Tech Worker Groups Boycott IBM, Infosys, Manpower 234
itwbennett writes: "Three U.S. tech worker groups have launched a labor boycott of IBM, Infosys and Manpower, saying the companies have engaged in a pattern that discourages U.S. workers from applying for U.S. IT jobs by tailoring employment ads toward overseas workers. For its part, Infosys disputed the charges, saying that 'it is incorrect to allude that we exclude or discourage U.S. workers. Today, we are recruiting for over 440 active openings across 20 states in the U.S.' Representatives from IBM and Manpower didn't respond to requests for comment on the boycott."
I'm boycotting IBM (Score:4, Funny)
Because IBM advertises on Slashdot and Slashdot Beta sucks.
Pay versus billing rate. (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone who has worked for any of the three should know by now that they pay their IT workers about 20 to 30% of what they bill the client at best. Avoid body shops like the plague if you want to make decent money.
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Not true... I worked at IBM as a contractor and was compensated very well.
I chose to leave for a better job/ higher paying role with benefits. The real problem is they are using contractors for a huge part of the us work force but paying pretty good comp for them, so that they don't have to cover all the little things. Like benefits....
I chose to leave after being the primary responsable admin in the group, who was denied a job in that group 4 times, due to "not hiring in the US at this time" their process
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LOL, job security. That hasn't existed since when, the 70s? 80s maybe?
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they pay their IT workers about 20 to 30% of what they bill the client at best. Avoid body shops like the plague if you want to make decent money.
That's very short-sighted advice from my experience. I made truckloads of cash from IBM/manpower in the 90's and they made truckloads off me, the difference is they had to pay for everything out of their cut, accountants, office space, secretaries, coffee machines, taxi's, air-fares, air-conditioning,..... Bottom line is a large corporation like IBM is doing well if it makes 10-15% ROI, ie: from $100 revenue, $30 goes to me, $60 expenses, $10 split between IBM/MP. The fact that I got $500-600/day and they r
Re:Pay versus billing rate. (Score:5, Insightful)
Believe it or not, an employee's "cost" is not the same as his or her salary.
While I have no idea if 20% - 30% is fair, consider that on top of your salary they pay:
I remember one project I worked on where my employer billed our client several million a year for three of us. Our client would often jokingly refer to us as the "million dollar men" when we came on site, and not so jokingly whenever it was time to renegotiate the fee schedule. However, our three salaries were actually a small part of the actual bill -- most of that was chewed up by things like equipment and software licensing fees.
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This.
Here in Canada, corporations match the personal income tax paid by an employee. Health coverage is not included, and the fees are increasing every year. But the biggest part of the pie by far is the liability insurance for a contract company.
Good luck finding contracts as an individual if you don't pony up for liability insurance.
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Oops. Sorry. It's not the personal income tax that gets matched, it's the unemployment insurance premiums.
Still, when push comes to shove, an employee's "cost" is roughly double their salary here. And that's not allowing for corporate overhead like accounting, management, receptionists, facilities, etc.
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Yeah but that's exactly the point. Your cost is not equal to your fee for service.
And if you dig into it, it's not that you're being paid only 20% of your contract rate, your cost to the company is 20% + x%, with x% being unknown (but could be as much as double your salary)
If you really did believe yourself to be underpaid, why didn't you ask for a raise?
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What exactly are you arguing for / against?
It seems to me you're just taking pleasure in negating anything I say...
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i don't understand; were they contractually required to sleep there?
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would you suffer for 6 years away from family & friends, living like an indentured servant in a nice neighborhood (relative to india), but afterwards you would have enough money to easily buy 3-4 nice homes in a good neighborhood?
consider that many americans risk their life & limb with the military and they don't get that much money.
Re:Pay versus billing rate. (Score:4, Interesting)
People in Asia often are used to living in much tighter quarters than westerners. What seems cruel to you, is normal for them.
Interesting anecdote from the book Changi, by James Clavell (awesome book, read it if you haven't!). During WWII, the Japanese were transporting Clavell and fellow POWs by ship. The japanese officer showed how "human shelves" works. You get into what looks to be a 1m high bookshelf, and sit cross legged. The POWs absolutely thought this to be insane, and demanded better transportation. The Japanese asked why POWs needed luxury transportation, and couldn't use the same transport as the japanese army.
Re:Pay versus billing rate. (Score:4, Informative)
The japanese officer showed how "human shelves" works. You get into what looks to be a 1m high bookshelf, and sit cross legged. The POWs absolutely thought this to be insane, and demanded better transportation. The Japanese asked why POWs needed luxury transportation, and couldn't use the same transport as the japanese army.
You mean the same Imperial Japanese Army that worked prisoners to death building railways and in mines and decapitated or mutilated captured soldiers for trivial offsenses?
The same ones that killed 300,000 civilians and committed 30,000 reported rapes in a few weeks in Nanjing?
The ones that locked vast quantities of women into military brothels to be raped roughly every half hour?
The one that conducted medical experiments on civilians in captured territories?
Of course they are an authoritative source about what treatment is humane according to East Asian norms, which is why the Chinese and Koreans are so much more understanding with the Japanese over the whole war and hardly mention it at all on domestic media or in international diplomacy.
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LOL
Well if you read the book, the Japanese are not exactly painted as heros. They're at best villains with a few redeeming qualities, and at worst super evil. Clavell surrendered himself to the Japanese and apparently they smiled and offered to kill him. Because, according to bushido, it's more honorable to be killed by the enemy then to be taken prisoner. He preferred being a prisoner and was quite badly mistreated for that reason.
If you've ever traveled to south east asia, you'll see they really do li
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Not very useful (Score:5, Insightful)
American IT workers boycotting firms which don't hire Americans? They're not even going to notice.
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They might notice if they still had any American IT workers.
Re: Not very useful (Score:5, Funny)
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Ya this seemed strange for me at first. But I think the real purpose is to encourage clients to avoid doing business with those companies. A boycott is not a stay at home and call in sick ploy, it's supposed to be an active event that can involve picketing a place of business or spreading information. I think that over time people have associated boycotts as being passive things that help them decide what foods to buy at the store.
I'd be more impressed if I heard of any of them (Score:5, Informative)
"Bright Future Jobs, the Programmers Guild and WashTech."
Who, who, and who?
As of August 1999, the Programmers Guild had 400 members. [wikipedia.org] Mighty important organization there, if you can't be bothered to offer membership numbers from this century. Which, to be fair, looks to be the last time their web page look was updated. [programmersguild.org]
As far as I can tell, "Bright Future Jobs" is one person Donna Conroy [brightfuturejobs.com].
WashTech is a union. [washtech.org] No thanks.
I suspect that IBM, Infosys and Manpower won't even notice their "boycott."
It's a start (Score:3)
And fyi, you owe everything you have today to Unions (that and the Cold War putting a halt on outsourcing). For God's sake man, read about what pre-Union life was like for all but the very, very rich. Just go read "A People's History of the United States" and go from there.
Re:I'd be more impressed if I heard of any of them (Score:4, Insightful)
I know there are a lot of reservations about unions, but it is dammed if you do and double dammed if you don't.
Without a union, you can watch all the jobs go overseas until the customers start to bail. Then you can watch them try to re-boot with "tiger teams" on shore, but only the leads will still be present, and the new on-shore teams will balk at the utter lack of code quality. If the on-shore team manages to clean up the code, they'll be rewarded by being let go again (for another trip on the merry go round).
It's enough to make you want to join a union so at least you can benefit from the revenue stream you created.
A slight misdirect (Score:5, Informative)
I did my time at IBM and learned this the hard way.
IBM does not favor hiring foreign applicants.
What they did at IBM Boulder was simple. At the beginning of LEAN in IBM e-Business, they laid off 1/3 of the staff. They moved from dedicated support for a pool of resources. And, as a result of the class action lawsuit, they cut everyone's pay 15%. After a lot of people left voluntarily, they fell well below the level of staff they needed to keep things running.
So, they decided to hire. Not regular employees, of course. Contractors. Only makes sense, yes? So, they opened up a number of junior admin positions at $12/hr. And a number of senior positions at $15/hr. When no one applied, they bumped it up slightly. Eventually, they were able to hire people in, but at a much lower rate than what the people who had left made. The nice thing about this from their perspective is that they also eliminated contracting companies that had things like paid vacation. (There might be a contracting company that still pays vacation, but I don't know what it is. There is one that still offers a small training budget).
Nationality of employee was completely irrelevant.
The color of the cog in the machine is irrelevant.
Cheap. Crappy. Brutal. That is the IBM Way now.
Re:A slight misdirect (Score:4, Informative)
Yep. Been in Boulder IBM and had to bail after 2 years. The Cog thing was pretty scary. Managers would just come into a room and 'duck, duck, goose! have your desk cleared out by Wednesday". When they 'Goose'd our Interface to the Customer (2 days to be gone), I figured IBM had blown a gear or something and started looking for a way out. Fortunately found it just up the road and have been here for almost 7 years.
[John]
Corporate outsourcing fraud permeates STEM sector (Score:5, Informative)
There is ample evidence that many American corporations have been actively discriminating against American Workers for well over a decade. This is especially true when it comes to STEM work skills. India, China, and Russia have been the main sources of off-shoring (and now, in-shoring). India is the absolute worst, with India's goovernment actively pushing for more H1-Bs because they would rather America hire them than India build proper educational and business infrastructure systems. Indian government is one of the most corrupt on earth (easily as corrupt as some of the worst African states).
Want proof? Unemployment is a problem in America, and so are our sticky problems with immigration. Undercover of helping those immigrants who have so long labored in our agricultural sector, the American IT sector has seen fit to use the sentiment to help agricultural workers to create a Landslide of advantage for itself. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... [huffingtonpost.com]
The H-1B fiasco has cost Americans **$10TRILLION** dollars, since 1975. For anyone who wants to know the truth, read on.
One of the most respected technology pundits in Silicon Valley has this to say about the H1-B worker problem http://www.cringely.com/2012/1... [cringely.com]
Here's an attorney and his consultants teaching corporations how to manipulate foreign-worker immigration law to replace qualified American workers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
H1-B abuse if accompanied by other worker-visa abuse L-1 Visa (H1-B's are only the tip of the iceberg). There are more than 20 categories of foreign worker visas. http://economyincrisis.org/con... [economyincrisis.org]
Professor Norman Matloff's extremely well documented studies on this problem. http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/... [ucdavis.edu]
Federal offshoring of healthcare.gov website http://www.economicpopulist.or... [economicpopulist.org]
How H1-B visa abuse is hurting American tech workers http://www.motherjones.com/pol... [motherjones.com]
There is no stem worker crisis in America http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-wo... [ieee.org]
Marc Zuckerberg and wealthy tech scions continue to perpetuate this trend http://programmersguild.org/do... [programmersguild.org]
Yahoo http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs... [yahoo.com]
Also, little known is the tactic of creating many different kinds of sub-visa categories to "fool the system". There are almost TWENTY different kinds of work visas. The whole thing is a sham and a lie, designed to drag down wages and keep from having to re-train Americans. Never thought I would see this day!
Some of the information presented in the aforementioned links will shock most Americans, because American corporate leaders don't want us to know the truth, and they are paying off policy makers with contributions to keep the truth from us. Bill Gates, John Chambers, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, and many, many others - including the principals of the most prominent immigration law firms, who profit from this outrage, are lying through their teeth. There is NO shortage of STEM workers in the US!!
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The funny thing at least in India a lot of the people that are working for hardly anything are just starting out or don't have experience. Experienced people in India don't want to work for nothing either.
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By the same argument then we should not be allowed to import foreign cars because it hurts the Americans who work in the auto industry.
Similarly, made in China products should be banned because they hurt the American factory worker.
And so and so on.
Yes, allowing foreign workers in the US hurts the people in the tech sector here. But, you can't simply ignore the huge pool of people in India and China who are trained to be engineers. This is capitalism and the low cost of labor will put an enormous pres
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The thing is that H1-B's are much better for America as a whole than not allowing this immigrant labor because the alternative would be more US companies moving off-shore.
If they do tax revenue and the associated secondary business activity in the US goes with it.
H1-B has some bad effects but the alternative is much worse.
Re:Corporate outsourcing fraud permeates STEM sect (Score:4)
> By the same argument then we should not be allowed to import foreign cars because it hurts the Americans who work in the auto industry.
My "foreign" car was made in Kentucky and the wife's in Ohio.
Assembled, not made, from Japanese designs. (Score:2)
The only American content in those cars is the fact that they use permatemps to assemble Japanese-designed cars. They're the manufacturing equivalent of guest workers.
Perhaps when the put a bit more car in
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My grandfathers fought in a war to maintain our standard of living. They worked hard to improve their country, for themselves and for their children. Now I watch these dirtbag corporate execs piss it all away to people of another country and expect us to reduce our standard of living in order to "compete". These same shitcocks who live opulent lifestyles off the backs of the same people they piss on.
Your grandfathers also looted, colonized, killed natives and owned slaves. Your standard of living could also have been due to those.
No. If they want to exploit all of this foreign labour, they should be forced to move their headquarters and executive officers to those countries where they do all their work, then import their product as if they were a foreign company. If they want to take advantage of all the niceties, protections, and advantages this country provides them, they can damn well show some support in return. If not, they are nothing but parasites who deserve to be removed.
Then why does the American consumer buy foreign cars? Why do they buy electronics from China, oil from the middle east and so on. They should move to the middle east if they want to use middle east oil or move to Japan if they want to drive a Japanese car. Or move to China if they want to buy Chinese goods. The American consumer is betraying the US companies by not buying pure
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It actually does, but nobody cares at this point given the Big 3 made garbage for a long time because they had a monopoly on the market. Introducing the foreign manufacturers was a result of people in the gov't getting pissed off with the Big 3 and the Labor Unions who they collaborate with. Had the Big 3 built cars that were worth a crap they probably wouldn't have the competition they do, they just got greedy in a big way and got cut for it.
Lack of competition will make anyone lazy and greedy, including American tech workers.
Of course we can, especially since the ones in In-juh tend to be trained so poorly. Did you ever ask yourself why so many of them over there are trained to be engineers? Uh, that's so that they can try and attempt all the work that was outsourced from here. Stop the outsourcing and you'll find more people here will actually go into STEM fields/careers.
If they are trained so poorly, then why are engineers and scientists from India and China able to become top scientists and engineers in the US?
No, it's crony capitalism where a few people benefit from huge profit margins off of using cheap foreign labor while a lot of workers, taxpayers in general, and the government suffer from loss of income tax revenue ... big difference.
Nope. You are also free to utilize foreign labor to make money. There is no cronyism because there is no special preference given to any group. Anyone can use foreign labor. If foreign labors were restricted only to certain groups of people then that would be cronyism.
Says the guy who hasn't gotten it in the rear from it. It's not competition, it's cronyism, and if you're not the one directly benefiting from it you're probably getting screwed by it.
People born i
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Also competition makes us all better. Why are we afraid of a little competition?
Not if businesses are only seeking the most compliant party, not the most competent party.
It's why the US first sought slaves, then Southerners, then Mexicans, and then the rest of the Third World. It's also why businesses want contractors, which gives union-type protections to employers against their own workforce. Workers are more easily controlled in those countries versus developed countries like the US, UK, Western Europe(although contract-based hiring doesn't help), and Australia.
From what I know, this has been long solved.
For almost a decade, one can transfer H1Bs. So, if your boss treats you badly or pays you too low, you can switch jobs and keep the same H1B. There are also lots of headhunters who poach H1Bs because the original employer has done all the hard work of getting the H1B, paying the fees and bringing the worker to the US. If they can get them to switch employers, you avoid all the costs of hiring a fresh H1B.
Second there is never ever a question of competence. If
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And if your current employer finds out you're talking to a headhunter or interviewing elsewhere, you get
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And if your current employer finds out you're talking to a headhunter or interviewing elsewhere, you get fired and deported. No thanks.
Except that's not how it works.
If you are fired, you have 180 days to stay in the US to find another job. You will only get deported if you overstay after that. Plus, you have all the worker rights of the US and can use legal action.
However, once you have an H1B, you have it for life. You can get a new job on the same H1B years later. So, if you go out of the US, find another job in the US, you can resume on your old H1B without going through the whole process again.
Also in most cases, H1B to permanen
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Worker rights. lol.
Manpower's execs have been doing some reading (Score:2)
The executives at Manpower must have done some reading and figured they wanted to be more like Manpower of Mesa.
Yay! Thank You! (Score:5, Interesting)
I've witnessed H1B-related shenanigans directly myself, such as forcing everyone to work without overtime pay at a big telecom company that rhymes with Ate Tea and Pea. The citizens tended to balk, but not the H1B's because they didn't want to rock the boat because their pay was a lot of money when spent back home. It's a lopsided mess; a way for companies to get more labor for less money. The "shortage" thing is lobbyist bullshit!
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Why didn't the citizens narc out this illegal behavior? It may depend on the state, but afaik working without overtime isn't something you can legally "volunteer" (read: be voluntold) to do as an employee.
Failing that, gang up and "educate" them. The labor movement didn't buy us a 40-hour workweek and basic safety standards by letting desperate scabs undercut it.
Infosys age discrimination (Score:5, Interesting)
I gave infosys a resume for a friend for a job that required a degree.
They bounced it back to me and said it needed to have her exact high school graduation date. Not the fact she had a high school degree. The date at which she was 17 or 18.
It should be illegal to require a person's high school graduation date on a resume.
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It should be illegal to require a person's high school graduation date on a resume.
Currently younger people are not a protected class (at a Federal level) against age discrimination in the US. Only workers over 40 years old are a protected class. (Some states may have other age protections).
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I don't think you understand. This was for a senior position that required a college degree and years of experience. It wasn't targeted at a high school student or even a recent graduate.
They didn't want to know you had a high school degree- they specifically wanted to know the date the applicant graduated high school.
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Yeah but try doing something about it.
The problem with "discrimination" in hiring is you can almost always find a reason not to hire someone.
Why dont we have a national IT union? (Score:3)
Like Electricians? companies cant pull this shit on Electricians, if IT people would pull their heads out of their ass and unionize the problem would solve it's self overnight.
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They're coming for you (Score:2)
So, what are you going to do in a few years when 1 million new tech workers (all younger than you, cheaper, and who work more hours) hit the market? You'll do absolutely nothing. You'll be too busy keeping your head above water to. Which is exactly w
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You didn't think they were sent home, did you?
I know an H1-B holder who had to leave the country with his family (and kids who grew up in the US) when it came to and end.
So yes, they do send them home. Why don't you go talk to an H1-B visa holder...
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true, but that is a perniciously relative standard, as you will probably learn eventually one way or another. :)
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true, but that is a perniciously relative standard, as you will probably learn eventually one way or another. :)
You don't know that. Some people are more prudent/aggressive/lucky and don't have that experience. I was lucky in that I had a rough period when my first company was swallowed. From then on, I understood I needed to be competitive. It takes extra work, but it's worth it.
Re:Why dont we have a national IT union? (Score:5, Informative)
Nope. It comes from people that have actual scruples and do not like seeing people being used and abused. I'm highly paid as I have a rare and large skillset, Plus I can step into management easily to avoid it.
But I see that IT really needs a Trade union. First to stop the bullshit of the MCSE morons from polluting the IT pool. second to stop businesses from whoring out people and treating them like shit.
Structure it exactly like the electricians unions and to get in you need to takes tests, spend time on the job under an expert, etc...
I'm guessing you have ZERO clue as to how the electricians union works.
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Too spread out (Score:2)
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Take a look around here. IT folks tend to view themselves as self-sufficient, rugged individualists who pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. Unions are for the weak and stifle innovation, and every tech bro knows they're just one angel investor away from Going Galt.
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Generally, programmers think of themselves as artists who happen to be paid a bunch of money for their irreplaceable genius, as opposed to the artists they sneer at and 'monetize'. A union as we know them doesn't really make sense for creative work; some kind of mutualist support system would make more sense. I think the major point is that programmers are the ones automating tasks. Maintenance takes some persistent labor, but at this moment we have a, shall we say, "bubble" of big ideas.
Anyway, this fleeti
All goes away once H1B goes away (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't bitch at the companies, bitch at the corrupt US officials who allow the practice.
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We've allowed corporations to take over the process, and so our security guards are better described as legislators-for-hire. The blame belongs to citizens (us) for allowing the system to get subverted in this way and not voting out the crooks. We can still fix it, but the perverse incentives that exist will not right themselves.
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440 (Score:2)
Re:Did someone just figure this out *NOW*?? (Score:4, Insightful)
Everyone figured it out a decade ago. The difference between these guys and people who just bitch about it in slashdot, are that these guys are the first to have the balls to try and do something about, however ineffectual it may wind up being.
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Re:Did someone just figure this out *NOW*?? (Score:5, Insightful)
So what you're saying is the second anyone infringes on the rights of a group you belong to you automatically band together in protest, even if it's at the potential expense of your livlihood?
Yes. It's called being in a union and something the corporations (with government assistance) eradicated to the point of almost extinction around the same time this behavior began.
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So your point is? Shall they decide since it's been a while that they might as well sit on their asses and moan on /. instead?
Re:Did someone just figure this out *NOW*?? (Score:4, Interesting)
The most visible part were riots and there were times in London where these were happening with tiring regularity approx every 20y or so.
The whole thing about how evil humans are is true and at the same time untrue. Some basic regulations are needed so that people are not ripped off. If industry can survive only if they pay hunger wages then maybe it there is no reason for it to exist locally or some helping hand is needed, not necessarily in form of cheap credit or release from regulation but some industrial policy like the one Germans have would do something. OC for that one would need to have educated work force. BTW: Germans complain about missing hands on the floor all the time because people are not ready to work for money that are being offered. Seems to be the same story all over. What seems to have been working for England back then was that once one industry was not as profitable as it used to be a new one came around. The only unpleasant part were the hunger and riots on falling part of the curve.
Re:Same Manpower as in Canada? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, they're outsourcing law jobs to India these days. They can't outsource things like arguing in a courtroom, but a lot of the clerical stuff they can.
Re:Same Manpower as in Canada? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Same Manpower as in Canada? (Score:5, Interesting)
An interesting experiment would be to change my name to Ashokar Gupta, and say I'm an orphan, in the U.S. with a H1B visa. The results would be fascinating.
That's a great idea. I wish Bright Future Jobs, the Programmers Guild or WashTech - or a newspaper or a government agency - would do the following:
1) Check with your legal department, to make sure you're not doing anything illegal.
2) Write 50 resumes that sound like the applicant is an American. Make sure that the resumes are are generic and forgettable, so that duplicates aren't remembered.
3) Copy the resumes. In the copies, change the contact information and university that they attended, so that the applicant sounds like they come from India (or some other non-US country).
4) Send in all of the resumes, and see which ones get results. If there's a big bias against Americans in the results, publicize the heck out of it.
The hiring companies might reply to the American-sounding applicants just for appearance's sake, but not intend to hire any Americans. I don't know how to test that kind of bias.
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Regardless of the outcome, publicize the heck out of it. You don't get to hide the results just because they don't confirm your pre-existing bias.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:What does IBM do these days anyway? (Score:4, Interesting)
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The do IT services and consulting
So, nothing?
Re:What does IBM do these days anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
Selling "nothing" for a high hourly billable over an extended contract term is the pinnacle of selling. Don't minimize IBM's profit-generating prowess in this respect.
Re:What does IBM do these days anyway? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What does IBM do these days anyway? (Score:4, Informative)
They sell a bill of goods to banks that have plenty of money and no brains.
About time (Score:2)
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It's stressful continually failing to do a job you're just not able to do, and it's painful working with these guys, trying not to get completely frustrated. Meanwhile onshore workers get dumped on and we end up doing more work to cover for the offshore guys while salaries drop and it's hard to move because a lot of the big guys are going with the management fad... Code quality is visibly dropping worldwide.
I've been noticing that the offshore 'resources' I've been dealing with have been getting worse
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they have also done a lot of buying of other companies as of late... Big data and cloud services are what they are buying now.
Re:Nativism (Score:4, Insightful)
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Charity begins at home.
We (natives) built this country, developed the land and the infrastructure, defined its laws and its culture and made it a distinct entity. We pay the taxes that keep it all going and keep it defended from those who would take advantage of us. "We" were not a uniform body of people, but a series of waves of immigrants (or invaders, depending on who you ask) and what we were 20 years ago isn't what we will be 20 years from now, but nevertheless, we are unique among the nations of the w
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"We" were not a uniform body of people, but a series of waves of immigrants
And the part of the reason the US is the greatest economy on the planet (and also the world's leading culture, which is also monetizable) is due to immigration.
For example, consider these immigrants: Albert Einstein, I.M. Pei, John Muir, Joseph Pulitzer, Irving Berlin, Ang Lee, Cary Grant, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Eddie Van Halen, Rupert Murdoch, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Pamela Anderson, Dave Matthews, George Soros, Sergey Brin, Alexander
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And who will still be here in 20 years and know what to do when the temps have all moved on and taken their domain knowledge with them.
This is part of why I say that the H1-B visa should require that a US citizen should be required to be hired to shadow every single H1-B visa position at an equal pay. The H1-B visa holder should not be allowed to do any work when the US citizen is not shadowing him and the US citizen should not be able to do any work when the H1-B visa holder is not shadowing him. This way, the cost of hiring an H1-B visa holder will pretty much always be more expensive than local labor and thus employers will only hire
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Suppose you were a programmer in India with a decent job, and your company found out they can hire citizens from Timbuktu who are happy to work for 40 cents (US) an hour and work long hours and never complain because 40 cents is a lot of money in Timbuktu.
Over time it appears that many Indian companies favor these Timbuktu workers because they are docile and hard-working compared to Indian citizens, due to their circumstances.
You may lose your job and/or find that wages are going down and expectations going
Re:Nativism (Score:5, Insightful)
> Someone explain to me why people who just happened to be born in the bounds of an arbitrary nation should have ANY advantages over someone who was not.
That's the best argument for elminating the H1B visa actually.
You think those Indians are being done some kind of favor? They are not. They are being allowed to become part of an underclass. If we were to be true to your rhetoric, anyone we saw fit to import for their skills would be the equal to any other man rather than at the mercy of his importer.
Creating an underclass is the kind of thing that "Maya Angelou would object to".
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've heard it all before and it's really wearing thin. Thankfully most real Americans don't pay any attention to the alleged slur anymore despite its repetition at increasingly higher levels of hysteria. You can only cry wolf so many times. Oops, so sorry, that's no doubt a culturally biased reference! LOL
BTW, Asians are among the most racist and class conscious people on earth. The Japanese-Negro inter-racial marriage rate is approximately zero.
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Nativism is the political position of demanding a favored status for certain established inhabitants of a nation as compared to claims of newcomers or immigrants.
Almost all unions in the US are nativist in origin if not in current implementation. No big surprise that the collapse of the unions in the late 60s and 70s coincided with the rise of minorities in blue collar/skilled labor.
Which minorities are those? African Americans? Since most African Americans have ancestors in this country going back over 200 years, I don't think they qualify as the "newcomers or immigrants" that nativism discriminates against.
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No big surprise that the collapse of the unions in the late 60s and 70s coincided with the rise of minorities in blue collar/skilled labor.
Which minorities are those? African Americans? Since most African Americans have ancestors in this country going back over 200 years
African Americans were actively excluded from unions until the late 1960's, see Unions and Discrimination [cato.org].
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"somehow workers are viewed by companies as not having that same right"
In the end there's no more rights than those you can and will defend.
Companies use their big pull to defend their interests. A worker has no such a strengh and -basically voluntarily, they killed whatever strengh they could have as a group the day they ditched unions.
So no wonder.
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