The New Form of Slavery
Carrie at Brilliant at Breakfast writes about H-1B visas, while Sue Sturgis at Facing South writes about H-2B visas, both are bad ideas, and both are costing Americans jobs, while abusing foreign workers who get the visas.
The claim is that there aren’t enough American workers to do the jobs. That’s not true. What’s true is that the corporations who use these visas don’t want to hire people who have rights and will demand to be paid for their education, skills, and experience. This is a form of internal out-sourcing, and the workers are the losers.
The foreign workers put up with unreasonable living conditions, while the Americans being replaced are highly skilled workers that are considered “too expensive”. It’s all about corporate profits.
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lotsa links
this study [linked from this article] does a lot of handwaving with what little data they provide, but it looks like, among other things, a misuse of statistical analysis to ‘prove’ their point.
cool! you just saved me from having to pollute my blog with this.
This situation doesn’t get nearly enough unbiased coverage in the traditional media. I am constantly amazed by the growing influx of H1-B folks I see in my day to day dealings with corporate IT organization. You can pretty much guarantee that the person from an American corporation you interface with will be from India or the like. Even in my own company the H1-B people outnumber the rest of us 3 to 1. These are all mostly developers but they work for a half of what you would have to pay an American for the same job.
In some cases, there really aren’t any Americans who want the job. You hear about H1-B’s mainly in the tech industries, but they’re also used to hire non-citizen/permanent resident faculty at colleges and universities across the country. And speaking from 12 years’ experience coordinating faculty searches in a science department at a Research-I university that should realistically be classed as “first-tier of the second tier,” I’m here to tell you, there aren’t an awful lot of American citizens beating a pathway to our door. Everybody wants to go to the Harvards, the Stanfords, the Michigans–they mostly only think about us when they’ve panned out at all the top-tier institutions. Without being able to use H1-B hires, we’d have to leave positions vacant.
I agree, it’s about corporate profit. And if they don’t get the visas they want, they’ll just outsource the work to a foreign country.
I got a first hand example this month when I needed to get a trouble ticket written at my isp. My internet connection at home went dead. I
havehad dsl. I did troubleshooting on my entire network, swapped out modem, router, cables, etc and then called tech support to have the line repaired. The entire customer service department forearthlinkmy once great but now crappy isp has been moved to India. They read from a script and cannot reason or discuss technical issues with the customer. Even if you get a supervisor! They insisted it was my modem. I could write pages on their incompetence, but I won’t bore anyone still reading.I was a customer for seven years, from when it was Mindspring. At that time they had actual technical people in the support department, not script readers working at a fraction of the cost. Problems were solved in minutes or hours, not days or weeks. My time is valuable, but the isp didn’t think so, and expected me to spend hours on the phone with people who don’t know what they are doing.
Ten days later they STILL would not escalate the problem to the telco. At that point, I quit. No reason to give financial support to a company that disrespects it’s customers. The sooner they go out of business the better. I now have cable. Time will tell if that’s any better, but at least they have US tech support.
Anyway, that explains why I’ve been so quiet lately… I’ve been off line.
Forgive me if I do not think university faculty hiring is representative of the rest of the highly skilled job market. No doubt, in that rarefied atmosphere, there are few enough specialists in some fields that hiring abroad is inevitable. Not so the technological fields. There are plenty of engineers, IT professionals, etc. right here in the good old U.S. of A. And as Lady Min points out, there are plenty of potential workers in related tech support fields.
Since its inception, the internet has provided the basis of my career as a developer. Since it started working well worldwide, it has provided the means of the demise of my career, as companies hire work done overseas that can be done over the ‘net. But H-1B’s are worse than that. They give American companies the “best” of both worlds: they can use low-paid technical professional employees right on their own sites. Do I resent it? damned right I do. It’s not as if these corp’s are returning much of their profits to the U.S. in taxes paid here.
Michael, I have no problem with H-1Bs being used as intended to fill positions in fields where there are no qualified Americans, actually I would like those filling the jobs put on a fast track to naturalization because they are adding to the country and are needed.
What I object to, and have too much experience with, it the wholesale dumping of senior programmers and project managers on the specious excuse that they don’t have the skills required. I was asked if I knew how to use any 4GL languages, and I looked at the Human Resources person and told them I didn’t need to because if necessary I can write a 4GL language, so using one is a trivial skill.
People who can enter machine code instructions from the front panel switches of mainframes and mini are being told they aren’t qualified anymore because the company is sifting to Visual Basic! People just out of universities in Asia where they used the deliberately stunted export versions of software on decades old hardware are claimed to be more knowledgeable than people who have been hand-coding device drivers since CP/M.
Lady Min brings up another sore point when she discusses troubleshooting by script. Who does anyone think wrote the script? A new grad in Bangalore or a senior support person with a degree from CMU who was fired when it was done.
You want angry stories, listen to the guys who were forced to train their replacements or lose all of their benefits as they were pushed out the door.
One of the big problems with Windows is that there is no continuity, everything is done by contract workers. The product is shipped and the workers are dumped. When there are problems, they have to hire new people to look at millions of lines of code they didn’t write to figure out what’s wrong.
And it’s not just the Americans who are abused. The guys who get the H-1Bs are paying huge fees to contractors and living in migrant labor conditions trying to exist in areas like the Silicon Valley, where nothing is cheap.
Michael, you can’t tell me that in a world where guys with a Ph.D. in Physics are teaching high school in rural Louisiana because they can’t get a university teaching job, that there’s a shortage of possible applicants for university science instruction jobs in this country. (Yes, the physics teacher in question actually exists, he was a friend of mine back in my Louisiana days, this isn’t a “friend of a friend” deal). What I *will* tell you is why my friend was teaching high school in rural Louisiana: 1) Tenure. He got tenure teaching high school. He could basically find *NO* tenure-track positions in his field teaching college. 2) Pay and benefits. When you get paid more teaching high school in rural Louisiana than you’d get as “adjunct faculty” at a major university, you know things are completely fucked.
In short, the colleges and universities have fucked themselves over by going to the whole adjunct faculty part time instructor bullshit, and now they’re whining that people don’t want to work for them because, well, because they fucked over their potential staff, so now they gotta import slave labor from overseas to fill those positions? Oh wahhhh! Shall I call a wahmbulance for ya?!
– Badtux the Abusive Penguin
Adjunct faculty positions are not intrinsically evil. I occupied an adjunct position for about a decade myself, in a small but high-quality university music department, as one tiny component of my multifaceted music-related income at that time.
But in my experience, an adjunct position is not a livelihood, or even close to it. A university that hires the services of a very part-time adjunct faculty member must reasonably expect that that person has other priorities. I am not sorry I taught part-time on that faculty; I enjoyed the work very much. But when income became a priority, I returned to my roots as a programmer, in a part-time employed position (with benefits!) of a sort that simply doesn’t exist anymore.
Abuse of workers is unacceptable no matter what the manner of employment. If IT professionals had unions comparable to AFM in the music world, that sort of crap wouldn’t be allowed to continue.
One of our local high school English teachers was the chairman of a department at a state university [with a lot of s’s and p’s in its name] when he applied for the high school job because the security and benefits were better. When a PhD has better prospects in a high school than a university, the system is messed up.
I was an adjunct, but I had a full-time job, and was doing as a favor for a friend and former professor because he needed people for night courses and to keep his mini computers working, but you couldn’t live on it and the job existed from budget to budget.