On the bright side, H-1B work visa fees are used to retrain U.S. workers in fields where there is a need. Here’s a perspective from the NY Times (free registration required):
So the subfields where there are jobs may not be “sexy,” but there are certainly jobs out there for people with IT skills. Believe me, I know: in most cases it’s impossible to get a green card for a foreigner unless you can show that there are no qualified and available U.S. workers at the prevailing wage (and the employer is required to pay the prevailing wage for the occupation and geographic location). And yet my office prepares hundreds, if not thousands, of successful green card applications every year.
You may have a hard time finding the exact job you want, but there are definitely jobs out there for qualified people. Why should IT be different than any other industry?
So where do you live? All I know is that I know people who have been out of work for a long time. They need to pay the bills. Office Jacuzzis? Cubicle Foosball? Papper Millionaires? What planet are you living on? These are ordinary folks, not dot-com millionaires down on their luck and too proud to take a job writing boring code in East Blithering.
The pay in nursing is pretty awful. My relatives who had nursing jobs got out of it for precisely that reason. If they paid nurses more, there wouldn’t be a shortage. And if you’re seriously suggesting picking produce in the fields as a growth opportunity I wouldn’t want you as my guidance counselor.
>> You may have a hard time finding the exact job you want,
Gigolo was my calling and vocation and I even graduated “cum laude” but unfortunately, my services are not in demand. Which goes to show you consumers don’t always know what’s best for them.
CalMeacham you still seem to imply people are entitled to a certain standard of living. They are not. Only in the measure that they provide services which society (the free market) considers useful and is willing to pay for them accordingly. if the market is not paying for your skills it means your skills are not needed. I just don’t see where we get this sense of entitlement.
Well, shoot, I graduated from a competitive university with a B.A. in Spanish, with an A average (no easy trick when you’re a native English speaker in classes conducted in Spanish, and all your classmates are native Spanish speakers – you have to work twice as hard) and admission to the relevant honor society. I had dreams of being a literary translator, but unless you’re Vladimir Nabokov, it’s hard to find a job doing that that pays the bills. So I had to adjust my expectations. I ended up initially with a job in a nonprofit doing job placement for refugees, and then court interpreting job. Although I’ve had a rather nontraditional career path, I’ve done just fine for myself with a little flexibility. I’m no millionaire, but then that was never my goal.
(You know, **sailor, ** flexibility isn’t a bad characteristic for a wannabe gigolo. Think about it.)
So do I. But that’s always been the case. Where is the evidence that the current phenomenon is due to foreigners stealing jobs, as opposed to, oh, I don’t know - the Internet bubble imploding?
We have this debate every six months, like clockwork; someone complains that the damn Indians are taking all the IT jobs. Well, they can’t be taking all of them, because there are IT jobs unfilled all over the place. As it has always been, the specific technical qualifications needed for personal marketability have changed.
The problem is that there are a lot of highly trained people out of work, and I satrongly suspect this trend will continue. I’m not demonizing the Indians or anything, but you would be a fool to ignore the implications. And large numbers of unemployed people has strong implications.
This is a unique situation. For the first time large numbers of highly trained and highly skilled people will find themselves in competition with others with much lower overhead costs. For the first time, it’s not necessary to have a concentration of such trained people in one place.
When the railroads came in, it displaced coachers and drovers and maybe canal workers. But they could get jobs with the railroad. If all the engineering jobs disappear from all fields, who do you work for? What do you do? They can’t all become liaison, and they can’t all work in the fields.
It’s important to recognize that the 500K figure is not just New York City, judging by the article.
I agree it sucks. And before all the apologists and bottom dollar business people pile on–well they already have, I suppose–I’d just like to know who’s going to have the money to buy the things that they’re so eager to sell, if all the well paying jobs get eliminated? As employees we don’t seem to count for much, but as customers we’re next to G*d. But the people who make these decisions to go offshort seem to think that customers and workers are completely distinct groups of people.
“I’m firing 90% of my people–but my customers love the prices!”
The people in the countries to which the jobs are moving. China and India are vast emerging markets, containing millions who would like to buy their first Dell and their first Nokia.
Sorry if I don’t buy into the doom & gloom. As was said in the other thread, unemployment is no worse than it has been historically. Times change and people adapt. And there has always been those who would copmplain rather than adapt. Nothing new under the sun.
>> I’d just like to know who’s going to have the money to buy the things that they’re so eager to sell, if all the well paying jobs get eliminated?
The Chinese. Of course. America already makes tons of money from exports. Always has and always will.
Let’s explore this vision a little further. So the products that used to be sold in the developed world at high prices will now be sold for a pittance to the developing world. That takes care of the sales numbers. But what happens to people in Europe and the U.S., when our cost of living doesn’t go down? Is the fact I’m supposed to wrap my mind around is that we’ve had it too good for too long, and now it’s payback time?
No, it’s time for a more equitable distribution of opportunity. That’s all. And you are missing something important. Low prices in some things keep prices down in general. Rent in NYC does not rise without regard to other factors. Landlords ask what they can get and if salaries do not rise, then tenents cannot pay as much and also if the cost of living is lower then the rent collected goes frther. Things do not exist in a vacuum.
Again, unemployment and the general state of the US economy is not worse than the average it has been in the last 50 years so all this is plain scaremongering.
And I repeat: protectionic=sm does not work in the long term so, even if the situation was awfully bad, like during the depression, protectionism is not the answer. The situation can be terrible and solutions that don’t work are not the answer so it is pointless to say we don’t care. It is not that we c=don’t care, it is that protectionism does not work.
This is the Pit, right, so I can rant about my pet, Peeve, without actually having to prove anything? Besides, it’s a rainy night, again, which is making me extremely cranky. I think after this, I’m going to google for the correct way to build an Ark.
Here goes…
The strict ideological answers given by you, sailor, and others, ignores a reality of our current situation: there is no generally accepted way for any economy anywhere in the world to get feedback on how it is doing relative to other economies in the world, despite the fact that it’s a truism that this is a global economy. How can you have a global economy without an accepted standard way to measure your success in that economy? Well, the current mess, and it is a mess, answers that question.
The first wave of globalization in the nineteenth century occurred under the gold standard. This wave is occuring under a “fiat” currency system, which is just another term for chaos.
Allegedly, currencies float against each other and this allows the feedback to take place, but this is actually not true. The USD floats, but the Hong Kong dollar doesn’t. Neither, as it turns out, does the Chinese remnimbi, and I found this article here, which states “Using the official exchange rate for the remnimbi the Chinese economy is the fifth largest in the world just below the UK economy albeit with twenty times the population. However, the World Bank uses an adjusted or purchasing power parity exchange rate to calculate an economy’s size and, on this basis, given the extreme under-valuation of the remnimbi, the Chinese economy runs the Japanese close for second place but China is growing at around 7 percent per annum versus the virtual stagnation of Japan.” (Apparently they lost the grammar checker on their version of Word on that site. Oh well.)
Point being, without any generally accepted way of measuring one economy against another and providing feedback in real time to each economy, you’re going to get highly dysfunctional results. The world would be a better place if the WTO or some other such organization insisted on the governments of the world coming to an agreement on a standard way of treating currencies (they should either all float or all be set according to an agreed upon standard commodity or basket of commodities, and they should be national), a standard that would exclude wacky, entirely artificial constructs like the Euro and the current Hong Kong dollar. In this way, it would be easier to see that China is actually doing quite well, far better than most people think, and this would automatically provide the buffer against overly rapid change that Reuben is posting about.
Absent that, we’re left with the current chaos, which is just causing far more destruction than is either necessary or considered acceptable by most people.
I’d like to add just one final comment, addressed to no one in particular. I personally have been involved with moving business to developing economies, displacing N. American, European, and Japanese workers, and importing the CEM goods back into western countries.
These particular products are of lower quality and are accompanied by a lower level of service than those they replace – they are not of comparable quality at a lower price. At least in this case, it would be a bald lie to say that someone is offering the same thing at lower cost. It is just the lower cost component that is being satisfied.
And yeah, before you ask, I’m sick about the trend.
In some cases, probably. But it’s still a company’s decision as to whether they value a cheaper over a better product, and the consumer’s decision as to whether the reduction in price is worth the reduction in quality.
It boils down to simple ideas that any idiot can understand such as loyalty, pride, and responsibility. Basic and worthy principles that are just so crashingly obvious that I honestly can’t explain it better than that. You may as well ask why, since we’ve got the money, we can’t hire Ronaldo to captain the England football team.
Any employer has a natural responsibility to recruit from his fellow citizens first and foremost, and look elsewhere only if those positions cannot be readily filled locally.
I must be an idiot but I thought the first obligation of a corporation is to survive, which means making a profit, which means competing in the market. I did not think of corporations as charities. So, if a corporation loses money because it puts loyalty, pride and responsibility first, what future does it have? Who buys more expensive stuff just to keep those companies afloat?
That’s your opinion and I don’t share it. I think all men were created equal and a corporation should concentrate on competing and being profitable in order to survive, not in doing charity. And why is it OK for a NYC corporation to hire someone from California but not someone from Ottawa which is much closer? Or should we prevent corporations from hiring from out of state? How about out of town?
I am sorry, I believe a corporation should find the best deal it can to achieve its ends just like consumers should find the best deal they can and employees should find the best deal they can. If employess feel such loyalty for their employer they should take a pay cut to help the employer and not expect the employer to take the hit.
