Microsoft Says H-1B Workers Among Those Losing Jobs 612
CWmike notes that after a US Senator urged Microsoft to lay off H-1B workers first, Microsoft says it is cutting a 'significant number' of foreign workers as part of the layoff it announced last week. But experts say there is nothing in the law requiring a company to cut the jobs of H-1B workers before US workers. David Kussin, an immigration attorney, said, 'In fact, the law is very well designed to say that you have to treat H-1Bs the same as US citizens in all regards.' Another H-1B critic, UC Davis professor Norman Matloff, said the Senator's letter would help their fight. 'If Microsoft doesn't state that they will lay off the H-1Bs first — and they won't state this — then it would be awfully tough for Bill Gates to come back to the Hill and urge an H-1B increase, wouldn't it?'"
Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:5, Informative)
It's an easy thing to fix - require that H1B visa holders receive the same pay and benefits for their work as the rest of the workforce.
It's already required. [wikipedia.org]
You're ignoring two things:
1. Companies have ways of working around this rule. This typically involves saying that the visa holder has skills not available in the U.S. workforce.
2. By importing workers, the company effectively shifts the supply curve [wikipedia.org] and lowers wages across the board.
I will also add, laying off foreign workers first is a form of protectionism. [wikipedia.org] Protectionism is never a good economic policy.
You do realize what you are quoting, right? (Score:3, Informative)
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AtlasShrugged [tvtropes.org]Meanwhile, contrast the "reality" described in that book with the current news.
Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:2, Informative)
Re:WHO IS JOHN GALT? (Score:3, Informative)
Mod parent up. People would do well if they read a book about the ideas that made this country great and those that are tearing it down. If one can't at least see that a man has the right to his own life and what he has earned through legitimate business, contracts to the mutual benefit of both parties, then perhaps one lacks the capability to reason.
Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:2, Informative)
HIS best interest? The vast majority of his fortune is or will be going to various charities. It's in OUR best interest to see his company prosper financially, as much as we'd hate to admit it (and I think most of Slashdot becomes nauseous at the idea)
Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:5, Informative)
One place I worked at, it was no secret why were hiring H1-B workers. It was much cheaper.
Whenever we hired Americans my boss would interview them, I'd interview them, another peer would interview them. Indian workers just kinda showed up.
One guy was fresh out of training and needed a lot of hand holding to do basic things. Any random CS grad would have been the same.
The best people we had were American. That sounds ethnocentric but the people I'm talking about included Russian-American, Indian American, etc. either first generation or immigrants.
I remember another time when someone contacted me about developing a small site for them. They explained how they hired an indian firm for $2,500 and after months of not getting the project done hired another for $3,500 and the didn't complete it either. He decided to share this information with me after I quoted him $10k for his project. He ultimately decided to try and find another outsourcing firm. Months later I checked and he didn't have the site done. He wound up spending almost the same in and got nothing in return.
Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Know what disgusts me ? (Score:3, Informative)
WRONG. As an H-1B holder, and a former TN-visa holder, I pay all the same taxes an American citizen or Green Card holder does. My employer pays the same 6.2% (or whatever it is) Social Security Tax that he pays for my American citizen co-worker. How do I know this? I work for a small company, so my boss bitches about it whenever he has to deal with payroll, like it's my fault he has to pay that 6.2% on top of my salary to the Federal Government. I see all the deductions the government takes on my W-2s when I file taxes. Neither my employer nor I see get any special breaks for having an H-1B employee. In fact, in order to hire me, he has to pay thousands into a special fund which, ostensibly, goes towards programs to help train Americans in high tech jobs; it probably went to pay for Senator "I am not a crook" Stevens' Bridge to Nowhere instead. Again, not my fault.
Salary? I'm getting the same as my American citizen co-worker. So: same salary, same taxes, but my employer has to pay into a special fund for the "privilege" of hiring an H-1B and he had to pay a lawyer to properly process the H-1B. I've cost him more than an American Citizen. On the flip side, I've also (presumably) provided enough of a skillset to make such a cost worthwhile.
You know what we do get? The shaft, when we lose our jobs. Yeah, all that unemployment insurance money they take out of my paycheque? I don't get to collect it when I lose my job, unlike an American citizen, or a Green Card holder. I get a nice pink slip and a 'GTFO the country before we deport your ass'.
It sounds to me that if there's H-1B shenanigans going on, the fault lies with the employers committing it, the lawyers who processed their paperwork, the employees who went along with it, and the bureaucracy for simply pushing paper along. Go after them for immigration fraud. There are some of us doing it by the book and trying to play by the rules.
Re:Re H1B should go first (Score:2, Informative)
Workers on TEMPORARY 3 year guest worker visas should not be buying houses. How do they even get a loan?
Re:WHO IS JOHN GALT? (Score:5, Informative)
So medical doctors would be the richest people in the world. I can choose to go without a car. I can choose not to use roads. I can choose to raise my own food and make my own clothes. However, when I get very sick, I can either find a doctor and pay them whatever they want, or die. Sure, if I want to hold strongly to my beliefs, I can tell the doctor to go screw themselves. However, death is kind of a big deal. You don't get to change your mind.
Plus, this was the attitude that allowed Crassus to become one of the richest people in history. His fire brigade would show up at your house fire and refuse to work unless you sold him everything for pennies on the dollar. Again, I could hold to my beliefs and watch it burn, or I could sell it and salvage something from the fire.
Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:5, Informative)
Shopping around the world for labor and materials ultimately lowers the price of goods.
No it doesn't; it increases the profit margin of the people providing the goods. Why on Earth would they lower prices when they're making good money? Demand is not perfectly elastic in the real world (especially for necessities like food, housing, health care, etc.), so lowering the price won't necessarily make a seller more money by increasing the amount demanded. Therefore, it's in their best interests to just pocket the money, and that's exactly what they do.
Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:4, Informative)
You don't get it.
It's not immigration of people with engineering degrees that drives down wages. It's continually bringing in entry level people and expelling experienced people that does that.
Everyone here seem to grasp that the fact that music files are so readily and perfectly copyable changes the economics of sharing copies. What some people miss is how the same kinds of things make the economics of knowledge different than, say the economics of automobiles. Even having and automobile industry creates lots of related jobs, in suppliers, distribution, sales, advertising and the like. But if you brought in a bunch of low wage braseros to run your automobile plant, you'd definitely have that many fewer jobs for American auto workers.
But has Linus Torvalds living in the US decreased the net employment of American software engineers by one?
Software is different in that making software tends to generate more jobs making software.
Think about it. Some team comes up with this great software framework that makes doing something that was hard before, easy. Does this mean people who were doing that stuff lose their jobs? No. What happens is that there is a new demand for people who can use that framework to do things that weren't possible before.
Let's say we're talking about Geographic Information Systems. You can do the kind of things GIS does by programming in Fortran with nothing but bare metal and a library with a handful of trig functions. But back when this was the the only way to do GIS, almost nobody did, except maybe in the oil industry or defense. But when GIS becomes so simple minded that non-technical managers can do simple analyses of store siting decisions, none of those few people are going to lose their jobs. In fact, there's a whole new industry of people employed doing jobs that didn't exist before.
Employers make their hiring decisions based on marginal calculations. In the Fortran-and-bare-metal days, many things were theoretically valuable, but not worth the expense and uncertainty to try. When what was hard before becomes easy, this opens up a new universe of things to do, which equals new employment opportunities.
Re:B*cough*s*it (Score:5, Informative)
No, actually they can't. Take a look into the rules those countries have in place to protect their workers from immigrants.
Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:5, Informative)
Actually that's not true. H1B's often accept a dramatically reduced standard of living, with the intent to make as much money as they can for the duration of their visa, then take it home with them. Sometimes this is still much better than the conditions they left at home.
H1B's make on average 23% less than their citizen counterparts [ddj.com].
The citizen counterparts tend to want things like kids, gadgets, a nice car, good clothes, a house, etc. The H1B tends to have 1 week's worth of clothes, takes public transportation or has an inexpensive used car, lives here alone (maybe with family back home), lives in a one-room studio apartment, and maintains a minimum of optional expenses.