From: Tom C
I've been saying it for a long time (as I'm affected every day by
either outsourced or on-shored technical workers). When the majority
of the population is working at McDonald's or Walmart, who will be
making the money to buy the SUV's and flat-screen TV's?
I'm not sure it's a matter of mindset, per se for those workers, but I
generally agree. It's more that their county's labor markets have been
handed hundreds of thousands of jobs that would have formerly been
held by native citizens because their labor can be had at a far
cheaper price. Hence thousands of qualified, but many more
under-qualified and nominally-qualified workers get the jobs because
all corporations can see is the immediate reduction in labor costs,
not the fact that they'll have to do the job three times to get it
done right, or that they've created a whole class of
un-/under-employed people in their own backyard. It's basically
business and political leaders pulling the rug out from under it's
citizens to increase stockholder wealth, plain and simple. I won't
vouch for all the claims made on this website but I believe it's
basically correct:
http://www.zazona.com/shameh1b/
When I worked as a contractor for the IBM PC Company back in the late
90s, 3 out of 4 of the people in my department were there on H1b visas.
IBM *STRONGLY* discouraged discussion of compensation, but if you kept
your mouth shut and your ears open you could still get a good idea what
was really going on.
IBM contracted for H1b employees through certain brokers. The brokers
were paid the "prevailing wage" for the workers they provided, and were
in turn responsible for paying the "guest workers" and providing
whatever benefits they saw fit. IBM didn't have to figure Social
Security, other payroll taxes, nor insurance or any benefits.
The brokers were responsible for getting the guest worker the visa and
getting them over here to work (although I believe IBM did provide some
paperwork to indicate they were unable to find qualified citizens to
fill the jobs - a patent lie, because the RTP where I worked was started
specifically to bring high tech jobs into the area and there was a
consortium of Universities, Colleges, Community Colleges and Tech
Institutes all organized to train workers to fill those jobs). There
were plenty of well trained local graduates begging for jobs.
IBM used H1b visas to force down the local wage base. Keep in mind also
that North Carolina is one of those terrible "right to work" states, so
there was NO UNION pressure on IBM at RTP.
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