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During this recession, I like many people working in technology, had a very difficult time finding work, but finally got back on my feet (though in a contract-only position with no benefits).
Now I am working in an American multinational here in the United States, and I find that every last person working for me is an H1B temp work visa holder. There are zero Americans on my staff. In addition to that, we recently had to fill 3 more headcount in my group. My boss instructed me that due to 'budget' that we were to go to our India sourcing department and they would arrange for contractors to be sent in from offshore (India). It would take about 1 month for their visas to be arranged and for them to be on site (in Raleigh North Carolina). Though our Applicant tracking system is overflowing with applications by Americans (including probably some of my own old ones), we didn't even look at those before bringing in the H1Bs. The corporate law firm arranges this, gives the 'no Americans can be found' stamp of approval and the temps are flown in with expedited Visas (H1B or other temp type visas that they use until the H1B is approved). I mentioned this to a couple of my coworkers, and I was discretely told to be quiet about it if I knew what was good for me and didn't want to 'expire' myself.
At the same time, while I was on a business trip, I found that several others in lower / mid management Americans in the firm, mostly in their 50s all have recent college grad kids living at home with them, unable to find any work or just working at the mall with their university degrees in solid subjects. It dawned on me then, that actually we had no American recent grads in the entire company. That virtually all the lower 2 to 3 rungs of company positions (programmers, BAs, SMEs..etc) were H1Bs (again, almost exclusively from India).
Basically the modus operandi is to first hire in India (we have a big India offshoring center), if that is not possible, bring someone from India to the United States, and if that is not possible either, then finally look at the Applicant Database and see if we can find an American for the role as a last resort. As a result, most junior roles (that are the easiest to fill), go to H1B and other temp visa holders. American new grads or unemployed won't even get interviews.
Talking to others in the area at the local linux group, it turns out virtually every other tech company in the area is doing this, and not only here either. Boston, Herndon Virginia tech corridor, the suburban silicon valley, it is the same story everywhere from coast to coast.
This is essentially visa fraud on a massive scale, probably criminal and basically theft from Americans who are legally supposed to get those jobs first. Right now, we don't even read the US applicant database when hiring in the US for most roles. Other firms here don't either from what others working in them tell me.
If you are working in a large corporate tech environment in the United States, you probably know exactly what I am talking about (reply and say 'yep' if you do). There are probably even some sitting within a couple cubes from you while there are fewer and fewer Americans working as they get 'replaced' around you.
I concluded that if this was not happening, the recession in the middle class would have been over years ago, and we would now be in a very healthy broad based recovery affecting everyone with increasing wages and improving benefits as the unemployed found good jobs with benefits, shortages would lead to new grads getting work, buying homes and filling them with furniture rather than living with their parents in their childhood bedrooms..etc.
What is the solution? A typical union is not the solution (I don't want one anyways, they often bring different kinds of problems). Writing to congress won't help (since corruption of congress by tech corp lobby corporate donations is what brought this about in the first place). Staging an annual 'Day of Action' protesting in front of tech company clients (i.e. if they use Oracle, in front of their clients retail stores) with your Guy Fawkes mask. Other industrial action like is common in European countries? A broad employee based (but somehow secret so we don't get laid off for being 'low performers' when it is discovered we are in it?) political pressure group? Anonymous? College grad groups (since they are the ones most affected by this)?
I'd like to hear the ideas and thoughts of the people on this forum of what to do, what action can be taken to reverse this. It is criminal what is happening in this country in this regard and I don't think we should stand for it.
Ed
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Monday August 18 2014, @01:58PM
I agree with the general sentiment here. A fundamental problem in business today is the professional managerial class who got there not by working their way up but by getting a business degree, cozying up to some corporate bigwig, and then being put in charge of things they know nothing about.
This is part of the legacy of the 1980's in particular: The size of MBA programs skyrocketed, and a fundamental philosophical shift was made towards the idea that management was a skill independent of knowing the ins and outs of the process of making a product. By contrast, there's at least one account of Ford executives being required to be able to assemble a working Model T.
An example of this was an acquaintance of mine who had recently graduated with both a mechanical engineering and MBA degree - she got a job scheduling production of moulded plastics, and within a few months had pissed off the factory floor workers so much that they would simply refuse to do what she told them to, and her boss eventually fired her when the orders weren't delivered. The reason? She saw the entire production process as simply numbers on a spreadsheet, and had never spent time on the floor understanding exactly what she was telling them to do. She had never asked the foremen to teach her the details, or even asked for their input on day-to-day decisions. Had she done that, she could have made better decisions, gotten the foremen and others on the factory floor to work with her rather than against her, made the company more profitable, and kept her job.
A lot of what the MBA seems to be about is blinding those with decision-making power from the consequences of those decisions. I've read some of the popular business literature, and there's absolutely nothing in there about the impact of decisions on the personal lives of employees, or the environmental effects of industry, or long-term retention of customers and employees. There's lots on how to put together convincing presentations, though, to convince superiors, investors, and customers to buy useless junk at inflated prices. There's a lot on how to turn anything into numbers on a spreadsheet, and a lot of inspirational-sounding nonsense.
The way those with power mitigate the risk of a real change is by throwing enough crumbs to a subset of the peasants that they are more concerned about making sure the other peasants don't get their crumbs than they are about trying to figure out where the rest of the cake went.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday August 18 2014, @08:23PM
What do this bread crumbs consist of?
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday August 19 2014, @12:19AM
If you work as a software developer or system administrator, there's a good chance you're one of those who gets crumbs. Crumbs like:
- Driving a car made in the last 15 years
- Owning a home (and having a good chance of being able to eventually own it free and clear without a mortgage to worry about)
- Cable or Netflix
- A retirement account, with the accompanying promise of eventually not having to work
- The ability to travel relatively easily around the world
- Good (possibly private) schools for your kids
- Eating high-quality fresh fruits and vegetables regularly
I know, it's not much, but the majority of the country right now has a really really hard time getting any of those. Education isn't necessarily the answer either: There are thousands of PhDs making peanuts teaching as adjuncts because those are the only academic positions open.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.