Jobs aren't what make people wealthy, its access to markets. Jobs are an expense, not an end in itself. Politicians and now even economists always talk about jobs as some thing to strive for. This article talks about outsourcing but freeing up human resources to pursue more meaningful work should be applauded. Eliminating menial work for people to perform (usually replaced by machines or in this case outsourcing to low cost countries) has led to furthering human achievement. That is of course only true if you believe people aren't mindless sheep.
The bounds of the human imagination, and its possible expressions, are functionally infinite. Then it is only a question of resources. I don't agree that we've reached this point.
In a post-scarcity world, I don't think the problem of insufficient meaningful work is likely to occur. There will always be a kitten to be played with, art to be made, research to be performed, and more.
I agree, but that's actually a good thing. How do you get more than someone else if everything is made for free by machines? New jobs would have to appear that produce handmade expensive goods and services that the rich can use to distinguish themselves from the poor :)
We're living in a lite version of that utopian world today, actually. It's pretty damn cheap to live in Canada or the US if you don't buy anything but food, water, and shelter. You'll find that most of your dollars today are spent on luxurious crap to improve your standing versus other people (new cars, rent in a fashionable urban center, new clothes, etc.)
In many socialist countries welfare is good enough that you can live quite healthy without ever working at all!
But we've always found new things to work on and purchase and we will continue to do so. They'll just be more meaningful than the repetitive crap most people have to do to eke out a living today.
> We're living in a lite version of that utopian world today, actually. It's pretty damn cheap to live in Canada or the US
Well, this is a prime example of why our trajectory is not converging to utopia. 'Things' are cheap, yet income inequality is extremely high in the countries. 'Things' will always come at a cost. Those who profit in the absence of labor will be a small subset of the population. The land owners, the farmers, those with political control. Sound familiar?
Welfare may be good enough in socialist democratic countries to live in relative comfort, but that is being subsidized by those who work (and I agree with this strategy). The assumption you are making is that if labor were removed from the equation, these countries would continue to exist as they are. I disagree with this premise.
We have always found new things to work on. But at the same time, jobs have become more monotonous as they are minified. The rate of automation is exponential, which hasn't been seen before. The assumption that we will all move into knowledge work is a poor assumption. Bob the builder wants to use his hands, not his brain. And good on him for being him.
The only mindless sheep here are the people allowing this travesty to occur. There is absolutely no way that the US Government should be incentivizing the offshoring of work.
Instead of H1B, we should update our immigration laws and policies to prefer educated people of means who have a desire to come here and contribute to our country.
> There is absolutely no way that the US Government should be incentivizing the offshoring of work.
And why not? The offshoring of work reduces the cost of goods and services and frees American time up to do meaningful, better compensated work instead.
The eventual conclusion (perhaps even in our lifetime) of automation and offshoring will be that Americans will not have to work for the necessities of life at all, just for self-actualization and luxuries.
The accountant seemed to be pretty happy (self actualized) in her job, which she no longer has. She's been stripped of her self actualization by a government that she paid taxes to in the expectation that it wouldn't pull the rug out from under her. I guess now she'll have to be self actualized on the unemployment line.
And what if she gets retrained and into another job? Why, isn't the best thing that could happen is that she should lose that one, too, helped by our good friends running H1B?
> And why not? The offshoring of work reduces the cost of goods and services and frees American time up to do meaningful, better compensated work instead.
In general, in a free capitalist market the government probably shouldn't be subsidizing corporations in any way.
That model assumes that the government has absolute power over corporations and that politicians need nothing from corporations.
In real life, governments need to negotiate with corporations, because individual politicians need corporate sponsors to finance their campaigns, so they sell their influence.
Play that through to the end though, having access to cheaper goods means little when you can't afford said goods due to the offshoring collectively lowering wages across the board. The part your ignoring is the downward pressure on everyone's wage that would have
It would not collectively lower wages across the board, it would leave many completely unemployed and the rest earning double or triple or fifty times what they're making now in real terms.
The solution is a basic income so those that are unemployed don't suffer for it and have a long runway to work on art, hobbies, retrain, etc.
To me, and a lot of people, the problem isn't free markets or movement so much as the distortion of markets that occurs under very uneven regulation.
What I think has happened here is that the government got out a bullhorn, pointed it overseas, and said "if you study engineering or computer science, we will give you a path toward citizenship and/or residency in a lucrative market through specialized tech visas that will not be available to general would-be immigrants." It then turned around with that bullhorn toward the United States and said "if you go to law, medical, dentistry, or even nursing school, we will protect your jobs through government backed professional associations and unions, and even in the absence of special protections, most fields and trades will require existing right to live and work in the US. Oh, and also, there's a shortage of Americans going into STEM."
Here's the thing, if make it much easier, through regulation, for immigrants or foreign consulting companies to enter the tech market than the legal, medical, or other markets, you should understand you've created an incentive for foreign workers and companies to focus on tech, and US citizens to avoid it.
Think of it this way - lemons and avocados are grown in similar conditions. People can't buy lemons for what they used to pay, so the government declares a shortage of lemons. From now on, lemons will be exempt from the 20% tariff that is placed on avocados, and the government will grant a temporary residency visa to any farmer who wishes to immigrate, provided he agrees to grow lemons only (if he stops growing lemons and tries to grow avocados, he will be deported).
You would expect people who already hold US residency rights to move into avocados, and away from lemons, right?
But this isn't the result of markets, it's a market response to severe distortion created by US government policy.
I think we've done something much like this in high tech and science/engineering. The "shortage" of US citizens going into these fields is a rational response to uneven government regulation.
This is why I'm ok with general immigration, but generally opposed to targeted visa programs designed to cure specific "shortages". I think that they are almost always used to suppress the wage growth that would draw people into the field and reach market equilibrium.
There is data to back this up - the RAND institute, historically a very pro-immigrant think tank, reached the conclusion that US citizens avoid Science and Engineering graduate programs because they are not competitive with the other fields that are available to high achieving students. But here's the thing, those fields are only available to people who already have citizenship!
In the interest of being accurate when commenting on a contentious issue, I should point out that my statement that these professions are only available to citizens in the US is not strictly true. The barriers to non-citizens wishing to enter law, medicine, dentistry, and so forth in the US are considerable, but they are still somewhat porous.
The barriers for citizens to enter law, medicine, dentistry are outrageous. The professional associations restrict supply on purpose so they can continue earning outsized salaries for skills that could easily be taught by the age of 22 for less than half the cost.
> Instead of H1B, we should update our immigration laws and policies to prefer educated people of means who have a desire to come here and contribute to our country.
Every student who comes here is on H1B after they graduate. They go through a lot of pain and effort to get a permanent residency because they get stiff competition from the employees who come directly and are on the same visa status.
Then you have people like me who through no fault of their own, are forced into semi-retirement due to the lack of interesting and challenging work. I spend my time working on open source projects and living off my investments and rental income, but I'd prefer to be employed.
Is laying off Americans in a poor job market with few opportunities because most of the interesting work has been moved overseas really a judicious use of resources and talent? If it costs X amount of dollars to live in a certain area of the planet, and companies don't employ
workers in that area of the planet, how can the company continue to have sales in that area over the long term?
Employers are really not all that serious about hiring. The economy really isn't in good shape when compared to before 2008. They'll hire people with very specialized skills at a bargain pay rate, but that's it.
There are two ways out of this. In the best case,
the cost of living will decrease in first world countries and meet the third world counties in the middle. In the worst case, there will be war on a scale similar to World War II at the end of the Great Depression. War is a good stimulus for the economy and it puts people to work. I'm hoping for the former and not the latter.
I think the New York Times and other publications need to put more scrutiny on the congress in stories like this,
"When Congress designed temporary work visa programs, the idea was to bring in foreigners with specialized, hard-to-find skills who would help American companies grow, creating jobs to expand the economy. Now, though, some companies are bringing in workers on those visas to help move jobs out of the country."
I think this quote represents what congress claimed to be doing, but instead were just obeying their corporate masters and knew full well that the program would be used to erode the us workforce and workers rights in order to enrich large corporations.
I don't expect journalistic institutions to agree with me but I do expect them to call out politicians far more than they are, and to question their motives with poorly thought laws like this one.
Agreed. The abuse of the system is the symptom of a broken system. The real solution is to revise the policy. Policy regulates. The market seeks to circumvent regulation.
I hate the racist and nationalistic undertones whenever this is brought up.
Why should Americans make more money than Indians for the same work? What is so intrinsically great about Americans that I should pay more for an American to do my accounting than an Indian and why am I wrong if I don't do that?
Edit:
> The 36-year-old accountant said the young Indian assigned to shadow her appeared to have no extraordinary knowledge of accounting. His expertise was in observing and mapping what she did.
> At the close of business, the recording was transmitted to India, where workers practiced mimicking his tasks.
If this is possible you don't have a real job and the Indian will be shortly be replaced in turn by a piece of software.
The claim is that an American has first dibs on a job over a foreigner, additionally there is an assumption that the local worker is better at the job. This is certainly true before the training, but unclear afterwards.
Mimicry can handle the ordinary events. I pay accountants to notice and handle the extraordinary.
Long ago when I was in digital medical imaging we observed radiologists reading X-rays and figured we could make many times our engineer wages by just saying "Normal chest" and pressing the "advance" button. We'd be right almost all the time!
I like to joke about how I could set up shop beneath a volcano, and every day predict whether it will explode with over 99.99% accuracy. I simply say "No" every day.
Like I said, because it will grow the real economy of the United States overall if menial labour is conducted elsewhere for cheap and the high-value high-margin labour is conducted in the U.S.
Consider that as a result of 70 people at Toys 'R' Us losing their jobs, toys became marginally cheaper for hundreds of millions of Americans.
Edit: not to mention the majority owners of Toys 'R' Us realizing the part of the savings that aren't passed on to consumers are undoubtedly American investors and pension plans.
Yeah, it'll get a corporation and a few higher ups rich at the expense of the folks making a decent living on those jobs. I have an interest in seeing my fellow countrymen do well compared to those of another nation.
"I have an interest in seeing my fellow white people do well compared to those of a darker skin tone." This is the same kind of feeling with the same kind of effect. The only difference is the choice of how to classify people.
No. I'm making an analogy to racism. It's not actually racism but only because of the arbitrary choice of classification. We usually think racism is bad so we should logically also think prejudice against foreigners is bad for the same reasons. It harms people simply because of how they scored on the lottery of birth. Just as racism does.
So you believe that nation-states should not be self-interested?
I think if you hold such a radical agenda, you should be up front about it, rather than arguing by analogy to topics people want to distance themselves from. You're advocating the dissolution of nation-states in the conventional sense. This is a fine thing to advocate for, but one certainly isn't a racist for not supporting this particular radical agenda that you happen to have.
Are you also a communist, or at the very least, do you believe that inheritance should be abolished? After all, inheritance is a literal lottery of birth in the same way race is.
And finally, as someone who is posting on the Internet, you have either won the lottery of birth in a direct way, or been blessed with enough intelligence to overcome suboptimal birth conditions and thus have won the lottery of birth in a more indirect way. What are you doing to address the harm your privileged position does to the world? Do you live a life of poverty and give all your money to Waatsi?
Nationalism is stupid. What's so radical about feeling I have more in common with an Indian engineering student than a white American factory worker?
I'm not a saint and I'm not simply going to give all of my money away, whether I deserve it or not. However, I'm not going to whine about foreigners stealing my jerbs either. If it's so easy for someone half the world away to steal my job I didn't deserve it in the first place.
You won't give up your cushy tech lifestyle to feed starving african babies, but you expect a blue-collar worker to give up his job to feed a guy in Dehli?
Except my tax dollars aren't exclusively spent on white people, they're spent on the folks in my country. I guess my supporting a path to citizenship for those dirty brown Mexicans that got brought over as kids would come as a surprise then, wouldn't it? Please, save your self-aggrandizing, half-baked rhetoric for your drum circle.
In a lot of industries (including software) the "menial" is the beginning of the path to the high-value position.
When outsourcing was a big hot-button topic back around THE TURN OF THE CENTURY (just realized we can say this now and get away with it, seems weird) there was a lot of talk about how the low-value "coder" jobs would go overseas while we here in the US would just do high level design and software architecture to ship to these people to implement....
That's great for one generation, but how do people become great designers and architects without being a working "coder" for a while? Doesn't happen, in my experience (or, rather happens so infrequently the exceptions aren't worth considering).
By removing today's low-end industry jobs we risk eliminating the path of real-world experience that makes people qualified for the higher-end work, thereby making us (as a country/culture/whatever) unqualified to do the high-end stuff in the not-too-distant future.
A lot of companies are very bad at thinking about that kind of long-term progression. My dad works in a power plant, where essentially he and the millwright are the only two who understand how all of the systems in the plant work, since they are the only members of the maintenance staff that have been there long enough to have repaired all of the equipment (longer than the current management...) Both of them are looking to retire in the next couple years, and made that known some time ago. Rather than hire full-time staff to train and learn the plant in preparation for that handoff, the company contracts out (more expensive) temporary workers...
Destroying the middle class to improve margins does not grow the real economy. You grow the real economy by investing in technology and an educated workforce that can translate their skill set to providing real goods and services.
Majority owners, investors and pension plan managers need to invest their money in companies that have real customers with real incomes that can afford to buy their goods and services.
The issue is not whether the government should facilitate this, but whether they should use violence to prevent it.
Similarly, if I don't threaten people with violence for watching "Real Housewives of New Jersey", that doesn't mean I'm facilitating people watching it.
On the other hand if I am actually a high skilled worker and will take over your job because I am simply better at it, would you still consider it as the government just facilitating me taking over your job? Am I not entitled to it? What would make you deserve the job more than me, the fact that you are American? Not trying to attack you in any way, I am just curious if and why you see this in a black and white way.
The government already facilitates research and technology which takes jobs from people. Would you like to stop that too? Newborn babies spend 20 years preparing to take your job. Should the government stop that too?
Don't forget that a "job" is not a good thing. It's a bad thing. People don't like working, they mostly want money, at least for menial jobs. The whole idea of silicon valley is to take people's menial jobs. That's what it's there for! Should the government hinder technology companies because they're threatening to replace people's jobs with computers? Of course not! In the case of both technology and cheaper foreign workers, the overall result is positive to the US economy.
If you think Americans are more deserving than other people, then, well that's just the nationalism and racism that the GP described. You can pretend it's not racism, but it's effectively the same thing - treating people worse because of who their parents are.
> I hate the racist and nationalistic undertones whenever this is brought up.
I do too. There are two Indian families in my apartment complex who have a breadwinner here on a work visa. I like them and their kids are my son's best friends. I don't see them as the problem here.
> Why should Americans make more money than Indians for the same work?
I don't know about you, but I probably pay more for rent and a lot of other things here in the States than a corresponding tech worker in India does.
I don't think that makes me better than someone in India, but it does mean that the almighty Free Market is certainly not my friend. If we could lower my expenses to the levels you see in India then I think I'd be okay with the Free Market.
> racist and nationalistic undertones whenever this is brought up. Why should Americans make more money than Indians for the same work?
Your idea that Indians (or perhaps Chinese) should be the only ones coming in sounds a bit racist to my ears actually. Why should it be Indians coming in, when so many Syrians are fleeing their homes, much due to the US invasion of Iraq (and undermining of Assad - so that now ISIS runs much of Syria).
I don't see how India providing its citizens with free IIT educations, only to be brought to the US and work like coolies, chained to an H1-B visa, is some wonderful thing. We should be giving out citizenship, and that's it, the foreign worker programs are only used to screw over American workers.
You have this racist attitude of wanting Indians, and excluding Syrians etc. You want them chained them chained as coolies to H1-B visas to exploit them. Then you accuse anyone opposed to your scheme to exploit people for a buck "racist" like you're some kind of humanitarian.
Huh? Nowhere did the GP post say that Indians/Chinese are preferable over Syrians or anyone else. I assume Indians were only mentioned because they are mentioned in the article, and are the stereotypical target of outsourcing hate. I really don't get this response; the GP also expresses distaste, or at least skepticism, at treating Americans as entitled to higher pay (having "coolies").
> Your idea that Indians (or perhaps Chinese) should be the only ones coming in sounds a bit racist to my ears actually.
I only mentioned Indians because the article was about Indians.
> We should be giving out citizenship, and that's it, the foreign worker programs are only used to screw over American workers.
Or the US could have work visas that aren't so closely linked to a specific employer. I agree the H1-B terms as they are now are ridiculous and exploitative.
Because Indians should create a great society for themselves, not simply essentially siphon off success that other societies have built up. The thing about this matter is that is a net negative for all parties involved, it's essentially akin to tearing others down instead of working to build one's own success.
why should I be able to live in a better house than you just because my parents left me money when they died?
Our ancestors built this nation. We current citizens are their heirs. Whatever benefits there are to having been born here, those benefits should accrue only to citizens.
America is ours, we and our ancestors built it. If there are any benefits to living here, they belong to us, and not to foregners. Likewise, my nice house belongs to me and not to you, despite the fact that it was purchased with money willed to me by my parents.
Hilarious. I'd expect this argument to be made by a 5 yr old. You do realize these jobs are being handed out by your "brothers and sisters" then right? Toys r us's management made these decisions. And your "ancestors" created a capitalistic, meritocratic society. You either be the best and survive or you perish. No hand outs.
This is a valuable point, though I don't agree with it. Inheritance is really more like giving gifts to people you like. That's part of freedom. Some people give their inheritance to charity or friends instead of their children. So really if you get a gift because somebody likes you, that's because you're lucky, likable, or whatever reason they had. It's not a fundamental right though.
The idea of personal property is completely off the topic. Of course your house is yours, but it's not automatically your children's when you die. That's a choice you're free to make.
As for "we built America". You mean "People of Earth built America" It wasn't done in isolation. It depended on international trade and influx of valuable workers from other countries. You could equally argue that America belongs to Italians because there lots of Italian people helped build it.
America is and was built by immigrants who have (had?) little more in common with you than the Indians in the story. Basically nothing really, except a common geographic area and some shared ideals.
Simply, in a perfect world without bad governments, this would be true. Buy we live in world where if I lose my job in the U.S. I will not get any support from the Indian government. If I am stranded in some jail in some undeveloped country on trumped up charges I can't go to the Indian embassy for assistance, etc. It also affords us better environmental oversight, better roads, infrastructure, etc.
That's to say nation states are selfish and are at the service of its people. That's how we've got things set up. That's why Bangladeshis aren't allowed to work in India, or why any state adopts tariffs, etc. All selfish self interest. That is why.
It's also not racist, unless you use the old definition of race meaning nationality. If these were going to the English or to the Russians, you'd see similar backlash.
>If this is possible you don't have a real job and the Indian will be shortly be replaced in turn by a piece of software.
This is actually possible for a LOT of jobs that Americans do, modulo edge cases. Most of what nurse practitioners do, for instance, can very easily be replicated by a random forest. Try telling the nurse practitioners they don't have a real job. Hell, by that metric, most of crud isn't a real job either. In fact, the whole point of "work experience" is that the newhire with zero work experience mimics the more experienced worker until he passes the Turing test ie. the Boss, given the work output, can no longer distinguish if the work was performed by the newhire or the oldhand. Its turtles/strike/mimicry all the way down.
Ah, yes, the old "train everyone to be a doctor, lawyer, or CEO" mindset (actually, 2 of those 3 are at risk these days too!).
Here's the thing. Not everyone in this country can be a CEO. The WALL-E premise of everyone living the fat life (pun intended) while the robots do the work is not viable. The truth is that this country is made up of people with a broad spectrum of capabilities and talents. Furthermore, these people are not fungible resources that can easily relocate to whatever third world country that has now usurped their former job functions. We have already seen large parts of this country's population essentially permanently displaced with the mass outsourcing of manufacturing. These were good paying, stable blue-collar jobs that people who were not born to be CEOs could rely on, live a good life, and raise families. Now look at the former manufacturing cities. They did not all magically retrain to be knowledge workers. Instead, entire communities were laid to waste. Now extend what happened to manufacturing to skilled labor under your "every job to the cheapest bidder" philosophy. What happens? Maybe plastic crap at Toys-R-Us is 3 cents cheaper. But eventually a large enough percentage of this country is displaced to where society itself becomes unstable. When this destabilization eats away at enough of foundations of our society, even the wealthy will be affected.
Government's job is (supposed to be) to take the longview on what is good for a healthy American society, not to facilitate multi-national corporations in their quest to cut every cost they can.
What I don't understand in all the "jobs are moving oversea" discussion is that the opponent seems to be advocating for economic inefficiencies (creating/keeping jobs in the States at all costs, comparative advantage be damned) as a mean for keeping a healthy society. Shouldn't the correct and proper solution be some appropriate measurements like basic income or better social welfare in general?
Jobs are a mean to create wealth (and by extensions, welfare) for a society. I don't understand the reason for trying to reduce the wealth being created in some notion of keep "jobs", and if the inland American economy can not generate enough wealth for some reasons, then we have bigger problems to deal with.
Essentially, this is a wealth redistribution issue, and should be treated as such, focusing on creating "jobs" seems to be the wrong idea to go at it.
Well you certainly have a point. I would argue that a working society is a society with purpose and is ultimately healthier than a society without jobs but adequate social welfare. But more pragmatically, I don't think a truly livable basic income program is in this country's DNA.
Who's going to pay the cost of a basic income system? Right now the tax base rests on the middle class (which is rapidly collapsing).
The globalization that allows the wealthy to eliminate their first-world workforce also allows them to avoid just about any tax they don't feel like paying.
Assuming that if the system work out when everyone/every company pays their required share of tax (otherwise, it's back to the wealth creation issue, and advocating for more economic inefficiencies won't help), and it's just a problem of tax avoidance, then the solution is to fix the taxation system.
I'm not saying that everything is fine and dandy, I'm saying that pointing finger to random chicken in the sky and shoot them won't solve the real issue. There are a lot of problems, but American politics right now is a bit engrossed in the wrong kind of trivialities.
> Right now the tax base rests on the middle class (which is rapidly collapsing).
Where did you get that from? The wealthiest 1% of Americans alone pay 50% of the federal income tax. The bottom 80% pay only 15%.
Edit: at a 50% marginal tax rate if the 1% get 60% richer through this kind of automation and offshoring, we could lower the tax rate on the bottom 80% to zero!
Edit #2: If the 1% get 120% richer, we could start handing out checks to everyone in the bottom 80% equal to what they're paying in taxes today! See where I'm going with this?
I'm aware of the distinction but it doesn't make a difference to my argument.
If MegaRoboCo Inc. and their contemporaries are making $1 trillion a year each in 2050, the tax revenues (corporate, capital gains, income on dividends, income on executive compensation, whatever) can be enough to support the resulting mass unemployment.
Would you use the same argument for hiring discrimination?
I.e. if a sector of the labor economy is discriminated against, do you say, well, let's fix that issue with government subsidies/negative taxes? If women get paid 80 on the dollar, we make the government make up the rest rather than legislate that companies to pay justly?
I don't follow the similarity between my argument and your question on hiring discrimination, so I'm not actually sure what is being related here.
Anyway, the government already subsidized certain demographics, for one way or another (various types of welfare, and the population also support a bunch of subsidize that doesn't exists right now: parental leave comes to mind). In essence, it's not a question of "do" or "do not", it's just matter of deciding where to draw the line.
Another distinction is that not all discrimination and welfare discussion is about economic, a lot of policies have to do with moral, ethics and general humanity. With those constraints in mind, the consideration change a lot. The original argument I was replying to was purely economic. If you want to make a moral argument of "people need job to have self actualization and feel good about themselves", then it's not a common argument around here, and certainly worth considering, but completely different.
The parallel is in saying that inefficiencies should be avoided and that companies should be allowed to pursue savings wherever they can.
If so, if they can skirt the system by hiring cheaper labor and creating unemployment for those lower skilled workers, then if we don't care about employing lower skilled workers but compensate them with alternative means (basic income, etc) then why not address other ills the same way? Don't address the root of the issue, just subsidize it away.
For the original discussion, subsidizing is addressing the root issue (distribution of wealth problem), there is also the solution proposed a hundred years ago by some guys name Marx and Engels ...
The example you brought up with women being paid 80 cent on the dollar is a whole can of worm that I'm not willing to open right now. Let's just put it simply that I think that specific issue is more complicated and one of the biggest difference is that it has more than just straight up economic consideration.
Let me highlight something I found in the data as an example of how this is nothing more than a gamed system that has nothing to do with Americans not being available to fill jobs:
Nested in the available data are several records for "Associate Data Scientist" and "Senior Data Scientist", meaning that the employer advertised the job as a role with this name.
(By the way, these visas were APPROVED!)
They then have listed as the category for the visa job role "Operations Research Analysts" for the Associate, and then "Computer Occupations, All Other" for the Senior Data Scientist role. Interesting how two jobs which sound very similar have completely different classifications for the same company, huh?
The best part: The prevailing wage listed for the "Associate Data Scientist" is $48,901 and the "Senior Data Scientist" is $61,110, because those wages are dictated by the bucket they are placed in.
The actual wages which were payed for these roles was $80k and $70K, respectively.
These rates are so far below market value it's ridiculous.
The point is that the law is supposed to be in place so that companies can get workers when Americans aren't available, but the reality is that they simply allow companies to refuse to pay the market rate.
The employer in question is Walmart, in case you are wondering.
I'm not disputing what you are saying at all. But having to hire American over foreigners knowing that company have to pay higher wages is still economic inefficiencies (the same as outsource, and actually I was specifically talking about outsourcing, not H1B visa).
I find fault that these consulting companies (such as Tata) essentially cheat the H1B system and block actually exceptional workers from coming to the US.
> All those American workers have bills to pay in America, where the bills are higher the same way their wages are higher.
Of course they are, because the standard of living is much higher in America. If you prefer, I can rephrase the question as "Why should Americans enjoy a higher standard of living than Indians doing the same work?"
So you also believe that the Indian government is acting immorally when they enact environmental laws? Preventing foreign capital from setting up toxin-dumping industries is also "interfering in the free market" too, you know.
"The free market" is neither (A) a natural state between different nations with different legal codes nor (B) intrinsically moral.
It seems to me that its best for the free market for jobs to go where the value/cost tradeoff is maximized. Simply put, first worlder's are not providing the value that their salaries demand. And if we actually are, then the companies we work for will have an advantage and will eventually beat the competitors using cheap labor.
As well local inflation + foreign deflation will change this, it will probably fix itself due to the crazy printing of money in the US. Eventually, a $100k a year employee will just be subsistence in terms of real goods.
This is such bullcrap. $6k a month after taxes goes a long way EVERYWHERE in the US. People that can't afford to live in SF on this salary are just bad with money.
Even spending $3k/mo on rent leaves you with $3k to spend on everything else. $3k/mo after taxes is like a $50k/yr salary. If you can live in Nebraska on $50k/yr, then you can live BETTER in SF on $100k/yr.
The SF tech crowd that can't get by on $100k need a lesson in managing money.
Firstly, it goes fast in SF. $3500 a month for a 1 bedroom is more realistic, unless one wants a >45minute commute (just checked with padmapper). Food ($350/mo), fun money($160 per month), clothes($50 per month), haircuts($30 per month), utilities($150 per month), healthcare copays, transit and other random crap probably eats $1k. Someone saving for retirement should roughly put $1k a month away (makes about $80k a year retirement income). So now we have $500 a month left for things like saving for a house, ring, wedding, visiting family once a year, maybe buying a car or a trip somewhere. So yes, of course, its livable but certainly not as intense as you've put it. ("such bull crap"... "just bad with money")
Secondly. The marginal price on a room is about $1000 so if you perchance want to have a family then you're looking at more like $4k- $4500 for your rent. Everything is more expensive in SF as well, not just your rent.
My bias is that I do not consider it a healthy society if a couple couldnt have a family of 2 (roughly replacement) on 1-1.5 incomes (some blend of parents have some time off to raise the kids) .
End result: $6k a month after taxes (roughly $110k before) is enough such that you still have to make sacrifices, either live far away (1 hr commute each way), live in a terrible place (tenderloin), have roommates or give up on a family.
Saving $1000 a month towards retirement and an additional $500 for anything else is actually doing very well by American standards. Saving $1,500 is no small feat for most families, that's more than half of the take-home pay for the median family in America. Plus, you have the copays+transit+random crap = $1000/mo bucket that has a lot of obvious savings.
Your post solidifies my point. Saving that much money in the midwest would be difficult on $50k/yr, but doing so on $100k in SF requires a little self-control.
Google, Facebook et al should not be campaigning for more H-1B's; that would simply worsen the offshoring situation. They should instead campaign for an improved program that distinguishes employees from (effectively) contract workers.
NYTimes is identifying the wrong problem here. What if Toys R Us sends an employee to India to train the team there (that's not uncommon). I'm struggling to understand the key takeaway from the article.
One could also complain about Americans who choose to live abroad. They often end up training foreigners either directly or indirectly. Companies understand that outsiders can be used to gain understanding more quickly in some areas, and they'll pay above the domestic market for it. America discourages this by taxing its citizens abroad; this would be even more punitive if not for the foreign earned income exclusion. True nationalists might consider its repeal.
Hopefully this coerced/forced training of your replacement will get captured at some point on a viral video incendiary enough to force Congress to do something out of national embarrassment. That's the only way to get the entrenched players to budge from the status quo.
A Cengage spokeswoman, Susan M. Aspey, said the company needed to install higher-grade accounting systems. “To do this quickly and efficiently,” she said, Cengage sought support from Cognizant.
Thanks, I needed a good laugh.
Outsourcing is great when you have a repeatable process that isn't constantly changing. The worst possible thing is to take a project that:
1. is changing constantly
2. is new
3. you can't get your hard around
Think it is hard managing a project when it is in the same building as you? Try doing that from thousands of miles away.
Obviously it sucks for people losing their jobs. But if someone's job is such that another person can come, mimic what they do and take away their job, aren't they already at risk of losing their jobs to automation in the near future?
"When Congress designed temporary work visa programs, the idea was to bring in foreigners with specialized, hard-to-find skills who would help American companies grow, creating jobs to expand the economy."
This is a common misconception. The H1B visa laws are generally used to hire very low wage workers. (I doubt the authors of the legislation are surprised by this result.)
Companies are required to pay a prevailing wage, but this wage can be one of four levels. And of course most H1B applications are for the lowest levels.
Here are levels for software developers in Chicago [1]:
Software Developers, Applications
Chicago-Naperville-Joliet, IL Metropolitan Division
Level 1 Wage:$24.45 hour - $50,856 year
Level 2 Wage:$33.14 hour - $68,931 year
Level 3 Wage:$41.84 hour - $87,027 year
Level 4 Wage:$50.53 hour - $105,102 year
For context the 25th percentile wage in Chicago is $68,670 and average is $88,630.
Of course, more ambitious companies may file applications under job titles with even lower wage levels like "system analysts".
You should also know that if a H1B worker is fired, he and his family are out of status that day and must leave the country unless a visitor visa is granted (which is not guaranteed).
How would you like working here if you could be fired and your whole family could be sent packing at will?
If you were an employer, do you think you could you hack this system to your advantage? I'm pretty sure I could.
As an H1B, I whole-heartedly agree with you. The H1B gives American employers disproportionate power over their foreign employees.
The ideal solution which has been proposed by several people, but will probably never see the light of day in legislation due to entrenched lobbying interests is very simple – separate the visa from the employer. If an employer sponsors an H1B once, that person should be automatically be free to work for any company he/she pleases for six years. This will make H1Bs more of a realistic "high skill level" visa and less of a captive labor pool for the industry.
We actually have this visa and employers don't want to have anything to do with it.
EB2 visas for permanent residence are currently available [1] for employees with Ph.D., master's degree, or at least five years of progressive post-baccalaureate experience.
[1] Excluding people born in India, Mainland China, Mexico and the Philippines because applicants from those countries have exceeded the per country maximum
Yes, but that greencard processes like the EB2 take a very long time. It is difficult for an employer to sign up an employee, with the hope that they begin work 12 months later. This processing period can easily balloon out due to random audits.
The H1B process is slow, but pretty much deterministic within a period of few months (every year). On the other hands, the EB1/2/3 and various O visa is very indeterministic (you won't know what happen, for how long), especially when those varies depends on the country of origin.
I completely agree. My ideal H1-B reform would be as follows:
1) The visa holder has no obligation to the company whatsoever as soon as the visa is approved. If the only thing keeping an employee at the company is the threat of deportation then maybe the company shouldn't be employing people at all.
2) The company can not extract any fees whatsoever from the employee, not even for training or relocation. The employee is not obligated to pay anything to the employer under any circumstances, even if he immediately leaves the job.
3) The Visa program is a reverse auction on salary, down to, say, 150% of the median wage for the NAICS code. The auction ends when the cap or the salary limit is reached.
4) The company must hold the first year of salary in escrow and forfeit any unpaid salary to the government if the employee leaves early. This is to prevent hiring an employee and then firing and rehiring immediately after the visa is approved at a lower salary.
Of course you're right that no real reform will happen, because as far as the Zuckerberg/fwd.us crowd is concerned, the only problem with the current system is that the cap is too low.
President Obama's executive action proposals[1] for improving the state of legal immigration was torpedoed last week by the latest USCIS Visa Bulletin[2]. This affects many engineers in Silicon Valley. The silence from fwd.us on the topic has been particularly telling.
Thats the whole problem - the conditions of the visa should be followed. As a H1B myself, I cannot really complain at all. My salary on-par or at least above market average (I am a C level exec, not an engineer) and my company has never-ever shown any interest in exerting their power over me via the visa. In fact they are worried about the visa running out and are trying to sponsor a green-card for me. So I guess it depends, and I would say the scenario I am in is more in line with the intent of the law vs the cheap labor brought in from India and China.
I worked over seas in the East. It was pretty much the same. Company sponsored you, if you were let go, you had a week to leave town (or seek another sponsor). It's not that atypical. Also, I met quite a few foreigners who worked the same (not an expat working in an overseas office but working for a local company). They also seemed to hire lots of Thais and Philippine people for hard labor (who were also subject to deportation once the work dried up)
And the police had powers to deport --double the fun (meaning you had to have papers)
That said, I don't think progressives who propose easing immigration from poor countries would allow competition for "high-skilled" jobs like doctors, engineers, lawyers because it would suffer pressure from professional pushback.
I think so many of today's "controversial" topics / issues are related. Capitalism, if it were generalized and mapped to a function, optimizes in the same way as the "least squares error" ML function does. The world is just getting too good at capitalism too quickly and it's causing too many people to lose out on the happy / comfortable lifestyle they would have were this not the case.
Why does H1B visas directly relate to Indian consulting companies? I agree those companies are the ones applying for the largest number of visas. But, I as an Indian working in the United States on H1B visa and earning more than a lot of Americans feel offended. I got my advanced STEM degree here from a reputed university and work for a US company. So, should I not be given the opportunity to stay and work in this country when I am contributing to the economy on par or more than many Americans? I work on temporary visas and wait for ~12 years to get a permanent residency even if I have bigger dreams and want to start a company. On my visa status, its very hard to do anything risky.
Create a new visa class then for students and entrepreneurs who come here and get their advanced degrees. Universities and talent out of those universities is what builds this great nation.
edit: I personally hate consulting companies from India because they get employees with a lot of experience and pay them peanuts. Even a new college graduate would not accept a job offer for their salary.
I like your point. The government should provide a new visa category for students who get an advanced STEM degree from US college. Its absurd that students who got their advanced STEM degree from a college in US has to complete in the same visa category as the people applying from consulting companies.
It sounds like most of this abuse goes with employees that are here for a much shorter period than the visa is valid for (2 periods of 3 years for H1B). That is a clear indicator that they were here for only training purposes
I think the article has got one major fact wrong. The Visa program that is most abused is the L1. I don't think those employees here for a few days/months were on a H1B, they were surely on a L1, because they had to leave soon after. An L1 has no cap, and all companies have to do is to have someone on their payroll for 2 years in another country. In fact, if an employee does get an H1B, they will frequently try to keep them in the US as long as possible, since there is a shortage of professionals with an H1B.
You will all be shocked if you realize the number of H1B's in the federal government. Forget about private business your jobs are guaranteed to be outsourced sooner or later. Just move to management and skip being skilled labor of any sorts. STEM education is a joke. As a tax payer/citizen there are no jobs in the federal sector either. There are a tonne of folks on H1B at the government agencies itself.
The idea that we can Save American Jobs by preventing foreigners from coming into the country is pure insanity.
I'm 100% sure that India could find some way to do accounting without sending people to the US for 4 weeks to learn. This is pure fear-mongering by the New York Times, probably just because of the political winds against immigration.
The real problem is that the same Visa quota is being used for both highly-skilled workers who _don't_ displace American workers (e.g. Silicon Valley or high-tech manufacturing), and "body-shopped" workers who are _intended_ to displace American workers (the example in this article, and the previous example of Disney).
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 229 ms ] thread(I believe we reached this point some time ago)
In a post-scarcity world, I don't think the problem of insufficient meaningful work is likely to occur. There will always be a kitten to be played with, art to be made, research to be performed, and more.
I agree, but that's actually a good thing. How do you get more than someone else if everything is made for free by machines? New jobs would have to appear that produce handmade expensive goods and services that the rich can use to distinguish themselves from the poor :)
We're living in a lite version of that utopian world today, actually. It's pretty damn cheap to live in Canada or the US if you don't buy anything but food, water, and shelter. You'll find that most of your dollars today are spent on luxurious crap to improve your standing versus other people (new cars, rent in a fashionable urban center, new clothes, etc.)
In many socialist countries welfare is good enough that you can live quite healthy without ever working at all!
But we've always found new things to work on and purchase and we will continue to do so. They'll just be more meaningful than the repetitive crap most people have to do to eke out a living today.
Well, this is a prime example of why our trajectory is not converging to utopia. 'Things' are cheap, yet income inequality is extremely high in the countries. 'Things' will always come at a cost. Those who profit in the absence of labor will be a small subset of the population. The land owners, the farmers, those with political control. Sound familiar?
Welfare may be good enough in socialist democratic countries to live in relative comfort, but that is being subsidized by those who work (and I agree with this strategy). The assumption you are making is that if labor were removed from the equation, these countries would continue to exist as they are. I disagree with this premise.
We have always found new things to work on. But at the same time, jobs have become more monotonous as they are minified. The rate of automation is exponential, which hasn't been seen before. The assumption that we will all move into knowledge work is a poor assumption. Bob the builder wants to use his hands, not his brain. And good on him for being him.
Instead of H1B, we should update our immigration laws and policies to prefer educated people of means who have a desire to come here and contribute to our country.
And why not? The offshoring of work reduces the cost of goods and services and frees American time up to do meaningful, better compensated work instead.
The eventual conclusion (perhaps even in our lifetime) of automation and offshoring will be that Americans will not have to work for the necessities of life at all, just for self-actualization and luxuries.
And what if she gets retrained and into another job? Why, isn't the best thing that could happen is that she should lose that one, too, helped by our good friends running H1B?
In general, in a free capitalist market the government probably shouldn't be subsidizing corporations in any way.
In real life, governments need to negotiate with corporations, because individual politicians need corporate sponsors to finance their campaigns, so they sell their influence.
It would not collectively lower wages across the board, it would leave many completely unemployed and the rest earning double or triple or fifty times what they're making now in real terms.
The solution is a basic income so those that are unemployed don't suffer for it and have a long runway to work on art, hobbies, retrain, etc.
What I think has happened here is that the government got out a bullhorn, pointed it overseas, and said "if you study engineering or computer science, we will give you a path toward citizenship and/or residency in a lucrative market through specialized tech visas that will not be available to general would-be immigrants." It then turned around with that bullhorn toward the United States and said "if you go to law, medical, dentistry, or even nursing school, we will protect your jobs through government backed professional associations and unions, and even in the absence of special protections, most fields and trades will require existing right to live and work in the US. Oh, and also, there's a shortage of Americans going into STEM."
Here's the thing, if make it much easier, through regulation, for immigrants or foreign consulting companies to enter the tech market than the legal, medical, or other markets, you should understand you've created an incentive for foreign workers and companies to focus on tech, and US citizens to avoid it.
Think of it this way - lemons and avocados are grown in similar conditions. People can't buy lemons for what they used to pay, so the government declares a shortage of lemons. From now on, lemons will be exempt from the 20% tariff that is placed on avocados, and the government will grant a temporary residency visa to any farmer who wishes to immigrate, provided he agrees to grow lemons only (if he stops growing lemons and tries to grow avocados, he will be deported).
You would expect people who already hold US residency rights to move into avocados, and away from lemons, right?
But this isn't the result of markets, it's a market response to severe distortion created by US government policy.
I think we've done something much like this in high tech and science/engineering. The "shortage" of US citizens going into these fields is a rational response to uneven government regulation.
This is why I'm ok with general immigration, but generally opposed to targeted visa programs designed to cure specific "shortages". I think that they are almost always used to suppress the wage growth that would draw people into the field and reach market equilibrium.
There is data to back this up - the RAND institute, historically a very pro-immigrant think tank, reached the conclusion that US citizens avoid Science and Engineering graduate programs because they are not competitive with the other fields that are available to high achieving students. But here's the thing, those fields are only available to people who already have citizenship!
http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html
Oh I could fill a page about how disgusting I find professional associations and unions, but it's probably off-topic here.
Every student who comes here is on H1B after they graduate. They go through a lot of pain and effort to get a permanent residency because they get stiff competition from the employees who come directly and are on the same visa status.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
Only if that pursuit can be realized, which in the reality of our current world and for the workers being displaced, it usually cannot.
Is laying off Americans in a poor job market with few opportunities because most of the interesting work has been moved overseas really a judicious use of resources and talent? If it costs X amount of dollars to live in a certain area of the planet, and companies don't employ workers in that area of the planet, how can the company continue to have sales in that area over the long term?
Employers are really not all that serious about hiring. The economy really isn't in good shape when compared to before 2008. They'll hire people with very specialized skills at a bargain pay rate, but that's it.
There are two ways out of this. In the best case, the cost of living will decrease in first world countries and meet the third world counties in the middle. In the worst case, there will be war on a scale similar to World War II at the end of the Great Depression. War is a good stimulus for the economy and it puts people to work. I'm hoping for the former and not the latter.
"When Congress designed temporary work visa programs, the idea was to bring in foreigners with specialized, hard-to-find skills who would help American companies grow, creating jobs to expand the economy. Now, though, some companies are bringing in workers on those visas to help move jobs out of the country."
I think this quote represents what congress claimed to be doing, but instead were just obeying their corporate masters and knew full well that the program would be used to erode the us workforce and workers rights in order to enrich large corporations.
I don't expect journalistic institutions to agree with me but I do expect them to call out politicians far more than they are, and to question their motives with poorly thought laws like this one.
Why should Americans make more money than Indians for the same work? What is so intrinsically great about Americans that I should pay more for an American to do my accounting than an Indian and why am I wrong if I don't do that?
Edit:
> The 36-year-old accountant said the young Indian assigned to shadow her appeared to have no extraordinary knowledge of accounting. His expertise was in observing and mapping what she did.
> At the close of business, the recording was transmitted to India, where workers practiced mimicking his tasks.
If this is possible you don't have a real job and the Indian will be shortly be replaced in turn by a piece of software.
Long ago when I was in digital medical imaging we observed radiologists reading X-rays and figured we could make many times our engineer wages by just saying "Normal chest" and pressing the "advance" button. We'd be right almost all the time!
If a company wants to offshore jobs out the country, they shouldn't be helped by our own government to do it.
Consider that as a result of 70 people at Toys 'R' Us losing their jobs, toys became marginally cheaper for hundreds of millions of Americans.
Edit: not to mention the majority owners of Toys 'R' Us realizing the part of the savings that aren't passed on to consumers are undoubtedly American investors and pension plans.
I think if you hold such a radical agenda, you should be up front about it, rather than arguing by analogy to topics people want to distance themselves from. You're advocating the dissolution of nation-states in the conventional sense. This is a fine thing to advocate for, but one certainly isn't a racist for not supporting this particular radical agenda that you happen to have.
Are you also a communist, or at the very least, do you believe that inheritance should be abolished? After all, inheritance is a literal lottery of birth in the same way race is.
And finally, as someone who is posting on the Internet, you have either won the lottery of birth in a direct way, or been blessed with enough intelligence to overcome suboptimal birth conditions and thus have won the lottery of birth in a more indirect way. What are you doing to address the harm your privileged position does to the world? Do you live a life of poverty and give all your money to Waatsi?
Nationalism is stupid. What's so radical about feeling I have more in common with an Indian engineering student than a white American factory worker?
I'm not a saint and I'm not simply going to give all of my money away, whether I deserve it or not. However, I'm not going to whine about foreigners stealing my jerbs either. If it's so easy for someone half the world away to steal my job I didn't deserve it in the first place.
When outsourcing was a big hot-button topic back around THE TURN OF THE CENTURY (just realized we can say this now and get away with it, seems weird) there was a lot of talk about how the low-value "coder" jobs would go overseas while we here in the US would just do high level design and software architecture to ship to these people to implement....
That's great for one generation, but how do people become great designers and architects without being a working "coder" for a while? Doesn't happen, in my experience (or, rather happens so infrequently the exceptions aren't worth considering).
By removing today's low-end industry jobs we risk eliminating the path of real-world experience that makes people qualified for the higher-end work, thereby making us (as a country/culture/whatever) unqualified to do the high-end stuff in the not-too-distant future.
A lot of companies are very bad at thinking about that kind of long-term progression. My dad works in a power plant, where essentially he and the millwright are the only two who understand how all of the systems in the plant work, since they are the only members of the maintenance staff that have been there long enough to have repaired all of the equipment (longer than the current management...) Both of them are looking to retire in the next couple years, and made that known some time ago. Rather than hire full-time staff to train and learn the plant in preparation for that handoff, the company contracts out (more expensive) temporary workers...
Destroying the middle class to improve margins does not grow the real economy. You grow the real economy by investing in technology and an educated workforce that can translate their skill set to providing real goods and services.
Majority owners, investors and pension plan managers need to invest their money in companies that have real customers with real incomes that can afford to buy their goods and services.
Similarly, if I don't threaten people with violence for watching "Real Housewives of New Jersey", that doesn't mean I'm facilitating people watching it.
Don't forget that a "job" is not a good thing. It's a bad thing. People don't like working, they mostly want money, at least for menial jobs. The whole idea of silicon valley is to take people's menial jobs. That's what it's there for! Should the government hinder technology companies because they're threatening to replace people's jobs with computers? Of course not! In the case of both technology and cheaper foreign workers, the overall result is positive to the US economy.
If you think Americans are more deserving than other people, then, well that's just the nationalism and racism that the GP described. You can pretend it's not racism, but it's effectively the same thing - treating people worse because of who their parents are.
I do too. There are two Indian families in my apartment complex who have a breadwinner here on a work visa. I like them and their kids are my son's best friends. I don't see them as the problem here.
> Why should Americans make more money than Indians for the same work?
I don't know about you, but I probably pay more for rent and a lot of other things here in the States than a corresponding tech worker in India does.
I don't think that makes me better than someone in India, but it does mean that the almighty Free Market is certainly not my friend. If we could lower my expenses to the levels you see in India then I think I'd be okay with the Free Market.
Updated: clarification.
Your idea that Indians (or perhaps Chinese) should be the only ones coming in sounds a bit racist to my ears actually. Why should it be Indians coming in, when so many Syrians are fleeing their homes, much due to the US invasion of Iraq (and undermining of Assad - so that now ISIS runs much of Syria).
I don't see how India providing its citizens with free IIT educations, only to be brought to the US and work like coolies, chained to an H1-B visa, is some wonderful thing. We should be giving out citizenship, and that's it, the foreign worker programs are only used to screw over American workers.
You have this racist attitude of wanting Indians, and excluding Syrians etc. You want them chained them chained as coolies to H1-B visas to exploit them. Then you accuse anyone opposed to your scheme to exploit people for a buck "racist" like you're some kind of humanitarian.
I only mentioned Indians because the article was about Indians.
> We should be giving out citizenship, and that's it, the foreign worker programs are only used to screw over American workers.
Or the US could have work visas that aren't so closely linked to a specific employer. I agree the H1-B terms as they are now are ridiculous and exploitative.
What about the success that was siphoned off from Indians due to centuries of colonialism by European powers?
Our ancestors built this nation. We current citizens are their heirs. Whatever benefits there are to having been born here, those benefits should accrue only to citizens.
America is ours, we and our ancestors built it. If there are any benefits to living here, they belong to us, and not to foregners. Likewise, my nice house belongs to me and not to you, despite the fact that it was purchased with money willed to me by my parents.
you shouldn't.
The idea of personal property is completely off the topic. Of course your house is yours, but it's not automatically your children's when you die. That's a choice you're free to make.
As for "we built America". You mean "People of Earth built America" It wasn't done in isolation. It depended on international trade and influx of valuable workers from other countries. You could equally argue that America belongs to Italians because there lots of Italian people helped build it.
America is and was built by immigrants who have (had?) little more in common with you than the Indians in the story. Basically nothing really, except a common geographic area and some shared ideals.
That's to say nation states are selfish and are at the service of its people. That's how we've got things set up. That's why Bangladeshis aren't allowed to work in India, or why any state adopts tariffs, etc. All selfish self interest. That is why.
It's also not racist, unless you use the old definition of race meaning nationality. If these were going to the English or to the Russians, you'd see similar backlash.
This is actually possible for a LOT of jobs that Americans do, modulo edge cases. Most of what nurse practitioners do, for instance, can very easily be replicated by a random forest. Try telling the nurse practitioners they don't have a real job. Hell, by that metric, most of crud isn't a real job either. In fact, the whole point of "work experience" is that the newhire with zero work experience mimics the more experienced worker until he passes the Turing test ie. the Boss, given the work output, can no longer distinguish if the work was performed by the newhire or the oldhand. Its turtles/strike/mimicry all the way down.
Here's the thing. Not everyone in this country can be a CEO. The WALL-E premise of everyone living the fat life (pun intended) while the robots do the work is not viable. The truth is that this country is made up of people with a broad spectrum of capabilities and talents. Furthermore, these people are not fungible resources that can easily relocate to whatever third world country that has now usurped their former job functions. We have already seen large parts of this country's population essentially permanently displaced with the mass outsourcing of manufacturing. These were good paying, stable blue-collar jobs that people who were not born to be CEOs could rely on, live a good life, and raise families. Now look at the former manufacturing cities. They did not all magically retrain to be knowledge workers. Instead, entire communities were laid to waste. Now extend what happened to manufacturing to skilled labor under your "every job to the cheapest bidder" philosophy. What happens? Maybe plastic crap at Toys-R-Us is 3 cents cheaper. But eventually a large enough percentage of this country is displaced to where society itself becomes unstable. When this destabilization eats away at enough of foundations of our society, even the wealthy will be affected.
Government's job is (supposed to be) to take the longview on what is good for a healthy American society, not to facilitate multi-national corporations in their quest to cut every cost they can.
Jobs are a mean to create wealth (and by extensions, welfare) for a society. I don't understand the reason for trying to reduce the wealth being created in some notion of keep "jobs", and if the inland American economy can not generate enough wealth for some reasons, then we have bigger problems to deal with.
Essentially, this is a wealth redistribution issue, and should be treated as such, focusing on creating "jobs" seems to be the wrong idea to go at it.
The globalization that allows the wealthy to eliminate their first-world workforce also allows them to avoid just about any tax they don't feel like paying.
I'm not saying that everything is fine and dandy, I'm saying that pointing finger to random chicken in the sky and shoot them won't solve the real issue. There are a lot of problems, but American politics right now is a bit engrossed in the wrong kind of trivialities.
Where did you get that from? The wealthiest 1% of Americans alone pay 50% of the federal income tax. The bottom 80% pay only 15%.
Edit: at a 50% marginal tax rate if the 1% get 60% richer through this kind of automation and offshoring, we could lower the tax rate on the bottom 80% to zero!
Edit #2: If the 1% get 120% richer, we could start handing out checks to everyone in the bottom 80% equal to what they're paying in taxes today! See where I'm going with this?
You're confusing wealth with income.
If MegaRoboCo Inc. and their contemporaries are making $1 trillion a year each in 2050, the tax revenues (corporate, capital gains, income on dividends, income on executive compensation, whatever) can be enough to support the resulting mass unemployment.
I.e. if a sector of the labor economy is discriminated against, do you say, well, let's fix that issue with government subsidies/negative taxes? If women get paid 80 on the dollar, we make the government make up the rest rather than legislate that companies to pay justly?
Anyway, the government already subsidized certain demographics, for one way or another (various types of welfare, and the population also support a bunch of subsidize that doesn't exists right now: parental leave comes to mind). In essence, it's not a question of "do" or "do not", it's just matter of deciding where to draw the line.
Another distinction is that not all discrimination and welfare discussion is about economic, a lot of policies have to do with moral, ethics and general humanity. With those constraints in mind, the consideration change a lot. The original argument I was replying to was purely economic. If you want to make a moral argument of "people need job to have self actualization and feel good about themselves", then it's not a common argument around here, and certainly worth considering, but completely different.
The example you brought up with women being paid 80 cent on the dollar is a whole can of worm that I'm not willing to open right now. Let's just put it simply that I think that specific issue is more complicated and one of the biggest difference is that it has more than just straight up economic consideration.
Nested in the available data are several records for "Associate Data Scientist" and "Senior Data Scientist", meaning that the employer advertised the job as a role with this name.
(By the way, these visas were APPROVED!)
They then have listed as the category for the visa job role "Operations Research Analysts" for the Associate, and then "Computer Occupations, All Other" for the Senior Data Scientist role. Interesting how two jobs which sound very similar have completely different classifications for the same company, huh?
The best part: The prevailing wage listed for the "Associate Data Scientist" is $48,901 and the "Senior Data Scientist" is $61,110, because those wages are dictated by the bucket they are placed in.
The actual wages which were payed for these roles was $80k and $70K, respectively.
These rates are so far below market value it's ridiculous.
The point is that the law is supposed to be in place so that companies can get workers when Americans aren't available, but the reality is that they simply allow companies to refuse to pay the market rate.
The employer in question is Walmart, in case you are wondering.
Or chef, or plumber, or auto mechanic, or teacher, or construction worker, ...
Don't worry, we haven't run out of things that people do better than machines yet!
Because America is not India. All those American workers have bills to pay in America, where the bills are higher the same way their wages are higher.
Of course they are, because the standard of living is much higher in America. If you prefer, I can rephrase the question as "Why should Americans enjoy a higher standard of living than Indians doing the same work?"
"The free market" is neither (A) a natural state between different nations with different legal codes nor (B) intrinsically moral.
I'm more interested in your views on "to maintain its lead over poor foreigners"
As well local inflation + foreign deflation will change this, it will probably fix itself due to the crazy printing of money in the US. Eventually, a $100k a year employee will just be subsistence in terms of real goods.
In a certain popular city in the US that starts with S, that is not far from truth right now.
Even spending $3k/mo on rent leaves you with $3k to spend on everything else. $3k/mo after taxes is like a $50k/yr salary. If you can live in Nebraska on $50k/yr, then you can live BETTER in SF on $100k/yr.
The SF tech crowd that can't get by on $100k need a lesson in managing money.
Secondly. The marginal price on a room is about $1000 so if you perchance want to have a family then you're looking at more like $4k- $4500 for your rent. Everything is more expensive in SF as well, not just your rent.
My bias is that I do not consider it a healthy society if a couple couldnt have a family of 2 (roughly replacement) on 1-1.5 incomes (some blend of parents have some time off to raise the kids) .
End result: $6k a month after taxes (roughly $110k before) is enough such that you still have to make sacrifices, either live far away (1 hr commute each way), live in a terrible place (tenderloin), have roommates or give up on a family.
Your post solidifies my point. Saving that much money in the midwest would be difficult on $50k/yr, but doing so on $100k in SF requires a little self-control.
Thanks, I needed a good laugh.
Outsourcing is great when you have a repeatable process that isn't constantly changing. The worst possible thing is to take a project that: 1. is changing constantly 2. is new 3. you can't get your hard around
Think it is hard managing a project when it is in the same building as you? Try doing that from thousands of miles away.
This is a common misconception. The H1B visa laws are generally used to hire very low wage workers. (I doubt the authors of the legislation are surprised by this result.)
Companies are required to pay a prevailing wage, but this wage can be one of four levels. And of course most H1B applications are for the lowest levels.
Here are levels for software developers in Chicago [1]:
For context the 25th percentile wage in Chicago is $68,670 and average is $88,630.Of course, more ambitious companies may file applications under job titles with even lower wage levels like "system analysts".
You should also know that if a H1B worker is fired, he and his family are out of status that day and must leave the country unless a visitor visa is granted (which is not guaranteed).
How would you like working here if you could be fired and your whole family could be sent packing at will?
If you were an employer, do you think you could you hack this system to your advantage? I'm pretty sure I could.
[1] http://www.flcdatacenter.com/
The ideal solution which has been proposed by several people, but will probably never see the light of day in legislation due to entrenched lobbying interests is very simple – separate the visa from the employer. If an employer sponsors an H1B once, that person should be automatically be free to work for any company he/she pleases for six years. This will make H1Bs more of a realistic "high skill level" visa and less of a captive labor pool for the industry.
EB2 visas for permanent residence are currently available [1] for employees with Ph.D., master's degree, or at least five years of progressive post-baccalaureate experience.
[1] Excluding people born in India, Mainland China, Mexico and the Philippines because applicants from those countries have exceeded the per country maximum
Granted, the H1B process is slow too.
1) The visa holder has no obligation to the company whatsoever as soon as the visa is approved. If the only thing keeping an employee at the company is the threat of deportation then maybe the company shouldn't be employing people at all.
2) The company can not extract any fees whatsoever from the employee, not even for training or relocation. The employee is not obligated to pay anything to the employer under any circumstances, even if he immediately leaves the job.
3) The Visa program is a reverse auction on salary, down to, say, 150% of the median wage for the NAICS code. The auction ends when the cap or the salary limit is reached.
4) The company must hold the first year of salary in escrow and forfeit any unpaid salary to the government if the employee leaves early. This is to prevent hiring an employee and then firing and rehiring immediately after the visa is approved at a lower salary.
Of course you're right that no real reform will happen, because as far as the Zuckerberg/fwd.us crowd is concerned, the only problem with the current system is that the cap is too low.
(edited to include links)
[1] http://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/14_1120_...
[2] http://www.natlawreview.com/article/regrettable-and-sudden-d...
And the police had powers to deport --double the fun (meaning you had to have papers)
That said, I don't think progressives who propose easing immigration from poor countries would allow competition for "high-skilled" jobs like doctors, engineers, lawyers because it would suffer pressure from professional pushback.
Create a new visa class then for students and entrepreneurs who come here and get their advanced degrees. Universities and talent out of those universities is what builds this great nation.
edit: I personally hate consulting companies from India because they get employees with a lot of experience and pay them peanuts. Even a new college graduate would not accept a job offer for their salary.
I am not making this up....
I'm 100% sure that India could find some way to do accounting without sending people to the US for 4 weeks to learn. This is pure fear-mongering by the New York Times, probably just because of the political winds against immigration.