Global Labor Auction

Date: Wednesday, October 29, 2003 1:09 PM

JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER

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Global Labor Auction

October 27, 2003
By Rob Sanchez

Until recently, workers who entered the United States on nonimmigrant
guest-worker visas were used primarily for low-paying, menial jobs such
as building railroads and picking farm crops. The year 1990 marked a
radical departure in philosophy as professional white-collar workers
using nonimmigrant work visas such as H-1B and L-1 were allowed to work
in the United States. These visas were inserted into the General
Agreement on Trade and Services as part of the World Trade Organization
plan to globalize the labor market.

Corporate lobbyists ran an expensive campaign to coerce Congress to
pass nonimmigrant visa legislation. The cornerstone of their marketing
campaign was the creation of the myth of a shortage of U.S. high-tech
workers. Shortage shouters included organizations such as the
Information Technology Association of America, American Immigration
Lawyers Association, the Indian-owned National Association of Software
and Service Companies, and the National Science Foundation.

Harris Miller, president of the ITAA, is a professional shortage
shouter. His corporate-funded organization creates anecdotal reports
claiming that massive shortages of technical workers threaten the U.S.
economy. ITAA studies are merely opinion polls of corporate human
resource departments, but the data was used to convince Congress that
worker shortages exist.

NASSCOM lobbies the U.S. Senate and doesn't hesitate to grease the
skids with plenty of money and perks. Its agenda is to allow more
outsourcing of jobs to India and, of course, to allow more nonimmigrant
visa holders to take jobs in the United States. The persuasion of U.S.
politicians is furthered by organized junkets for the India Caucus.
NASSCOM helped organize the latest India Caucus junket to Mumbai for an
entourage led by congressional lap dogs Joseph Crowley, D-N.Y.; Sheila
Jackson Lee, D-Texas; Chris Bell, D-Texas; and Kendrick Meek, D-Fla.
These pandering politicians were wined and dined in Mumbai while they
pledged to sacrifice U.S. jobs by moving them to India.

"Free-trade" corporatists seek to globalize the world into rich
plutocrats and units of labor that work for a living. The church of
globalism, sometimes called the WTO, has mandated that business owners
have the right to move workers across national boundaries. The WTO
calls these mobile units of labor "natural persons," and they will be
traded on the world commodity market as a service.

Disparate groups of international workers cannot effectively coerce
reform while corporations maintain an economic stranglehold on the
governments of nation-states. Responsible leaders must define the rules
in order to stop the plundering of their economies and the exploitation
of workers from other nations.

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>>> Rob Sanchez, a software engineer from Arizona, is the Webmaster of
ZaZona.com and author of the "Job Destruction Newsletter."

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