On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 02:37:44PM -0500, John Sessoms wrote: > From: Adam Maas >> On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 12:36 PM, Tom C <[email protected]> wrote: >>> > The sad part is: >>> > >>> > 1) Stupid greedy American corporations bring many of these so-call >>> > "highly trained professionals" over here on VISA's because they will >>> > work for far less than Americans. >> >> Which is untrue by the way. They get paid market rates over here and >> occasionally more. And they by-and-large are "highly trained >> professionals" and typically actually have extensive experience. I've >> worked with quite a number of these engineering expats over the years. >> I've zero issues with them aside from occasional problems with their >> spoken-english skills. > > That's not the way it worked when I was at IBM in the late 90s. They > were bringing in west Asians on H1B visas as contractors because they > could pay them about half what U.S. engineers got paid for the same work. > > Strictly speaking, you weren't supposed to tell anyone else working at > IBM how much YOU were getting paid. Partly because they might find out > how badly they were being screwed, partly because YOU might find out how > badly you were being screwed.
What you describe above is pretty much what DEC were doing two decades earlier. I transferred out to the states at the end of the 70s. I was paid more than I was getting in the UK, so it looked like a good deal to me. A few years later, though, I discovered that what I was actually being paid was significantly less than I should have been getting if DEC had followed what they claimed to be their corporate salary policies. I told DEC what I thought of this when I walked out of the door (after giving them four years of payback for their getting me a green card) and took a job at a small startup (paying less than 'market rate') which still paid me 40% more than I was getting from DEC. But what do you expect? As the current health care debate shows, the label "socialist" is the kiss of death to any American political initiative. Ranting about the ugly side of free market capitalism isn't going to solve anything; if you want a system that doesn't treat most of the workforce as disposable assets that can be sacrificed on the altar of the profit gods the change needs to come from within. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
