US Senator Blasts Microsoft's H-1B Push As It Lays 18,000 Off Workers 529
dcblogs (1096431) writes On the floor of U.S. Senate Thursday, Sen. Jeff Sessions delivered a scalding and sarcastic attack on the use of highly skilled foreign workers by U.S. corporations that was heavily aimed at Microsoft, a chief supporter of the practice. Sessions' speech began as a rebuttal to a recent New York Times op-ed column by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, investor Warren Buffett and Sheldon Adelson ... But the senator's attack on "three of our greatest masters of the universe," and "super billionaires," was clearly primed by Microsoft's announcement, also on Thursday, that it was laying off 18,000 employees. "What did we see in the newspaper today?" said Sessions, "News from Microsoft. Was it that they are having to raise wages to try to get enough good, quality engineers to do the work? Are they expanding or are they hiring? No, that is not what the news was, unfortunately. Not at all."
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Re:Free market economy (Score:5, Insightful)
Silly argument (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a false comparison being made here... who says the Nokia engineer or the Xbox content maker being laid off has the same skills as the programmer they are wanting to hire?
Re:Free market economy (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Free market economy (Score:0, Insightful)
Somebody needs an abject lesson on free market globalisation, and it's not scsirob.
Re:Free market economy (Score:0, Insightful)
That's still only part of the picture. You're only looking at how producers choose to operate. We also need to look at how consumers operate.
If a producer choose to use cheaper workers, who are often far less-capable when it comes to knowledge-intensive trades like software development, then the producer's products will start to suffer, sooner or later. If they produce operating systems, for example, then they may start producing ones with unusable, flat, "Modern" user interfaces.
Consumers are the other part of the picture. Being it a somewhat free market economy, they can choose whether or not to buy from the producer in question. If the producer's increasingly-worse products aren't of value to consumers, be they individuals or corporations, they'll look elsewhere for products to satiate their needs.
In the short run, companies who choose to use cheap, third-world labor may see some financial benefits. In the long run, however, they always lose. Their products will suffer, especially if the cheap, third-worlders are brought to more prosperous nations to perform knowledge work that is far beyond their capability. Customers will stop buying that producer's products. The producer will feel the pinch, financially.
If you have a copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader installed, look at its credits. Notice the names, and their obvious origins. It'll be clear why it's such a lousy piece of software.
Silly argument (part 2) (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should we pass laws to enable a company to do what it wants?
Laws should be passed because they are morally right and protect the American people, not to make business more profitable. Train the workers you have.
Re:Free market economy (Score:0, Insightful)
we had enough regulation already, look where it got us. do you think throwing the same shit over and over again is going to work? we need a fundamental change.
Re:Free market economy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Free market economy (Score:5, Insightful)
>we had enough regulation already, look where it got us.
To the most economically, technologically and military powerful nation the planet?
America only started falling off once Reagan and Clinton started busting unions, signing free trade treaties, giving amnesties to illegal aliens and deregulating wall street.
Re:Not fungible (Score:5, Insightful)
If tech companies weren't shit at training they would be somewhat more fungible, though not perfectly so. Engineering companies are somewhat better at this: if a company is looking for chemical engineers and can't find someone with experience in exactly the process they're hiring for, they'll hire a chemical engineer with experience in a different process and get them up to speed. Tech companies seem incapable of doing that, and instead they have a big list of really specific background they want, "must have 7 years of experience in J2EE and 3 years experience using Joe Bob's Serialization Framework", then complain they can't find anyone so it must be a "programmer shortage".
Re:Free market economy (Score:0, Insightful)
"You must be stupid if you believe that" is a logical fallacy.
Re:Free market economy (Score:5, Insightful)
What did regulation get us? You mean after the new deal was put in place but before Ragean and company went about getting rid of it? Hmm let's see? End of the great depression? But wait Rush Limbah says that WW2 ended the great depression? Well the great depression was starting to end before WW2 but if you are saying that the massive government spending and massive government growth during WW2 ended the great depression then I have to thank you for proving my point exactly,
What else did it get us? ~50 years of strong growth without any real recessions? Strongest middle class in the history of mankind? Turning the US economy into the biggest in the world with the largest manufactoring base? Remember back in the day all the best consumer electronics were all made in the USA. Our manufactoring base was protected because from the founding of the country until about the 1980's we actually charged tariffs to people importing goods we could make here. In fact until WW1 tarrifs completely funded the federal government.
Execpt for all of that then I guess I would have to say yeah, regulations gave us nothing. Guess we need a fundamental change? And by fundemental change I guess you mean do the same thing we have been doing for the last ~30 years? I.E continue to deregulate and destroy whatever is left of the new deal? Yes we should not got back to the way things were back in the 50's and 60's. Back then the government actually regulated business. Back then a CEO could not be paid in stock (so he -- and yes back then it was always he, couldn't pump and dump like everyone loves to do today.) If a company became a monopoly then the government would split it up. The government wouldn't allow banks to lend money to people that couldn't afford to pay it back. And since the ultra rich had a +50% top tax bracket (with a lot fewer shelters so they actually mostly paid it) more rich people invested more money in their companies (to avoid paying taxes) and so there was less money around to have tons of bubbles in the stock market, energy market, housing market, etc. Back then companies actually had R&D departments because the CEOs all weren't slaves to the stock price -- they actually cared about the long term future of the company (imagine that!)
No you are right we should certainly not go back to the way things were back then. We need a fundemental change and that means doing the same thing we have been doing since Ragean.
Re:Free market economy (Score:3, Insightful)
So, the Senate controls the markets?
Really?
Or is it just Reid?
Not decades and decades of bad & manipulated & paid-for laws/regulations/state monopolies?
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Re:Free market economy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Free market economy (Score:2, Insightful)
There has never been deregulation of anything. Only changed regulation, and usually more of it. The problem we have today is not too much or too little, but regulatory capture by the big boys which serve as a barrier to entry for little guys.
We need fewer, simpler regulations. Regulations that you can understand without being a lawyer or expert on "regulatory compliance". The mess of overlapping regulations today were largely written by the regulated and the ones who really understand them use them to do whatever they want.
Re:Free market economy (Score:5, Insightful)
I appreciate your comments, very well said.
But, the American prosperity after World War II was due to the fact that the rest of the world had basically been converted to rubble and it takes a couple of decades to rebuild after such destruction. America lost a lot of young men, but our infrastructure was intact after the war.
I agree with everything you are saying, just pointing out why we had 50 years of growth and prosperity. We built industry, everyone else had to rebuild.
Re:Free market economy (Score:3, Insightful)
You as Americans have a choice and a vote, each 2-4 years. You can either do something or you don't want to. The spiral and time is working against you.
Every so often we get to vote, but we are limited to two choices, both of which have been given large sums of money by various PACs, which are essentially just fronts for various corporate officers. Often, the same PAC will back both candidates in any given race, just so that they get the benefit of backing the winner every time. There is no democratically elected leadership in this country anymore, there is only a selection between two candidates presented to the masses by the 1%. In all the ways that really matter (fiscal policy, economic policy, regulation, law enforcement, etc...), the candidates are identical. They will debate and argue over the issues that the public has been trained to believe really matter, but in reality the issues that are hotly contested don't really matter, and the ones that do, are quietly agreed upon behind closed doors. How many politicians that truly have power have done anything to end Guantanamo, or the rights abuses happening there? How many have done anything to end the systematic dissolution of our constitutional rights? How many have actually taken steps to fix the systemic problems that led to the recession? How many have taken any action to help eliminate the vastly disproportional power the 1% wield in our political system? How many have taken steps to address the extraordinary and growing wealth and earnings inequalities in our society?
The answer to these questions is now, and has been: none that matter. The only way we will be able to undo the damage the 1% have done to our country will be through an extraordinary action outside the accepted political system, because everything inside the political system has been thoroughly corrupted by those with the real power: the 1%.
Plus, the striking down of the law limiting corporate contributions by the Supreme Court has made things even worse. Now they can give as much as they want.
How a corporation came to have the right of free speech is beyond me...
Any company which lays off 10% of their workforce (Score:5, Insightful)
Any company which lays off 10% of their workforce should be banned from the H1B program for at least 5 years.
Re:Free market economy (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, we paid for all that with $17 trillion of debt, and a behavior/thought process that it was ok, starting with Reagan and continuing to this day.
Other countries are just waiting for it all to collapse and pick our bones.
When Reagan took office federal debt was a little over 2T and went up to a little over 4T when he left office. Clinton took it from a around 6 to around 7. The current administration has seen it go from around 9 to around 17. Maybe you haven't kept up on current events but there hasn't been much union busting, new free trade treaties, or deregulation of wall street in the last 6 years.
Re:Free market economy (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, we paid for all that with $17 trillion of debt, and a behavior/thought process that it was ok, starting with Reagan and continuing to this day.
Other countries are just waiting for it all to collapse and pick our bones.
When Reagan took office federal debt was a little over 2T and went up to a little over 4T when he left office. Clinton took it from a around 6 to around 7. The current administration has seen it go from around 9 to around 17. Maybe you haven't kept up on current events but there hasn't been much union busting, new free trade treaties, or deregulation of wall street in the last 6 years.
You skipped a prez, hoss......GWB, the president who ran up that 8 trillion to bail out his Wall Street Buddies.....
Re:Free market economy (Score:5, Insightful)
Then, Reagan came into office and lowered that top rate. All of a sudden, the government deficits started going up and work didn't get done. Millionaires started using their new buckets of money for speculation. Now, we're in a recession as a result of Wall Street speculation and we can't fix a fucking pothole let alone pave a single new freeway.
Re:Free market economy (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll let you know when he actually starts changing something. So far, it's been pretty "Hopey" and not a lot of "changey".
It annoys me when conservatives get up in arms about Obama, who is basically just keeping Bush policies steady. Yes, even the recent migrant kids thing is a Bush policy. sigh.
At least Liberals hate him for REAL reasons... Basically that he hasn't been very "Changey".
Re:Free market economy (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh... There's been plenty of Union busting, plenty of new free trade treaties, and plenty of wall street deregulation. Certainly there's been no love for Unions. Free Trade Treaties? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U... [wikipedia.org]. Since we already deregulated the banking industry to stupidity, we TRIED to re-regulate, and now even Dodd and Frank acknowledge that the Dodd-Frank act is toothless.
Where have YOU been?
Also, yeah, you missed a President there chuckles.... How Convenient.
Re:Free market economy (Score:5, Insightful)
Reagan went from $1T to $3T
Bush Sr went from $3T to $6T
Clinton went from $6T to $5T
Bush Jr went from $5T to $11T
Obama went from $11T to $17T
Which one was worse?
It doesn't fucking matter.
Re:Free market economy (Score:5, Insightful)
You're forgetting the HUGE back-door corporate subsidy they get by putting workers on poverty wages and forcing them onto welfare.
Re:Free market economy (Score:5, Insightful)
It's funny how much some people respect President Reagan. Actually, it's not funny. It is sad.
And you didn't even mention the War on Drugs, the sole reason the prison population bloomed during and since his presidency.
And what recession? The DOW is at an all time high?
Re:Free market economy (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm a little unclear on how this shapeless formless nameless "government bureaucracy" does all that. I'm extremely crystal clear on how the US has entered into a race to the bottom, deliberately encouraged by our trade practices, our effective elimination of tariffs, and all with the willing cooperation of just about every president since and including Jimmy Carter, who was a lot more friendly to free trade than anybody gives him credit for (or, if you're like me, blames him for)
After WWII when we were rebuilding nations, we gave them strong labor protections, decent work policies, strong provisions for health care for all. Written into their constitutions or whatever they call their founding documents. We did NOT give them "free trade". Absolutely nothing is perfect, and some societies are messed up in other ways besides economics, but from an economic perspective that worked out very well for them at the same time it was working out very poorly for us once they got themselves rebuilt.
BTW, everybody who's been watching our utter (intentional, I might add) failings overseas the last decade or so--the way you rebuild a country is to help stabilize the government and then help local employers employ local people to put things right. You don't go giving sweetheart contracts to American multinationals who do nothing but screw things up. Franklin Roosevelt had a person in charge of making sure that there were no war profiteers in WWII. The last few presidents we've done exactly the opposite.
Neocon policies don't work, have never worked, and will never work unless you define "work" as "transfer wealth from regular people to the well off". That's been going very well indeed lately. We need to change that. All the fuss about "terrorism" and the increasing authoritarianism in the US and allied countries is all about them fearing that we will.
Re:Did he just notice that? (Score:1, Insightful)
Microsoft layed off a bunch of v\factory workers and QA guys while complaining how hard I is to hire developers. Seems legit to me.
But is so much more fun to shout "big companies are evil!" "rich guys are evil!". than to think about issues. Here's a thought for you: if you think rich is bad, you won't get rich.
Re:Free market economy (Score:5, Insightful)
There was the savings and loan meltdown in the early '80's when they were deregulated. That was the first sign about the dangers of de-regulation with the big difference that people went to jail then.
Now they get huge bonuses as rewards for screwing the worlds finances.
Re:Free market economy (Score:5, Insightful)
He can't. Jeff Sessions is a Republican in the Senate. Harry Reid is single handedly deciding on what gets to the Senate floor for a vote and what does not. Until Reid chooses to do something about it, nothing can be done in the Senate. Sessions is attempting to shame everyone who is preventing something from being done.
With Reid as Senate Majority leader there will be no free market. A free market might allow people to not be dependent on government hand outs and he can't allow that to happen.
Similar arguments (about this and other things) can be made about Speaker of the House John Boehner and the House Republicans. Obstinate, obstructive, short-sighted, selfish, petty people can be found many places in Congress.
Laughable conclusions ..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me preface this by saying I think Limbaugh has become a self-important blowhard, who spends hours saying nothing, just to hear himself talk on the radio. I'm also no fan of the vast majority of idiots signed up as members of the Republican party.
But let's not try to cherry-pick historical events to make conclusions that just aren't there..... The Great Depression might have shown signs of going away before WWII, but you'd have to be kind of crazy to back the idea that America's prosperous period after WWII had nothing to do with winning the war! Essentially, on this one, Rush actually *is* right. Heck, if nothing else, one could make a strong argument that the war put America in an advantageous place in the world market simply because other major competitors were knocked out for a while. (It's easy to look good when the other players are still rebuilding decimated manufacturing capabilities and so on.)
And no... "massive govt. spending and growth" from WWII wasn't the magic ticket to prosperity.... Fools like GWB seemed to believe this, and America found out the hard way that you can't just dump a ton of money into having a war and expect automatic prosperity to result.
In reality, if America had some way to win WWII without all of the military expenditures, we would have been that much MORE well-off, post war, than we were.
Now, arguing about banking regulations, specifically? Yes, I think it's pretty widely understood that the deregulation in the Reagan era (and let's be honest here ... much of that had more to do with Reagan's economic advisers than Reagan himself) turned out pretty bad. If you had to put a face and a name to those ideas, you'd probably pin most of it on Alan Greenspan, who eventually admitted himself that he was wrong. (Essentially, he felt he did the right thing, philosophically speaking -- but didn't think the people put in charge of banking would be so short-sighted and irresponsible to do some of the things they were ABLE to do with the regulations lifted. Basically, he was guilty of believing too much in some of the people who supposedly could make wise business decisions.)
If you want to talk fundamental change that would actually help America's situation today? We've GOT to get rid of the Corporatism. Big businesses can NOT be allowed to infiltrate government and effectively become another arm of it! Too many people, today, have this simplistic notion that big businesses are evil/bad/wrong, and need to be forcibly dismantled -- or forced to give up a portion of their wealth to "everyone else". Big business, itself, is not the problem. A big business is just one of those small businesses people like to cheer for that did well enough, it got bigger and hired a lot more people. The PROBLEM comes in when government accepts financial gifts from said businesses for favors, or allows people with direct ties to the businesses to take key positions inside government itself and proceeds to get new legislation made/approved that only benefits those businesses.
IMO, Obama is just as guilty of perpetuating this as any of our last few presidents -- and the results are like a snowball rolling downhill. For example:
http://www.newyorker.com/onlin... [newyorker.com]
Re:Free market economy (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair, it's hard to change much while you need 60 votes in the senate to get anything to pass.
I'm glad he spent his political capital on the ACA. I'm disappointed and curious about why he didn't shut down Guantanamo . He's made a lot of "small" liberal progress on over a hundred issues but his hands are tied by the party of "no no no no no no no no no no no no no NO NO no no no!"
Re:Free market economy (Score:2, Insightful)
It wasn't being at war that ended the great deression, it was the process of removing s significant portion of people from the work pool and then needing to supply several war torn countries right after it.
Interestingly, the great deression was largely the results of keynsian economics. There were a lot of other factors too but its interesting to how we forget
Re:Did he just notice that? (Score:3, Insightful)
Your employer's duty is to give you money, not hold your hand and guide you through life.
Microsoft had a very generous severance package for engineers. They're on the payroll for 2 months after "being layed off", they get 2 weeks pay per 6 months tenure up to some high cap, from what I've heard.
When I got layed off in the dot-bust, my employer gave me a check and a shove out the door, but not having to work for 6 months gave me plenty of time brush up my skill set and to place myself with another company.
A free man doesn't expect his employer to be his mommy too - that's how a serf thinks. A company who wants to hire professionals ever again, after laying some of them off, will make sure to have a decent severance package - and MS did that. Most big companies that aren't in a death spiral do.
Re:Did he just notice that? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd argue that an employer's duty is both to compensate you monetarily AND to provide a safe and comfortable working environment. Beyond that one nitpick, I completely agree with you.
Even as a temporary contract programmer, when my project with Microsoft was cancelled, I was treated very well. They kept me on for another month as an unofficial "severance" even though there was no work to be done, and arranged for a few other internal interviews for me. My project lead also bought me an Xbox (the first one, which had recently come out) and some games out of his own pocket.
Obviously, that was a while ago, but from what I've heard, MS still generally treats its people pretty well, and that experience was borne out several times while working for them in contract positions. Note that this isn't completely altruistic - part of it is to avoid wrongful termination lawsuits (I've been given severance pay by another employer in exchange for promising not to sue, which was fine with me), and part of it is simple competition with others who might treat their employees better. And of course, part of it is that most people aren't complete jerkwads, and understand that helping out someone with a severance package is simply the right thing to do, as being laid off is already a mildly traumatic experience.
Re:Did he just notice that? (Score:4, Insightful)
A free man doesn't expect his employer to be his mommy too - that's how a serf thinks.
Look around you. Do you see people who *want* to be free men, or *want* to be serfs?