Fast Food workers wanting 15.00 an hour..really..

[MarieB]

As the owner of a company that has actually gone through the (painfull and expensive) process of hiring H1B employees (two or three total over many years..) I can assure you that the skills set of those we hired were definitely not available here at the time. All three of them happened to be Brits. But that aside...it's what?...about 65,000 per year total H1B hires allowed? Agree or disagree with the program, that's a drop in the bucket.

There is a big push to expand that program. Note, I'm not saying that all companies abuse that system, but I've read enough about it and talked to some people with first hand experience to know that there is a lot of abuse and it probably will only get worse.

I'll try to dig up some of what I've read and post it later. I remember hearing either Steve jobs or bill gates whining about how there are not qualified engineers here. They were hiring people from other countries (mostly India) without degrees in engineering. That means that they aren't willing to do Any OJT anymore, and quite possibly weren't paying enough for someone who had shelled out the money for a degree. I notice that a lot in the workplace now - not much in the way of OJT opportunities and internships. And, if they think they need engineers without degrees, why not partner with the education system to get these skills taught? Many large corporations partner with community colleges for things like this.

Sorry for typos, etc. it's a pain posting from a phone

 

[Gilligan]

There is a big push to expand that program. Note, I'm not saying that all companies abuse that system, but I've read enough about it and talked to some people with first hand experience to know that there is a lot of abuse and it probably will only get worse.

I'll try to dig up some of what I've read and post it later. I remember hearing either Steve jobs or bill gates whining about how there are not qualified engineers here. They were hiring people from other countries (mostly India) without degrees in engineering. That means that they aren't willing to do Any OJT anymore, and quite possibly weren't paying enough for someone who had shelled out the money for a degree. I notice that a lot in the workplace now - not much in the way of OJT opportunities and internships. And, if they think they need engineers without degrees, why not partner with the education system to get these skills taught? Many large corporations partner with community colleges for things like this.

Sorry for typos, etc. it's a pain posting from a phone

I know that something like 70% of the H1B hires are for computer/IT jobs. That does not pass the smell test, IMO. I don't know anything about the degree situation (the Brit guys we hired under H1B visas had unique and extensive advanced high speed vessel experience that all originated "over there"..) And I did see recently the discussion of a proposal to expand the program and increase the ceiling, include spouses, etc..

But again..back to the fundamentals....how much of an impact is the hiring under H1B really affecting the US job situation? How much could it be, since the number is so relatively small?

 

[BigBlue]

UNION have been the problem

BS and you know it .The fact is that the more Unions die away the worse the middle class gets .You want me to say Unions were perfect and the answer to everything , nope I can't and I have never proclaimed it but to deny that Unions help this country is BS , and now the purposely killing off of Unions is leading to a greater monetary gap between rich and poor .

 

[Gilligan]

and now the purposely killing off of Unions is leading to a greater monetary gap between rich and poor .

How?...very specifically.

 

[GURPS]

There are qualified people here at home but they don't want to work an entry level job for entry level pay.

they think a PHD in Women's Studies will get them a 100,000 dollar year JOB when the finally leave college

 

[GURPS]

As the owner of a company that has actually gone through the (painfull and expensive) process of hiring H1B employees (two or three total over many years..)

I wasn't clear I guess. I'm talking about the corporate abuse of H1B visas.

IMHO that issue lays at the feet of Silicon Valley, in Hiring Indian and Chinese Programmers and other Information Technology JOBS

 

[GURPS]

I know that something like 70% of the H1B hires are for computer/IT jobs. That does not pass the smell test, IMO.

why not - Facebook and Microsoft can hire programmers at half the cost of an American just out of college


http://www.geekwire.com/2012/h1b-se...ews-call-looser-restrictions-foreign-workers/

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2013/01/29/facebook-microsoft-back-senate.html?page=all

Both Facebook and Microsoft have thrown their support behind the Immigration Innovation Act, which would raise the number of employer-sponsored H-1B visas allocated each year from the current 65,000 (plus 20,000 for people with advanced U.S. degrees) to up to 300,000, depending on market demand.

How H-1B Visas Are Screwing Tech Workers
A program meant to boost innovation instead fuels outsourcing.

A few years ago, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer informed hundreds of tech workers at its Connecticut R&D facilities that they'd soon be laid off. Before getting their final paychecks, however, they'd need to train their replacements: guest workers from India who'd come to the United States on H-1B visas. "It's a very, very stressful work environment," one soon-to-be-axed worker told Connecticut's The Day newspaper. "I haven't been able to sleep in weeks."

Established in 1990, the federal H-1B visa program allows employers to import up to 65,000 foreign workers each year to fill jobs that require "highly specialized knowledge." The Senate's bipartisan Immigration Innovation Act of 2013, or "I-Squared Act," would increase that cap to as many as 300,000 foreign workers. "The smartest, hardest-working, most talented people on this planet, we should want them to come here," Sen. Marco Rubio, (R-Fla.) said upon introducing the bill last month. "I, for one, have no fear that this country is going to be overrun by Ph.D.s."

To be sure, America's tech economy has long depended on foreign-born workers. "Immigrants have founded 40 percent of companies in the tech sector that were financed by venture capital and went on to become public in the U.S., among them Yahoo, eBay, Intel, and Google," writes Laszlo Bock, Google's senior VP of "people operations," which, along with other tech giants such as HP and Microsoft, strongly supports a big increase in H-1B visas. "In 2012, these companies employed roughly 560,000 workers and generated $63 billion in sales."

But in reality, most of today's H-1B workers don't stick around to become the next Albert Einstein or Sergey Brin. ComputerWorld revealed last week that the top 10 users of H-1B visas last year were all offshore outsourcing firms such as Tata and Infosys. Together these firms hired nearly half of all H-1B workers, and less than 3 percent of them applied to become permanent residents. "The H-1B worker learns the job and then rotates back to the home country and takes the work with him," explains Ron Hira, an immigration expert who teaches at the Rochester Institute of Technology. None other than India's former commerce secretary once dubbed the H-1B the "outsourcing visa."

Of course, the big tech companies claim H-1B workers are their last resort, and that they can't find qualified Americans to fill jobs. Pressing to raise the visa cap last year, Microsoft pointed to 6,000 job openings at the company.

What Americans don’t know about H-1B visas could hurt us all


There are a number of common misunderstandings about the H-1B program, the first of which is its size. H-1B quotas are set by Congress and vary from 65,000 to 190,000 per year. While that would seem to limit the impact of the program on a nation of 300+ million, H-1B is way bigger than you think because each visa lasts for three years and can be extended for another three years after that.

At any moment, then, there are about 700,000 H-1B visa holders working in the USA.

Most of these H-1B visa holders work in Information Technology (IT) and most of those come from India. There are about 500,000 IT workers in the USA holding H-1B visas. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are about 2.5 million IT workers in America. So approximately 20 percent of the domestic IT workforce isn’t domestic at all, but imported on H-1B visas. Keep this in mind as we move forward.

H-1B is a non-immigrant visa. H-1B holders can work here for 3-6 years but then have to return to their native countries. It’s possible for H-1B’s to convert to a different kind of visa but not commonly done. The most common way, in fact, for converting an H-1B visa into a green card is through marriage to a U.S. citizen.

H-1B isn’t the only way for foreigners to work in America. They can work to some extent on student visas and, in fact, many student visas are eventually converted to H-1B for those who have a job and want to stay but maybe not immigrate.

There is a misconception about the H-1B program that it was designed to allow companies to import workers with unique talents. There has long been a visa program for exactly that purpose. The O (for outstanding) visa program is for importing geniuses and nothing else. Interestingly enough, the O visa program has no quotas. So when Bill Gates complained about not being able to import enough top technical people for Microsoft, he wasn’t talking about geniuses, just normal coders.

I don’t want to pick on just Microsoft here, but I happen to know the company well and have written over the years about its technical recruiting procedures. Microsoft has a rigorous recruitment and vetting process. So does Google, Apple — you name the company. All of these companies will take as many of O visa candidates as they can get, but there just aren’t that many who qualify, which is why quotas aren’t required.

So when Microsoft — or Boeing, for that matter — says a limitation on H-1B visas is keeping them from getting top talent, they don’t mean it in the way that they imply. If a prospective employee is really top talent — the kind of engineer who can truly do things others simply can’t — there isn’t much keeping the company from hiring that person under the O visa program.

H-1B visas are about journeyman techies and nothing else.

H-1B Workers Not Best Or Brightest, Study Says
Skilled foreign worker programs are causing a U.S. brain drain, an Economic Policy Institute report says.


Managers of high-tech companies insist they need more H-1B visas for foreign IT workers to ensure access to the best and brightest workforce. But a study released on Thursday finds that imported IT talent is often less talented than U.S. workers.
The study, published by the Economic Policy Institute and conducted by Norman Matloff, professor of computer science at the University of California in Davis, compares U.S. and foreign IT workers' salaries, rates of PhD awards, doctorates earned and employment in research and development to determine whether those admitted to the U.S. under the H-1B visa program have skills beyond those of U.S. IT workers.

Based on Matloff's analysis, there's no evidence that those granted H-1B visas offer exceptional talents.

"We thus see that no best and brightest trend was found for the former foreign students in either computer science or electrical engineering," Matloff writes in his report. "On the contrary, in the CS case the former foreign students appear to be somewhat less talented on average, as indicated by their lower wages, than the Americans."

 

[GURPS]

.... and now the purposely killing off of Unions is leading to a greater monetary gap between rich and poor .

I make around $ 30 bucks an hour, with NO UNION Interference

 

[Gilligan]

Managers of high-tech companies insist they need more H-1B visas for foreign IT workers to ensure access to the best and brightest workforce. But a study released on Thursday finds that imported IT talent is often less talented than U.S. workers.

Looking back on what we had to go through to justify H1B hires 15+ years ago, this is the part I don't get. The gummint must have significantly changed the vetting process on their side, because we had to go to some serious lengths to argue and prove our case that the foreign national we wanted to hire possessed unique skills that we really needed.

I wonder when that process changed?

 

[GURPS]

I wonder when that process changed?

you Gilligan - 2 man shop are not Microsoft, Employer of 25,000[swag] and politically connected owners worth billions

- American Competitiveness in the Twenty-First Century Act of 2000
The American Competitiveness in the Twenty-First Century Act of 2000 (AC21) and the U.S. Department of Labor's PERM system for labor certification erased most of the earlier claimed arguments for H-1Bs as indentured servants during the green card process. With PERM, labor certification processing time is now approximately 9 months (as of Mar 2010).[33]

Because of AC21, the H-1B employee is free to change jobs if they have an I-485 application pending for six months and an approved I-140, and if the position they move to is substantially comparable to their current position. In some cases, if those labor certifications are withdrawn and replaced with PERM applications, processing times improve, but the person also loses their favorable priority date. In those cases, employers' incentive to attempt to lock in H-1B employees to a job by offering a green card is reduced, because the employer bears the high legal costs and fees associated with labor certification and I-140 processing, but the H-1B employee is still free to change jobs.

However, many people are ineligible to file I-485 at the current time due to the widespread retrogression in priority dates. Thus, they may well still be stuck with their sponsoring employer for many years. There are also many old labor certification cases pending under pre-PERM rules.

plus other program rule changes ....

 

[Gilligan]

you Gilligan - 2 man shop are not Microsoft, Employer of 25,000[swag] and politically connected owners worth billions ..

At that time, we employed 40-45 people.

I don't see any "easy button" changes in what you excerpted. That still notes that the H1B process is expensive and a hassle for an employer to go through....which is exactly how I remember it.

 

[Blister]

I make around $ 30 bucks an hour, with NO UNION Interference

I know a lot of people that make a lot more with Union assistance.

 

[BigBlue]

I make around $ 30 bucks an hour, with NO UNION Interference

That is a lie . Had it not been for Unions and the threat of the work force being Union your employer would be paying you $7.50 and hour and no benefits .

 

[BigBlue]

I know a lot of people that make a lot more with Union assistance.

..............the word is help .

 

[kom526]

I know a lot of people that make a lot more with Union assistance.

Of the $30+ an hour, how much goes for the boondoggles, 'leadership training retreats' and political contributions that the employee must pay due to the privilege of being a union member?

 

[Gilligan]

That is a lie . Had it not been for Unions and the threat of the work force being Union your employer would be paying you $7.50 and hour and no benefits .

I was paid more than 30/hour starting back around 1992..no union was ever involved in any of the work I do and never will be.

 

[Larry Gude]

Anyone who says a corporations only responsibility is to make a profit should, automatically, understand unions and see them as the exact same thing. They are two sides of the same coin. That is not a judgment. It's an observation. If we are all for corporations getting as big as possible then, at some point, the concern they had for their people on a one on one basis that a small business must have goes out the window in favor of profits as people become no different than any other cost; a line on a budget.

Any entity, by necessity, grows less and less free market. It becomes natural and obvious that, at some point, workers will start to see this, and feel this, and, as their interests are threatened, do, as the business does, what it takes to survive and prosper. When you're talking jobs that are less and less about individual skill, individual talent, initiative and drive, the only protection the worker has is strength in numbers, joining forces for mutual protection.

You can't just go open a McDonalds; you have to, in effect, join their union. You can go open a burger stand but, you're not going to have the protections of being part of the McDonald's owners group. You're also not going to have the freedom. You gotta do things their way in exchange for the protections they offer by being part of their collective or group or gang or....union. Whatever you like to call it.

For the longest time business has struggled with how to balance worker interests with business interests and it's tough because, at the end of the day, the motivations and interests of the business owner simply are not and can not be the same as an employee. Again, at some point, at some size, the desire to unionize is going to make sense for workers.

Business always needs customers.
The ability to do business at a profit relies on a balance between competition and demand.
Business always needs workers.
Wages relies on the same balance, supply and demand.
Business can either expand or contract with supply and demand.
Labor does the same thing.

Business, big business, goes about increasing demand by defeating competition; various ways of limiting public access to supply.
Labor does the exact same thing.

If we limited immigration, controlled it, wages would, naturally, go up and business would, naturally, suffer, less customers. The GOP response is the usual; every man for himself; illegal immigration means cheaper labor and more customers. The D response is the usual; control, control, control; more customers (for public services) and more control over making us pay for it; taxes, regulations, etc.

Their positions make perfect sense, just as the actions and motives of big business and big labor do.

What doesn't make sense is we, the people, stuck in the middle, as usual, where the best national interest would be some sort of control coupled with some level of freedom; positions that harm both D and R interests.

So, we line up like Bloods and Crips and brawl for our colors instead of the national interest which has three colors and therefore is no fun if we support 'em all.

 

[Baja28]

That is a lie . Had it not been for Unions and the threat of the work force being Union your employer would be paying you $7.50 and hour and no benefits .

You make me squint.

 

[LibertyBeacon]

You make me squint.

Baja is taking selfies again I see.

Protip: this isn't twitter.

 

[GURPS]

At that time, we employed 40-45 people.

I don't see any "easy button" changes in what you excerpted. That still notes that the H1B process is expensive and a hassle for an employer to go through....which is exactly how I remember it.

I don't know .... again, afaik, you are not politically connected like Microsoft and Facebook