Are tech firms faking job ads to avoid hiring U.S. workers?

http://weblog.infoworld.com/robertxcringely/archives/2008/09/are_tech_firms.html

September 24, 2008
Companies like Hewlett Packard, Cisco, and others are being accused of skirting federal laws to hire foreign workers while laying off American geeks. Cringely labors to uncover the truth.

TAGS: Come Hell or HP

Ask the Programmers Guild that question, and their answer would be an emphatic "yes!" The New Jersey-based organization has accused Hewlett Packard of advertising for jobs it has no intention of filling -- at least with US citizens -- on the Idaho Department of Labor Web site.

Federal regulations require U.S. corporations that wish to request a green card for a foreign worker to demonstrate that no qualified U.S. workers are available to fill the job. So, the argument goes, HP is allegedly posting fake jobs online and in newspapers to fulfill the requirements of Uncle Sam's Program Electronic Review Management process. Resumes come in, Americans get winnowed out, and the PERM job goes to Enrique or Sanjay or Vladimir.

The key bit of evidence: Job applications are directed not to HP's normal human resources department but to one of its immigration specialists.

A Hewlett Packard spokesperson responded thusly:

The programmer's guild website and press release on HP is inaccurate and misleading. The job notices that were on the Idaho state job bank last week appeared in error. We are working with the Idaho Department of Labor to assure such errors do not occur in the future. HP has no plans to substitute American workers with foreign nationals for these roles.

HP is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate against any workers, but always seeks to hire the best and the brightest and that includes a small percentage (2-3%) of foreign nationals.

Blogger (and recently downsized HP engineer) Clayton Cramer notes that HP said those Idaho job postings were a mistake and would be taken down. Curiously, he adds, very similar ads for job at HP appeared on the site a few days later.

Programmers Guild president Kim Berry says companies prefer H-1B workers because foreign workers' options are limited: They aren't allowed to change jobs for several years, they may be forced to work overtime without pay, and they're less likely to question management decisions. "It's a form of indentured servitude," he says.

The Guild isn't the only group squawking about this. Blogger James Fulford has accused HP of laying off older Americans and then posting ads for jobs that are pretty much identical to the ones they just "eliminated." The motive: to replace older, better paid employees with younger, cheaper PERM employees.

Meanwhile, HP recently announced it's slashing 24,600 employees as a result of its merger with EDS, half of them employed in the States. According to SiliconValley.com, "HP said it plans to replace about half those jobs with new positions performing other functions."

It will be interesting to see how they define "other functions."

Of course, HP is hardly the only company suspected of doing this. Cisco has been accused of running similarly bogus ads. Last year, the Guild posted a YouTube video showing Pittsburgh law firm Cohen & Grisgsby giving a tutorial on how to skirt the legal requirements to hire H-1B workers that created a small firestorm on the Net and even woke up two members of Congress. (They resumed their nap shortly thereafter.)

Is this illegal? Technically not, says Berry. "But the companies are supposed to make a good faith effort to hire Americans. It's not good faith if they're getting resumes from highly qualified candidates and looking for reasons not to hire them."

Finally, frequent Cringe contributor J. H. shares this viral video, titled "Developers Are in Pain." It doesn't have anything to do with immigration or H-1B visas, but it's pretty damned funny -- and very true.

Have you been PERMed out of a job? Post your tale or woe (or resume) below or email it to at cringe (at) infoworld (dot) com. We'll get back to you...after we've interviewed Enrique, Sanjay, and Vlad.

Posted by Robert X. Cringely on September 24, 2008 03:00 AM

What IT jobs?

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9110329

Study: IT jobs will drop in 2009
Sharp reductions likely in contract staff, professional services and hardware, and almost no investment in cloud computing
By Ephraim Schwartz

July 18, 2008 (InfoWorld) IT staff jobs are at increasing risk -- both for contractors and in-house workers -- according to a survey of top CIOs by Goldman Sachs & Co. released last week. Global services companies will also feel the pinch because of the slowing economy.

A second survey showed that basic PC and network hardware, as well as professional services providers, would bear the largest proportion of spending cuts. It also showed that CIOs planned to emphasize economizing measures over investments in new technologies, with cloud computing emerging as the last item on their priority lists, despite the hype around it.

"Demand for discretionary IT projects dropped to its lowest point" in the 41-study history of the Goldman Sachs staffing survey, which asked 100 managers with strategic decision-making authority (mainly CIOs at multinational Fortune 1,000 companies) about their IT staffing plans for 2009.

The Sachs report states that "in a cost-constrained IT budget scenario, CIOs will most likely look to cut their resources first from lower-value augmented [contract] IT staff." The company also describes its survey as "an early warning flag" for service providers' 2009 bookings of new projects.

These intended cutbacks are a change from last fall. When the managers were asked in October which area of IT service delivery resources they would cut for application-related development or maintenance work, the answer was 0% for in-house employees. However, with a declining economy, 8% of respondents in a February survey said in-house IT programming staffers would be cut. In April, 15% of respondents said in-house staffers would be cut. That dropped to 11% in the June survey (the most recent).

But contract employees fare much worse. In the survey, 48% of the respondents said that those staffers would be cut. And 30% of the responders said on-site third-party service provider staffers would also be cut for application-related development or maintenance work. Twelve percent of the managers said they would cut employees from offshore third-party service providers.

high-tech visas

Business claims they really, really need to import large numbers of high-tech workers.
I can see their point. They're actually having to hire people over 50 as programmer/analysts. The horror of it. The next thing you know, they will be hiring new graduates, if there are any who are still willing to get a degree in IT nowadays. Just think, if they can't import workers from overseas, they might actually be forced to take effective steps to stop our habit of throwing away large numbers of our own people, who happen to have been born in deprived circumstances, but who have the potential to succeed.

how to lied with statistics about globalization

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18699042/site/newsweek/

In a Newsweek article, Robert Samuelson says that globalization has not hurt the U.S. much because some studies found that only a small percent of mass layoffs could be attributed to offshoring.

In 2004 and 2005, the BLS counted almost 1 million workers fired in layoffs of 50 or more. That isn't a huge number in a labor force of about 150 million. Moreover, most causes were domestic. The largest reason (accounting for about 25 percent) was "contract completion"—a public works job done, a movie finished. Other big categories included "downsizing" (16 percent) and the combination of bankruptcy and "financial difficulty" (10 percent). Only about 12 percent of layoffs stemmed from "movement of work"—a category that would include offshoring. But two-thirds of those moves were domestic.

What about the "downsizing" category? Ignored was Why the company was downsizing. Maybe because some of the jobs were outsourced to other countries?

He also totally ignores the number of jobs lost to citizens because of the importation of workers through H1-B and L-1 visas.

And of course, he points to low official unemployment statistics :

Still, with the unemployment rate at 4.5 percent, it's clear that globalization hasn't crippled the U.S. job machine.

Of course, this doesn't take into effect cases like a person who has been a computer programmer for 25 or 30 years is working at a low-skilled job, or borrowed money to get a graduate degree, because they can't get a job in their field. Getting a degree in middle-age, certainly in late middle-age, is likely to result only in a higher debt load. Also, the baby boomers who can afford to, and want to, are starting to retire.

elite whiners : H1-B visas and outsourcing

I am really tired of the rich power elite whining because of conditions they instigated, or at least made worse.

They are complaining that not enough young people are going into computers. When I got my first programming job, I had a degree in math, and a single programming course - in FORTRAN. I was given an IBM programmed instruction manual on Assembler language, and became an Assembler programmer. I taught myself COBOL from a programmed instruction manual, and got a COBOL job. For years, I continued to get jobs and assignments for which I did not have all of the specific experience needed, but which I was able to easily pick up on the job. Now, companies don't want to hire anyone who doesn't have several years of specific experience in every detail of the job, no matter how trivial. They don't want to hire people over a certain age, or people just out of school. In 2000, when many thousands of programmers had been thrown on the trash pile after saving the economy of the world, business got Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, to greatly increase the number of H1-B visas, allowing the importing of technical people from other companies. Also, many companies have been outsourcing skilled jobs to other companies. Many skilled and capable people were out of work, or working at low-paid jobs. So college students made the intelligent decision not to go into IT. Now that many baby boomers are retiring, companies are being forced to hire older and less experienced people. So now they are trying to get Congress to again increase the number of H1-B visas. I saw an article in the last couple of weeks saying that there is a program to go to high schools and colleges and tell students that IT would be a great field to go into, at the same time they are trying to make sure this is a blatant lie by increasing the number of H1-B visas and outsourcing.

Of course, much of this is also true for other skilled professions. They are even outsourcing tax preparation and x-ray analysis to other countries.

We are also being told that we are going to have a problem in funding Social Security retirements of baby boomers. Increasing the number of H1-B visas will make this worse. If we can't get decent-paying jobs, we will be forced to take early Social Security retirement just to survive. We are criticized for not saving enough for retirement. If you have a low-paying job, you can't save much, if anything, for retirement.

here we go again

In 2000, when thousands of people in IT were out of work after saving the economy of the world by doing the Y2K conversions, Congress paid of its big business donors by greatly increasing the number of high-tech H1-B visas, which allow busingess to bring in cheap labor from other countries. The result is that people with 25 or 30 years of experience couldn't even get e-mails or phone calls returned, and ended up working at jobs such as teacher's aid, waitress, construction, etc. Also, people w/o experience could not get a job. Now many baby boomers are retiring, so companies are being forced to open up to older people, and those just out of colleges. So, no surprise, Congress is being lobbyed by the business community to greatly increase the limit on H1-B visas.