace U.S. workers.
Quote from: carpnter on December 28, 2014, 05:43:40 PM
If it were only that simple. There simply aren't enough people in the workforce.
Bullshit. It's funny how conservative stop believing in supply and demand when it comes to labor.
If employers raise the wages they're paying, the jobs will be filled.
Alot of the pressure for H1B for higher education is driven by the US corporate use of graduate programs to fulfill basic research on the cheap.
Its not unusual to see corporates help pay scholarships for in demand engineering skills (chemical, mechanical or civil). So they press for more H1-B to import the engineering talent they seek.
Its no secret that there has been a reduced domestic interest in the engineering fields for the past 30 years. Most of the highly educated are going to either medical, financial or legal fields.
Quote from: finehoe on December 29, 2014, 09:53:22 AM
Quote from: carpnter on December 28, 2014, 05:43:40 PM
If it were only that simple. There simply aren't enough people in the workforce.
Bullshit. It's funny how conservative stop believing in supply and demand when it comes to labor.
If employers raise the wages they're paying, the jobs will be filled.
By people leaving one position for another. That means the company they left will need to find someone to fill that position. Do you think that there will suddenly be qualified people to fill those positions if companies simply pay more?
It is funny to see people like you think that problems can be solved by simply throwing more money at them. (See I can make ridiculous statements too)
"There's no evidence of any way, shape, or form that there's a shortage in the conventional sense," says Hal Salzman, a professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers University. "They may not be able to find them at the price they want. But I'm not sure that qualifies as a shortage, any more than my not being able to find a half-priced TV."
Quote from: carpnter on December 29, 2014, 11:56:57 AM
Do you think that there will suddenly be qualified people to fill those positions if companies simply pay more?
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Purple+Squirrel
Quote from: finehoe on December 29, 2014, 01:07:41 PM
"There's no evidence of any way, shape, or form that there's a shortage in the conventional sense," says Hal Salzman, a professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers University. "They may not be able to find them at the price they want. But I'm not sure that qualifies as a shortage, any more than my not being able to find a half-priced TV."
Wtf does he know? He just teaches this stuff at Rutgers. We all know Fox News has the real answers.
Per Computerworld:
Southern California Edison tech layoffs 'deeply disturbing'
Information technology workers at Southern California Edison (SCE) are being laid off and replaced by workers from India. Some employees are training their H-1B visa holding replacements, and many have already lost their jobs.
The employees are upset and say they can't understand how H-1B guest workers can be used to replace them.
The IT organization's "transition effort" is expected to result in about 400 layoffs, with "another 100 or so employees leaving voluntarily," SCE said in a statement. The "transition," which began in August, will be completed by the end of March, the company said.
"They are bringing in people with a couple of years' experience to replace us and then we have to train them," said one longtime IT worker. "It's demoralizing and in a way I kind of felt betrayed by the company."
SCE, Southern California's largest utility, has confirmed the layoffs and the hiring of Infosys, based in Bangalore, and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) in Mumbai. They are two of the largest users of H-1B visas.
The utility has a large IT department. In 2012, before any layoffs, it had about 1,800 employees, plus an additional 1,500 contract workers.
Computerworld interviewed, separately, four affected SCE IT employees. They agreed to talk on the condition that their names not be used.
The IT employees at SCE are "beyond furious," said a second IT worker.
The H-1B program "was supposed to be for projects and jobs that American workers could not fill," this worker said. "But we're doing our job. It's not like they are bringing in these guys for new positions that nobody can fill.
"Not one of these jobs being filled by India was a job that an Edison employee wasn't already performing," he said.
SCE said the transition to Infosys and Tata "will lead to enhancements that deliver faster and more efficient tools and applications for services that customers rely on. Through outsourcing, SCE's information technology organization will adopt a proven business strategy commonly and successfully used by top U.S. companies that SCE benchmarks against."
The employees say that some of SCE's U.S. workers have been training their replacements, either in person in SCE's IT offices or over Web sessions with workers in India. The IT workers say the Indian tech workers do not have the skill levels of the people they are replacing.
The SCE outsourcing "is one more case, in a long line of them, of injustice where American workers are being replaced by H-1Bs," said Ron Hira, a public policy professor at Howard University, and a researcher on offshore outsourcing. "Adding to the injustice, American workers are being forced to do 'knowledge transfer,' an ugly euphemism for being forced to train their foreign replacements. Americans should be outraged that most of our politicians have sat idly by while outsourcing firms have hijacked the guest worker programs."
"The majority of the H-1B program is now being used to replace Americans and facilitate the offshoring of high wage jobs," Hira said.
SCE said Infosys and Tata were selected through a competitive process that began "with eight potential vendors, some of them United States-based.
"The decision made to contract with Infosys and TCS was made following vendor site visits, some in India, and in-depth reviews of prospective vendors' operations," the utility said.
SCE employees said that since August, when the layoffs began, the composition of the IT workplace began to change. "I see a lot of Indian people walking the halls, and less Americans," said a third IT worker interviewed.
Employee observations of an increasing number of foreign workers in their workplace is backed up by U.S. Labor Department filings. Employers have to file wage data of foreign workers and their workplace location with federal authorities in a form called a Labor Condition Application (LCA). In Irwindale, California, where SCE runs a major part of its IT operations, the two offshore companies had as many as 180 LCAs, and in a random check of these applications, every address matched an SCE location.
Displaced IT workers have long protested and complained about the use of H-1B workers, but they are overshadowed by large tech companies that lead H-1B lobbying efforts in Washington. IT workers are also effectively silenced through severance agreements that include non-disparagement clauses and confidentiality provisions, as well as fears that public complaining may hurt re-employment prospects.
Replacing U.S. workers with H-1B workers violates the spirit if not the letter of the law. Hira pointed out that as a part of the application process to obtain H-1B approval from the Labor Department, an employer is required to attest to the following: "Working Conditions: The employer attests that H-1B, H-1B1 or E-3 foreign workers in the named occupation will not adversely affect the working conditions of workers similarly employed." This statement is in Form 9035CP of the LCA.
Further, Hira noted that the Labor Department states, "The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) requires that the hiring of a foreign worker will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of U.S. workers comparably employed.
"The SCE case is clearly one where the hiring of the H-1B is adversely affecting the wages and working conditions of American workers," Hira said. "There isn't a clearer cut case of adverse impacts - the American worker is losing his job to an H-1B." Hira believes that the U.S. Secretary of Labor has the authority to investigate these cases.
The use of H-1B workers has other implications as well. They are mostly young, under 35 years of age, according to government data, and the SCE workers interviewed said many older workers were being laid off. H-1B workers are also overwhelmingly male. The IEEE has estimated that as many as 85% are males.
Although H-1B workers have to be paid prevailing wages, a data analysis of wages that Hira conducted found that H-1B workers cost employers less. The national median wage for an Infosys worker over a recent three-year period was $60,000 per year and for Tata it was $64,900, he said. These are figures that are lower than what appear in salary surveys, including Computerworld's annual survey. H-1B workers employed by offshore outsourcing companies are less likely to become permanent residents. Infosys sponsored only 2% of its workers for permanent U.S. residency over a three-year period and Tata, none, he said.
Northeast Utilities in Connecticut last year made a similar decision to SCE's and brought in foreign contractors on visas. More than 200 U.S. IT workers lost their jobs.
Some of the SCE employees say the outsourcing move is linked to a 2012 report that found fault with the IT management culture. The report, by a consulting firm's incident management team, followed a December 2011 shooting, where an employee fatally shot two IT managers and wounded two other workers before taking his own life. The gunman worked in the IT department.
The consultants interviewed IT workers who told them that some managers were "autocratic, authoritarian and draconian in their approach." Full-time employees complained of working excessive hours, including weekends and holidays. The report said that "these difficult and exhausting conditions are reportedly having adverse consequences on employees health, including increased stress and irritability."
Prior to the outsourcing agreements, the SCE employees said there were a series of layoffs, including managers.
SCE said it is helping affected employees with severance, and other benefits, including "job fairs and other possible opportunities with other organizations within SCE."
"SCE does not take this action lightly and it is assisting employees through this difficult period," the utility said.
But the third employee interviewed said it did not appear that the company was interested in keeping any of the IT workers targeted for layoffs, and they weren't being offered the chance to apply for other jobs. "They just want to get rid of us and clean house," said this IT worker, who now worries about keeping her home.
Per NetworkWorld:
Behind the White House's claim of 545,000 unfilled IT jobs
Earlier this week, the White House announced a plan to use $100 million in H-1B fees to help train people for technology jobs. To make its case for this new program, it said there were 545,000 "unfilled jobs" in information technology.
This claim of more than half-million available IT jobs needs a lot of explanation.
It was based on data from one source that doesn't account for normal churn in the labor market, meaning that these jobs do not represent an explosion in new job demand.
(http://images.techhive.com/images/article/2015/03/white-house-jobs-estimate-100573222-medium.idge.jpeg)
The White House data point doesn't tell you how many of these jobs are for contract or contingent workers.
This unfilled-jobs data also doesn't explain a decline in starting salaries for computer science bachelor degree graduates, reported by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE).
In a footnote, the White House cited two sources for its data, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and labor analytics firm Burning Glass Technologies, which analyzes help-wanted ads.
In creating its data, the White House used BLS data showing 5 million job openings overall in the U.S. But, a BLS spokeswoman said, it doesn't have a separate breakout for IT occupations.
This means that the administration's 545,000 unfilled IT jobs figure is based on the Burning Glass analysis. It arrived at this by counting the number of jobs over a 90-day period leading up to President Barack Obama's State of the Union address on Jan. 20, according to Dan Restuccia, chief analytics officer at Burning Glass.
Estimates on the size of the IT labor force can vary depending on which occupational groups are counted. Burning Glass puts it at about 3.5 million, and uses Occupational Information Network (O*NET), a computer and mathematical occupations category.
The analytics firms pulls job postings from about 50,000 sites, gathers occupations, industries, specific skills, certifications, degrees, salary if available and other data and then runs it through a deduplication process that sets aside about 80% of the job postings and keeps the unique ones, said Restuccia.
The White House number doesn't identify which job postings are the result of churn, or due to people within the workforce who are moving to other jobs or new demand from expanded hiring.
But what each job posting represents for a job seeker is "a chance to go get a job," said Restuccia. He said the point of the White House's use of this data was "to highlight the importance of IT jobs across the market."
Burning Glass's approach draws concerns from Hal Salzman, a professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers University, who studies the science and engineering workforce. "They claim they deduplicate, but they don't publish their methodology; there is no external verification," he said.
Salzman believes the deduplication can be a challenge with job ads. In Salzman's own research, he has run across jobs that are posted in multiple cities that appear as if they are specific to each of those cities. The recruiters are doing this to keep prospects from automatically rejecting the job because of location, he said.
Restuccia believes their data is getting independent verification from its use. He said the White House's Council of Economic Advisors vetted its data before using it, and groups such as the Brookings Institution have used it their data to discover, in a report, that job openings for STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) jobs take longer to fill than do openings in other fields.
Burning Glass has been in business since 1999, and its customers will use its data in many ways, including examining specific hiring trends, recruiting, what skills are hard to fill and competitive intelligence. Salzman says the most recent BLS data shows about 120,000 new hires in computer occupations, representing people being replaced due to retirement, for instance, as well as expansion.
Although the White House doesn't raise the issue of temporary H-1B workers in its training push, the use of the half-million plus job openings in its announcement creates a data point for supporters of raising the H-1B cap. But Salzman argues -- something he did along with other researchers in an Economic Policy Institute paper -- that the U.S. has a sufficient supply of STEM workers, and that the demand for guest workers isn't in large part due to unmet demand but instead meant to replace the existing supply or existing workforce.
Wage trends are also indicator of demand, and last April NACE reported that that the mean starting salary for computer science bachelor's degree graduates in 2014 was $67,300. The organization recently predicted that this year's starting salary will average $61,287, a 9% drop, wrote Norm Matloff, a professor of computer science at the University of California-Davis who has long disputed the idea that there's a technical talent shortage.
NACE has "shown in the past few years that computer science graduate salaries have basically been flat — up 2% one year, down 3% the next," wrote Matloff on his blog. "But the current figures show the biggest one-year change I can ever recall seeing -- and it is downward," he said.
With the behavior of SCE, which unfortunately is not unique, why would US person want to enter into the IT industry? Let's get your IT degree, only to not find a job, or have it subcontracted out. If for the same dollar amount, you can get 20-30 more workers, you might get more done quicker. The biggest issue I see is quality. If it takes a foreign individual longer to do stuff, you have lost your savings. I have yet to see offshore workers do the same quality, and speed of work done here.
And the beat goes on......
Per Computerworld:
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2915904/it-outsourcing/fury-rises-at-disney-over-use-of-foreign-workers.html (http://www.computerworld.com/article/2915904/it-outsourcing/fury-rises-at-disney-over-use-of-foreign-workers.html)
Fury rises at Disney over use of foreign workers
A restructuring and H-1B use affect the Magic Kingdom's IT operations
At the end of October, IT employees at Walt Disney Parks and Resorts were called, one-by-one, into conference rooms to receive notice of their layoffs. Multiple conference rooms had been set aside for this purpose, and in each room an executive read from a script informing the worker that their last day would be Jan. 30, 2015.
Some workers left the rooms crying; others appeared shocked. This went on all day. As each employee received a call to go to a conference room, others in the office looked up sometimes with pained expressions. One IT worker recalls a co-worker mouthing "no" as he walked by on the way to a conference room.
What follows is a story of competing narratives about the restructuring of Disney's global IT operations of its parks and resorts division. But the focus is on the role of H-1B workers. Use of visa workers in a layoff is a public policy issue, particularly for Disney.
Disney CEO Bob Iger is one of eight co-chairs of the Partnership for a New American Economy, a leading group advocating for an increase in the H-1B visa cap. Last Friday, this partnership was a sponsor of an H-1B briefing at the U.S. Capitol for congressional staffers. The briefing was closed to the press.
One of the briefing documents handed out at the congressional forum made this claim: "H-1B workers complement - instead of displace - U.S. Workers." It explains that as employers use foreign workers to fill "more technical and low-level jobs, firms are able to expand" and allow U.S. workers "to assume managerial and leadership positions."
The document was obtained by Norman Matloff, a computer science professor at the University of California at Davis and a longtime critic of the H-1B program. He posted it on his blog.
Disney says its restructuring wasn't about displacing workers, but was intended to shift more IT resources to projects involving innovation. That involves hiring many new people to fill new roles. Prior to the reorganization, 28% of Disney's IT staff were in roles focused on new capabilities; after this reorganization, that figure was 65%, a source at Disney said.
"We have restructured our global technology organization to significantly increase our cast member focus on future innovation and new capabilities, and are continuing to work with leading technical firms to maintain our existing systems as needed," Jacquee Wahler, a Walt Disney World spokesperson, said in a statement.
Disney officials did not want to comment about the situation beyond that statement.
From the perspective of five laid-off Disney IT workers, all of whom agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity, Disney cut well-paid and longtime staff members, some who had been previously singled out for excellence, as it shifted work to contractors. These contractors used foreign labor, mostly from India. The laid-off workers believe the primary motivation behind Disney's action was cost-cutting.
"Some of these folks were literally flown in the day before to take over the exact same job I was doing," said one of the IT workers who lost his job. He trained his replacement and is angry over the fact he had to train someone from India "on site, in our country."
Disney officials promised new job opportunities as a result of the restructuring, and employees marked for termination were encouraged to apply for those positions. But the workers interviewed said they knew of few co-workers who had landed one of the new jobs.
Employees said the original number of workers laid off back in October was more than several hundred. But the Disney source put that number lower, saying approximately 135 IT workers lost their jobs.
Disney has long used contractors at its IT operations in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., at a building called "Team Disney." Workers on visas were likely in use well before the restructuring. But in the period after the October layoff notifications, IT workers said they observed a marked increase in people they believe were new to the U.S.
It's difficult to determine how many H-1B workers, L-1 visa workers or contractor workers generally, were at this Disney site. Only a couple of workers asked the contractors where they lived or if they were on a visa. It was an awkward conversation and generally avoided. But one observation all of the workers recounted was the widespread use of Hindi.
Several of these workers, in interviews, said they didn't want to appear as xenophobic, but couldn't help but to observe, as one did, that "there were times when I didn't hear English spoken" in the hallways. As the layoff date neared, "I really felt like a foreigner in that building," the worker said.
In the Team Disney office, two of the contractors, HCL and Cognizant, had, in total, about 65 Labor Conditional Applications on file in the past year, according to records by MyVisaJobs.com for just that site. But there were other contractors working at Disney, as well, and it's unknown whether temporary workers on L-1 visas were used.
Disney Parks and Resort CIO Tilak Mandadi, in a leaked memo shared Nov. 10 to the IT staff, described the planned transition, told about the posting of new roles and explained the goal to deliver new capability. Disney's culture is to refer to employees as cast members.
The CIO wrote in part: "To enable a majority of our team to shift focus to new capabilities, we have executed five new managed services agreements to support testing services and application maintenance. Last week, we began working with both our internal subject matter experts and the suppliers to start transition planning for these agreements. We expect knowledge transfer to start later this month and last through January. Those Cast Members who are involved will be contacted in the next several weeks."
One of the laid off workers believed there were other ways for Disney to achieve its goals.
"There is no need to have any type of foreigners, boots on the ground, augmenting any type of perceived technological gap," said one worker. "We don't have one, first off."
Workers can be trained, because "once you are in the system and you are a learner, you are a learner for life in IT. You are going to constantly learn."
Kim Berry, president of the Programmer's Guild, said that "Congress should protect American workers by mandating that positions can only be filled by H-1B workers when no qualified American - at any wage - can be found to fill the position."
The use of H-1B workers to displace U.S. workers is getting more attention in Congress. In response to Southern California Edison's use of foreign labor, 10 U.S. senators recently asked three federal agencies to investigate H-1B use. But one agency, the U.S. Department of Labor, wrote back last week and told the lawmakers that large H-1B using firms "are not prohibited from displacing U.S. workers" as long as they meet certain conditions, such as paying each H-1B worker at least $60,000 a year.
Per Computerworld:
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2926837/it-careers/it-workers-win-key-ruling-against-visa-using-firm.html (http://www.computerworld.com/article/2926837/it-careers/it-workers-win-key-ruling-against-visa-using-firm.html)
IT workers win key ruling against visa-using firm
U.S. judge rejects dismissal of Infosys discrimination lawsuit
A discrimination lawsuit alleging that Infosys favored "South Asian" workers over all others will not be dismissed, a federal judge has ruled.
Infosys had asked for a dismissal of the case brought by four IT workers. U.S. District Court Judge Pamela Pepper granted some of what Infosys was seeking -- but she did not rule against the central claim of discrimination on the basis of race, in a decision released this month.
This lawsuit was filed by IT workers identified as "Caucasians of American national origin," who allege that they were discriminated against because "they are not of the South Asian race or Indian, Bangladeshi or Nepalese national origin."
In her 18-page decision, Pepper wrote, in part, "that the plaintiffs' allegations are sufficient to state claims that the defendants intentionally discriminated against them because of the plaintiffs' race, and the complaint is clear that the plaintiffs regard their race as distinct from the 'South Asian race' that the defendants allegedly favor."
The Infosys lawsuit, which was filed in Wisconsin federal court in August 2013, is part of a two-pronged legal attack on the IT offshore industry. The legal team for the IT workers is also involved in a similar case against Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), alleging that this company also favored "South Asians" in hiring and promotion.
Infosys and TCS, both based in India, are two of the top users of H-1B visa workers, and these lawsuits have potential of shedding light on their use of the visa workers. The Infosys lawsuit has already revealed federal data that is otherwise kept confidential.
The plaintiffs are using government U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) workplace demographic data that is rarely made public in the absence of a court order.
This federal EEOC data required Infosys to report the demographic make-up of any location at which it employs at least 50 people, according to the lawsuit. In 2012, there were 59 worksites that met that criteria, and in 21 of those sites Infosys reported that 100% of its employees are Asian. For 53 of the 59 sites, 94.5% of the employees were Asian, the lawsuit stated.
One of the plaintiffs, Layla Bolten, claims she was harassed because she was not Indian, was denied promotions and was excluded from work conversations by Hindi-speaking supervisors. Bolten was working on a nearly $50 million government project won by Infosys for the District of Columbia.
The Infosys and Tata lawsuits are seeking class action status.
The Infosys plaintiffs' attorneys include Michael Brown of DVG Law Partner, and Robert Klinck and Daniel Kotchen of Kotchen & Low. One of the attorneys reached declined to comment for this story.
Infosys was contacted about the court ruling, but the firm typically does not comment on pending litigation.
Pink Slips at Disney. But First, Training Foreign Replacements.
ORLANDO, Fla. — The employees who kept the data systems humming in the vast Walt Disney fantasy fief did not suspect trouble when they were suddenly summoned to meetings with their boss.
While families rode the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train and searched for Nemo on clamobiles in the theme parks, these workers monitored computers in industrial buildings nearby, making sure millions of Walt Disney World ticket sales, store purchases and hotel reservations went through without a hitch. Some were performing so well that they thought they had been called in for bonuses.
Instead, about 250 Disney employees were told in late October that they would be laid off. Many of their jobs were transferred to immigrants on temporary visas for highly skilled technical workers, who were brought in by an outsourcing firm based in India. Over the next three months, some Disney employees were required to train their replacements to do the jobs they had lost.
www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff-at-disney-train-foreign-replacements.html
Read that article in NYT this morning and my wife thought I was having a stroke! Completely unforgivable!! Absolute misuse of the visa program and the government should immediately revoke the visas of the workers that Disney brought in. Serve Disney right if all of their point-of-sale and ticket units quit working.
Her sister, a graphics artist, had the same thing happen to her several years ago. She designed all of the packaging and advertising for a local import firm that brings in cheap goods to local grocery and variety stores. They had her train her replacement in China then fired her.
If it was only so simple. With good communication, all of the work can just be sent off shore, and not buy workers on visas, but workers over seas, working for the very same countries. It is all about profit. The USA workers lose.
Quote from: finehoe on June 04, 2015, 11:26:31 AM
Pink Slips at Disney. But First, Training Foreign Replacements.
ORLANDO, Fla. — The employees who kept the data systems humming in the vast Walt Disney fantasy fief did not suspect trouble when they were suddenly summoned to meetings with their boss.
While families rode the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train and searched for Nemo on clamobiles in the theme parks, these workers monitored computers in industrial buildings nearby, making sure millions of Walt Disney World ticket sales, store purchases and hotel reservations went through without a hitch. Some were performing so well that they thought they had been called in for bonuses.
Instead, about 250 Disney employees were told in late October that they would be laid off. Many of their jobs were transferred to immigrants on temporary visas for highly skilled technical workers, who were brought in by an outsourcing firm based in India. Over the next three months, some Disney employees were required to train their replacements to do the jobs they had lost.
www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff-at-disney-train-foreign-replacements.html
just think of it as undocumented latinos but with college degrees.
In the legal case raised by displaced IT workers, they are finding that diversity is lacking.
Per Computerworld:
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2956584/it-outsourcing/with-h-1b-visa-diversity-doesnt-apply.html (http://www.computerworld.com/article/2956584/it-outsourcing/with-h-1b-visa-diversity-doesnt-apply.html)
With H-1B visa, diversity doesn't apply
In computer occupations, India dominates H-1B visa use.
Apple says workforce diversity "inspires creativity and innovation," but one of Apple's major contractors, Infosys, is far from diverse.
In 2013, Infosys, an India-based provider of IT services, had 509 workers assigned to Apple sites in Cupertino, Calif. Of that number, 499 -- or 98% -- are listed as Asian, with the remaining 10 identified as either white or black, according to government records.
Apple isn't the only company where a large majority of Infosys workers are Asian. Of 427 people employed by Infosys at insurance giant Aetna's Hartford, Conn., offices, 418 were identified as Asian in a court filing.
In the District of Columbia, where Infosys has developed a government-funded healthcare platform, 63 of 71 Infosys workers are Asian. And there are many other major employers that use Infosys with similarly large percentages of Asian workers, according to recently filed court documents in a Wisconsin federal lawsuit brought by four IT workers alleging discrimination.
This lopsided representation of Asian people among the workforces of IT services providers is not limited to Infosys. And it is a consequence of the H-1B visa program, which the offshore IT services industry uses to procure most of its labor.
Nearly 86% of the H-1B visas issued by the U.S. government for workers in computer occupations are for people from India, according to a Computerworld analysis of government data obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
IT services providers "apparently cannot get enough Indian programmers, which has little to do with a shortage of competent natives for these types of jobs, but a lot to do with the industry's business model," said Lindsay Lowell, director of policy studies at Georgetown University's Institute for the Study of International Migration.
Offshore companies that provide IT services "prefer young H-1B programmers because the visa offers control over this contracted short-term workforce, it permits them to pay less than they would for experienced natives and they cultivate programmers who can better serve their clients after returning home to India," said Lowell.
Many of these H-1B visa holders will work for an alternate universe of companies that primarily hire IT professionals from India. In many instances, these workers may be used to replace people such as Brian Buchanan, a former senior IT staffer at Southern California Edison (SCE).
Buchanan last month joined a lawsuit filed earlier against Tata Consultancy Services in federal court, accusing the company of discrimination. The claims in the lawsuit, which was filed by the same legal team involved in the Infosys case in Wisconsin, are similar to charges Infosys is now fighting.
Buchanan was laid off earlier this year from SCE and had to train his replacements from Tata, who were from India on a visa, according to the lawsuit. Tata has called the lawsuit "baseless," and it reiterated that argument following the filing of last month's amended complaint. Infosys has previously denied the allegations as well.
Prior to his layoff, Buchanan attended a job fair organized by SCE for its soon-to-be terminated employees.
At the Tata booth, which was staffed with "South Asians," Buchanan spoke with a Tata regional manager, who told him that the company was hiring for jobs at SCE and elsewhere. But the Tata manager "was dismissive" of Buchanan's inquiries, the lawsuit alleges. In contrast, Buchanan "observed that the Tata employees spent considerably more time speaking with South Asian applicants and spoke to them in Hindi about available positions."
The lawsuit against Tata alleges that the firm staffed SCE "with an almost 100% South Asian workforce." It claims that about 95% of Tata's overall U.S. workforce is made up of South Asians.
A number of technology companies, including Apple, have begun disclosing the workforce diversity data they file with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). This information usually stays confidential, unless a company voluntarily discloses it or it is released as part of a court case, which is what happened in the Infosys case.
These court cases have the potential to shed more light on the offshore outsourcing industry. They could also put Infosys and Tata, two of the top users of H-1B visas, in the position of having to defend their business models. This defense has begun.
George Stohner, an attorney representing Infosys in the Wisconsin case, told the judge that "there's nothing that requires a U.S. employer doing business in the United States to manufacture in the United States. You can employ elsewhere."
"Nor is there ... any requirement," said Stohner, "for a foreign company doing business in the United States to employ workers in the United States." Infosys is required only to follow immigration laws, he said, according to a court transcript.
There were around 76,000 H-1B visas issued to people in computer occupations in 2014. That figure includes those applying for new employment, whether or not they fall under the overall H-1B cap (some areas, such as research, are exempt).
After India, which garners the top share of visas for computer jobs by an overwhelming margin, China is in second place -- just over 5% of H-1B visas for computer jobs go to Chinese people. No other nation rises above 1%, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services H-1B data for the 2014 federal fiscal year.
That's considerably different from the breakdown in other fields, such as engineering, where workers from India received fewer than half of the H-1B visas for new employment and China's share was almost four times the size of its share of the visas for computer jobs.
India is able to flourish in the IT services business because it has some advantages over countries like China, which was at one time seen as a potential IT services rival to the U.S.
Indian IT services providers "have proven skill sets in IT services, and English proficiency plays a major role as well," explained David Rutchik, a managing director at Pace Harmon, an outsourcing consulting and advisory firm. Moreover, "security concerns are certainly an issue" for China, and on top of that "China doesn't have mature IT services for export capability either," he added.
But China may have a more developed internal IT market, said Eric Simonson, managing partner for research at the Everest Group, an IT services research and consulting firm. "The domestic IT business in China is stronger than in India, and the Chinese economy is larger and broader than India's economy; together these provide more career opportunities and increase labor rates for technical talent," Simonson said.
Chinese IT workers can work for companies such as Alibaba, an e-commerce site. "In India, these dot-com opportunities did not exist until fairly recently -- Flipkart being a hot recent example," he said. Flipkart is also an e-commerce site.
One way to get an indication of the imbalance in global distribution of H-1B visas for computer occupations is to look at the breakdown of H-1B visas that go to engineers.
Last year, the U.S. issued H-1B visas to 8,103 engineers, including people specializing in disciplines such as electrical, mechanical, civil, chemical and aeronautical engineering. Workers from India received the largest share -- 47% -- of those visas, but that's a far smaller percentage than the nearly 86% of H-1B visas for computer occupations that go to people from India. China had 19.5% of the engineering visas while Canada got 3.4%, Korea 2.4%, Mexico 2.2%, and Taiwan and Iran tied with 2.2% each, according to government data obtained by Computerworld.
"This demonstrates just how dominant the outsourcing companies have become," said Russell Harrison, director of government relations at the IEEE-USA, of the country-by-country breakdown of H-1B visas that go to people in computer occupations.
The IEEE has 60,000 members in India and 40,000 in China, and "if companies were looking around the world to find the best possible candidates for their jobs, you would expect a distribution that was similar to the distribution of engineers on the planet, and that's not what you have," said Harrison.
Apple and Aetna were both contacted but didn't have comments by deadline.
For me, H-1B makes sense if it is used to fill short term gaps (there aren't enough people available locally) and to transfer knowledge from H-1B engineers / programmers to local employees (i.e. you import the knowledge). This would be a long term win for the US economy and companies.
However, it appears to me that this is actually going the other way around - knowledge is transferred from US engineers / programmers to H-1B workers, i.e. it is transferred out of the country. Plus, if as an "expensive" local employee there is no work to be found, chances are that fewer and fewer High School graduates will seek IT or engineering degrees. So long term, companies are strengthening their competitors.
So if you are a company who is looking for IT support, why pay HP if you could go directly to the source by having a contract with Tata or Infosys ?
Sadly, long term is not a focus of many CEOs.
It's only about cheap labor. I think that 'Asian' would be more accurately changed to Indian. I doubt there are many Japanese, Korean, or others working for Indian companies.
Sounds anti immigration to me... 8)
Quote from: BridgeTroll on August 11, 2015, 10:09:37 AM
Sounds anti immigration to me... 8)
H-1B visa holders aren't immigrants.
Quote from: finehoe on August 11, 2015, 10:47:56 AM
Quote from: BridgeTroll on August 11, 2015, 10:09:37 AM
Sounds anti immigration to me... 8)
H-1B visa holders aren't immigrants.
Exactly. Why let highly skilled, motivated, documented workers immigrate when we can have alllll the unskilled, undocumented workers we can handle?
Good thing illegal immigration from Mexico is at net zero.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/01/03/mexican-immigration-richard-miles/21056155/
Quote from: finehoe on August 11, 2015, 11:21:44 AM
Good thing illegal immigration from Mexico is at net zero.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/01/03/mexican-immigration-richard-miles/21056155/
I take no issue with the number of immigrants crossing our border... my issue is the "undocumented/illegal" part. Clearly if we can document and track H1-B temporary skilled workers... we are fully capable of doing the same for the unskilled... thus making it "documented/legal" immigration. It is simply a matter of will... and of course ideology.
In our little IT world in Jacksonville, I have worked as an analyst and developer for large enterprises (all F500), and the displacement of American citizens by H1-B resources is staggering. Colleagues complain about difficulty in understanding accents, different cultures, and work ethic. Those are the same who have never traveled outside the South and produce "good enough" work product to retain their jobs...until the visa workers demonstrate superior capabilities.
What isn't apparent by these reports is the long list of vacancies that are so highly specialized, that only the likes of Google, Apple, and Amazon have secured prospectives Jacksonville seeks. There are pseudo-data scientists and then there are Data Scientists, for example. You will find the former here and the latter where phenomenal talent attracts the same caliber.
Quote from: BridgeTroll on August 11, 2015, 11:37:48 AM
Clearly if we can document and track H1-B temporary skilled workers... we are fully capable of doing the same for the unskilled... thus making it "documented/legal" immigration. It is simply a matter of will... and of course ideology.
Yes, because tracking tech employees who are brought over by their employers is just like tracking agricultural workers who slip over the border themselves.
Quote from: finehoe on August 11, 2015, 01:02:37 PM
Quote from: BridgeTroll on August 11, 2015, 11:37:48 AM
Clearly if we can document and track H1-B temporary skilled workers... we are fully capable of doing the same for the unskilled... thus making it "documented/legal" immigration. It is simply a matter of will... and of course ideology.
Yes, because tracking tech employees who are brought over by their employers is just like tracking agricultural workers who slip over the border themselves.
And there is the ideology shining through. So... monitor and track the law abiding highly skilled temporary worker and ignore and even encourage the unskilled who sneak across the border? Complain about highly skilled, law abiding, tax paying temporary workers... lol. I get it they are taking educated millennial jobs. No worries about the unskilled Americans who are losing jobs to unskilled, undocumented, unregulated, migration... awwwwww. Funny how it is racist when some people want to regulate immigration across the board but NOT racist when they complain about skilled labor from asia...
A Huffpo exclusive...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ash-murthy/immigration-reform_b_5052006.html
Quote
Ash Murthy, a Silicon Valley based software engineer, is interested in criminal justice.
My Life as a 'Highly Skilled' Immigrant
Posted: 03/28/2014 5:22 pm EDT Updated: 05/28/2014 5:59 am EDT
One August morning many years ago, I found myself starry eyed and jet lagged at the Los Angeles International airport. In search of the American Dream, I had come halfway around the planet to pursue graduate studies in computer science at the University of Southern California.
My earliest memories of the United States are of newfound friends asking me about the movie Slumdog Millionaire and arousing laughter when I referred to an eraser as a 'rubber.' In about a year, America was no longer a foreign place but the country I call home, the nation I want to contribute to.
Little did I then know that the green pastures are not so green, at least not without a green card. I would soon be on a work visa (H1), joining hands with over a million engineers, scientists and doctors living as second class citizens, thanks to our broken immigration system.
I soon graduated with flying colors and applied for jobs across the country. After a rigorous interview process, I was offered a spot at a search engine company with an acceptance rate of less than 0.5%. Excited about working with the best engineers I accepted the offer, and over the years have built a career as a software developer.
On the surface, I've created a good life and lived the American dream. But in reality, thanks to the immigration limbo and the endless wait for green cards, I live a different kind of life -- the life of an indentured servant. I cannot change employers or quit my job (to start a startup or go back to school). And if I ever get fired, guess what? Leaving family, friends and everything else behind, I would be tossed out of the country, like an empty beer bottle tossed into the trash can, that very day. Spouses of skilled immigrants face an even tougher life -- despite being well qualified, they cannot work or even have a credit card in their names. Denied every opportunity to be productive citizens and virtually confined within the four walls of their house, they lose their self esteem and end up in a state of depression.
Like any other patriotic American, I take great pride in serving my country. A few months after graduating from grad school, I had a chat with a local Army recruiter about volunteering in the Reserves. The recruiter was very excited about my skills -- foreign languages and engineering prowess. When asked about my green card, I said I was on a work-visa and was waiting "in line" for a green card.
I vividly remember the instantaneous change on his face, from excitement to disappointment, as if our conversation took place yesterday. It turned out that as an ALIEN (Yes, that is exactly what I am called as though I am from Mars) I cannot serve my country. Even though I think of myself as an American and consider America my country, my country doesn't think of me as one of its own.
In the age of globalization, we need to attract and retain the best and brightest to remain competitive. A Duke university study found that foreign born inventors have been credited to about 75 percent of patent applications filed by the top research universities, and another study by Kauffman foundation found that about 25 percent of engineering and technology firms have a foreign born founder. In the US, almost half of STEM graduate students are foreign born, but dejected at their lives as second class citizens during the decades long wait for green card and the plethora of problems the H1b's face in their day to day life (from renewing a drivers license to buying a house), many of these American trained engineers and scientists return to their native countries and end up competing against the American economy -- a phenomena named as 'reverse brain drain' by Duke University researcher, Vivek Wadhwa.
The effects of the reverse brain drain are significant. A 2009 study by Technology Policy Institute found that in the absence of reverse brain drain and other barriers against retaining brainpower, the annual GDP will be raised by 13 billion.
Both Democrats and Republicans agree on the need for immigration reform, and its imperativeness to our economic health. Yet, immigration reform has been stalled in the House of Representatives. Why does Speaker Boehner think that maintaining status quo -- millions contributing to an underground economy, while we train the best and brightest to work for our competitors -- is good policy? It is time for our politicians to put aside petty politics and come together to act on immigration reform. Til then, I will serve my country by advocating for immigration reform.
Sign the petition...
http://www.petition2congress.com/3284/ease-green-card-backlogs-highly-skilled-employment-based-immigran
Holy smokes... more from Huffpo...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/herbie-ziskend/green-card-recapture_b_6984076.html
Quote
Herbie Ziskend
This Single Reform Would Improve the U.S. Immigration System and Grow the Economy
Posted: 04/01/2015 9:06 am EDT Updated: 06/01/2015 5:59 am EDT
Tucked away in the Senate's bipartisan, immigration reform legislation of 2013 was an obscure provision referred to as "recapture." The measure, which directs the State Department to allocate unused visas that failed to be issued due to bureaucratic shortcomings from 1992-2013, would help clear the green card backlog and result in roughly 200,000 -- 250,000 immigrant workers and spouses receiving permanent residency.
Recapturing would quickly provide economic stimulus as talented immigrant entrepreneurs and innovators receive the flexibility associated with green cards, reunite thousands of families who are separated as a result of backlog, and represent real reform to the legal immigration system. The White House is currently reviewing whether the President has existing authority to execute recapture policy absent congressional action -- and there is a strong case that he does.
But Congress ought to step up and pass this provision on its own.
Unlike other components of comprehensive immigration, such as high-skilled reform, which could not pass as standalone bills given the vexing politics of the issue, recapturing unused green cards would not dim the prospects of a larger immigration overhaul. The concept is heavily favored by the business and startup communities and generally supported by labor and religious constituencies (the politics of green cards are less controversial than H-1Bs). President Clinton in 2000 and President George W Bush in 2005 signed into law legislation that included recapturing employment-based immigrant visa numbers.
Most House Republicans are intransigent when it comes to considering comprehensive immigration reform at least until President Obama leaves office -- and recapture would by no means serve as a replacement for reform that addresses the millions of undocumented workers and their families currently in the country, high-skill visas writ large, border security, among other fixes to a broken system -- but that should not preclude Congress from adopting a provision similar to the one included in the Senate's 2013 legislation. Especially when the result is stronger economic competitiveness and reunited families.
For some background: during the second half of the 20th century, two of the country's signature immigration overhauls -- the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and its modified version, the 1990 Immigration Act -- expressly permitted the recapture of unused visas in a given year. Following implementation of the 1990 Act, bureaucratic processing delays, inaccurate workflow predictions, and lack of staffing at the three federal agencies that play a role adjudicating lead to the failure of allocating hundreds of thousands of immigrant visas. As a result, legal immigrants have had to wait years to obtain green cards and are restricted in their ability to change jobs or launch new businesses while family members are separated from one another for longer periods of time.
When President Obama announced his executive action giving unauthorized immigrants protection from deportation in November of 2014, the White House also announced that it would work with agencies to explore how to improve the visa process for legal immigration, including on the issue of recapture. The Administration, in consultation with State and the Department of Homeland Security, may arrive at the conclusion that the President has authority to enact recapture policy on his own, given congressional intent in previous legislation and precedent for the Executive Branch utilizing similar powers in the past. But Congress can ensure there is no question if they send a bill to the President's desk.
Through the course of history immigrants have contributed substantially to U.S. economic growth and entrepreneurship. Around 40% of Fortune 500 companies were started by immigrations or their children and 25% of high-tech firms created since 1995 were started by immigrants, employing 450,000 people and doing $50 billion in sales. According to the Kauffman Foundation, nearly all net-new job creation in the U.S. is produced by startups -- and from U.S. Steel to Google to Chobani Yogurt, immigrants have founded some of the most noteworthy. In 2011, nearly two-thirds of electrical engineering Ph.D and Masters degrees in the U.S. went to foreign nationals. But without a green card, immigrant workers -- and American-educated immigrant graduates -- do not have the flexibility to move between established firms or launch startups. Meanwhile large enterprises face increasing difficulty hiring talented immigrants due to visa challenges, just as many of their competitors abroad contend with no such legal hurdles.
Today is April 1st, the start date for accepting H-1B visa petitions for the next fiscal year. It's also a date that reminds us why it is so critical to pass immigration reform. Recapturing 200,000-250,000 unused green cards is no substitute for a comprehensive overhaul, but for families, businesses, and entrepreneurs it would represent a meaningful step forward.
Quote from: BridgeTroll on August 11, 2015, 01:39:24 PM
Quote from: finehoe on August 11, 2015, 01:02:37 PM
Quote from: BridgeTroll on August 11, 2015, 11:37:48 AM
Clearly if we can document and track H1-B temporary skilled workers... we are fully capable of doing the same for the unskilled... thus making it "documented/legal" immigration. It is simply a matter of will... and of course ideology.
Yes, because tracking tech employees who are brought over by their employers is just like tracking agricultural workers who slip over the border themselves.
And there is the ideology shining through. So... monitor and track the law abiding highly skilled temporary worker and ignore and even encourage the unskilled who sneak across the border? Complain about highly skilled, law abiding, tax paying temporary workers... lol. I get it they are taking educated millennial jobs. No worries about the unskilled Americans who are losing jobs to unskilled, undocumented, unregulated, migration... awwwwww. Funny how it is racist when some people want to regulate immigration across the board but NOT racist when they complain about skilled labor from asia...
Jeez, talk about missing the point...