8 Articles Worth Reading
8 Articles Worth Reading
Date: Monday, November 07, 2005 12:37 PM
JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER
November 07, 2005 No. 1363
Article 1:
http://money.cnn.com/2005/10/26/news/fortune500/northwest_flightattendants/index.htm
More outsourcing for Northwest?
Flight attendants contend airline wants non-union workers on overseas flights and smaller jets.
The Professional Flight Attendants Association says the company is seeking to give virtually all flight attendant jobs on international flights to lower-paid foreign workers. The union also says the airline is seeking to have flight attendant positions on planes with 77 to 100 seats done by non-union workers as well.
Article 2:
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB113029189328179595-lMyQjAxMDE1MzIwNjIyOTYxWj.html
Northwest Targets Flight Attendants For Outsourcing
Not only is the airline asking the flight attendants for 17% pay cuts, it is proposing to have 75% of its flights across the Atlantic and Pacific and all of its flights between Amsterdam and India staffed by "regional flight attendants" who aren't currently members of the Professional Flight Attendants Association union. Several of the largest U.S. airlines -- including AMR Corp.'s American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and UAL Corp.'s United Airlines -- already employ less expensive foreign nationals as flight attendants,
Article 3:
http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/05_38/b3951434.htm?chan=gl
The Visa Maze
Pending legislation could make it tougher to hire immigrant workers
Rhodes's 18 employees are mostly foreign nationals with H2B visas that allow them to work in the U.S. for just 12 months. Entrepreneurs like Rhodes, who says he has no choice but to hire immigrants. "No American workers are willing to do this type of work," he says. "I didn't receive one application this year." Shirish Phatak, chief technology officer of Tacit Networks, a $10 million computer-networking company in South Plainfield, N.J., - fourteen of his 100 employees are foreign nationals, mostly engineers from India.
Article 4:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,3604,1579037,00.html
We can do this the nice way ... or the nasty way
Two hurricanes in a month, petrol prices at $3 a gallon, a current account deficit of enormous proportions, a housing market that defies gravity: little wonder that the mood in the United States is a little edgy. The International Monetary Fund made it clear last week that it saw the world's largest economy as an accident waiting to happen.
Article 5:
http://pittsburgh.bizjournals.com/bizwomen/pittsburgh/content/story.html?story_id=1184399
Area firms, workers value H-1B visas
Reduction in number issued annually makes for short supply
Wei Xu spent six years traveling outside of her native China before landing a job here. "It's such a very friendly environment in Pittsburgh," said Xu, a software engineer at Vocollect Inc., a Wilkins-based designer and manufacturer of wearable computers for warehouse inventory services. Xu's time in Pittsburgh is possible because she was able to obtain an H1-B nonimmigrant working visa, which allows nonresidents to temporarily enter the United States for jobs in certain fields. She's on her second one, and it expires in two-and-a-half years.
Article 6:
http://www.edmontonsun.com/News/Canada/2005/10/29/1283949-sun.html
Stripper shortageNo change in easy visas: 'still pimping for the underworld'
Canada's welcome mat is still rolled out for foreign strippers and lap dancers who can get quick visas to fill a domestic "labour shortage."
Article 7:
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/11/2/135209.shtml
Senate Bill Will Take Even More Jobs From Americans
The latest bombing of the Middle Class, particularly on the professional occupations, may be found in Specter's and the Senate budget package. It includes provisions that will make available hundreds of thousands of green cards for new permanent legal immigrants. if you still care about your job, your nation and the future of your children and grandchildren, you'd better rock their tidy little congressional world with enough phone calls and letters to shut them down. Personally, I think that would do us all a lot of good and give the U.S. Senate in particular a much-needed trip to the woodshed and a drubbing they richly deserve.
Article 8:
http://washingtontimes.com/metro/20051103-103013-2489r.htm
Immigration bill gets support
Local universities and technology alliances have thrown their support behind federal legislation that would make it easier to bring in highly skilled teachers and workers from India and China. Among the companies that support Compete America's push for access to foreign nationals -- many of whom already reside in the United States -- are Microsoft Corp, Intel Corp. and Texas Instruments Inc. George Washington University is one of several local universities that said they welcome the opportunity to readily hire foreign professors and researchers.
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http://money.cnn.com/2005/10/26/news/fortune500/northwest_flightattendants/index.htm
More outsourcing for Northwest?
Flight attendants contend airline wants non-union workers on overseas flights and smaller jets.
October 26, 2005: 7:54 AM EDT
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Northwest Airlines, which has already outsourced many jobs formerly performed by its mechanics union to outside contractors and replacement workers, is now looking to make deep cuts in the work done by its unionized flight attendants.
The move is worrying airline unions outside of Northwest Airlines, which worry that if Northwest is successful in stripping more of its work from its unions other airlines will try to follow course in order to trim their own costs.
Northwest, which filed for bankruptcy court protections last month, is seeking to have the bankruptcy judge void its union contracts at a Nov. 16 hearing. It says it needs $195 million a year in cost cuts from the flight attendants as part of the plan to reorganize.
The Professional Flight Attendants Association says the company is seeking to give virtually all flight attendant jobs on international flights to lower-paid foreign workers. The union also says the airline is seeking to have flight attendant positions on planes with 77 to 100 seats done by non-union workers as well.
PFAA estimates that more than 2,000 of its members would be laid off if it lost the right to perform the work the airline now wants to give to non-union flight attendants. That's in addition to any layoffs that will occur due to the airline trimming capacity in the bankruptcy process.
Northwest has not disclosed its negotiating demands other than the cost-cutting target. It says that PFAA represents 8,500 current employees at the nation's No. 4 airline, while the union says it has 10,000 members at the airline, including those on furlough.
The demands on the Northwest flight attendants prompted the Association of Flight Attendants, an AFL-CIO affiliated union, to offer an unconditional, no-strings-attached pledge of resources and support to PFAA, an independent union that does not belong to the AFL-CIO. That offer includes union lawyers experienced in airline bankruptcies, labor negotiators, as well as researchers and analysts.
"The situation at Northwest is potentially devastating to all flight attendants across the country if the company's proposal is met," a statement from AFA President Patricia Friend said. "This non-contract, non-union workforce that Northwest is proposing will show up on every bargaining table in the future if we don't all work together and come to an equitable solution."
The PFAA rank and file voted not to support the strike by the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association, which started Aug. 20. The lack of support from other Northwest unions hurt AMFA's ability to disrupt Northwest operations and weakened its chances to stop the outsourcing of maintenance work at the airline. Virtually all maintenance work outside of Northwest's hubs in Detroit and Minneapolis-St. Paul is now done by outside contractors.
The PFAA has called for its members to rally Congress about airline outsourcing Nov. 2, and is calling for members to rally outside the Nov. 16 bankruptcy court hearing in New York.
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http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB113029189328179595-lMyQjAxMDE1MzIwNjIyOTYxWj.html
Northwest Targets
Flight Attendants
For Outsourcing
Ailing Carrier Seeks Savings
By Pushing Veteran Staffers
Off Prized Overseas Routes
By SUSAN CAREY
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
October 26, 2005; Page A1
Emboldened by its success in beating a mechanics strike with an army of replacement workers, Northwest Airlines is trying another hardball tactic against organized labor -- an outsourcing maneuver other airlines may be forced to copy.
Part of the plan this time involves farming out some of the positions filled by senior flight attendants on coveted international routes. It's another sign that Northwest, which filed for bankruptcy-court protection last month, wants to become a "virtual airline," with all sorts of jobs previously claimed by organized labor outsourced to cheaper workers, some overseas.
Earlier this month, Northwest told its bankruptcy-court judge that it will ask the court at a Nov. 16 hearing to cancel its current labor contracts if the unions don't agree by mid-November to new terms that would save hundreds of millions of dollars a year. The carrier also is trying to outsource pilot and ground-worker jobs.
Not only is the airline asking the flight attendants for 17% pay cuts, it is proposing to have 75% of its flights across the Atlantic and Pacific and all of its flights between Amsterdam and India staffed by "regional flight attendants" who aren't currently members of the Professional Flight Attendants Association union. That's the group that represents Northwest's 9,800 U.S.-based flight attendants.
Northwest also is seeking to move all the flight-attendant jobs on planes with 77 to 100 seats that fly in North America to attendants not on the PFAA seniority list, and to cut the number of U.S. flight attendants allowed to work on flights from Japan to the rest of Asia to one from two. The seniority list ranks attendants according to hire date, and the ranking affects pay, assignments and other quality-of-life issues.
Those intra-Asia flights are mostly staffed by nearly 700 Asian attendants from bases in Japan, China, South Korea, the Philippines and other countries. They operate under different pay and work rules but have language skills for Asian destinations as well as English. The current union contract allows this limited but longstanding outsourcing.
Northwest is seeking cost savings of $195 million a year from the flight attendants through 2010. The airline, based in Eagan, Minn., and the nation's fourth-largest by traffic, said it hopes to achieve mutual agreements on concessions with all its unions except for the mechanics before the Nov. 16 hearing. It also said it remains open to suggestions from the unions on alternative ways to reach the cost-savings targets it has identified.
No other U.S. airline has managed to take away most of the prized international flying normally awarded to the most senior attendants. If Northwest succeeds, its big rivals might be forced to follow suit simply to get their costs into line.
Many U.S. attendants like overseas flights because they earn more, can pack more hours of work into fewer days and sometimes can enjoy longer layovers in attractive foreign cities. If Northwest took much of that work away, it would push veteran attendants into domestic flying and displace colleagues with less experience.
Other unions are worried. "The situation at Northwest is potentially devastating to all flight attendants across the country," said Pat Friend, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants, AFL-CIO, in a press release. Her union represents 46,000 attendants at a number of carriers. In a letter to the president of PFAA, a small union that isn't affiliated with the AFL-CIO, Ms. Friend said: "One thing we have learned during this financial crisis in our industry is that proposals like this spread from carrier to carrier like the most virulent disease mankind has ever experienced."
PFAA says it is focusing its attention on negotiating a cost-saving contract agreeable to both sides before Nov. 16. "Aside from our own jobs, we're also conscious about how things domino in the airline industry," says Bob Krabbe, the union's assistant contract administrator. "Were the company to get its way, this would be a huge slap in the face to the American worker."
An Aug. 20 strike by Northwest's 4,400 unionized mechanics and cleaners allowed the airline to impose new terms on the replacement workers it brought in to look after its fleet when the work stoppage began. Now the airline is permanently hiring some of the replacement workers, and has vastly cut the overall number it needs to just 880 by outsourcing work to third-party contractors in this country and abroad.
PFAA estimates that 2,600 more attendants would be laid off if Northwest outsources most of the overseas flying and goes ahead with the creation of a new subsidiary to handle small-jet flying on domestic routes. Those cuts would come on top of 1,400 others who will lose their jobs in the coming months as the airline pares capacity in bankruptcy.
This threat comes at a time when Northwest is trying to pressure unions to agree to big concessions. But if the unions don't agree to givebacks -- and vote them in through ratification by members, the bankruptcy judge could annul the current contract and allow Northwest to impose terms that could look a lot like these.
Northwest's concessionary plans also take aim at its pilots and ground workers. The new regional airline Northwest wants to start would allow the pilots to be members of the Air Line Pilots Association, but not ALPA members from Northwest's seniority list. There would be no limits on the number of planes that would fly for the new carrier and wages would be "average for the regional airline industry," or much lower than those at Northwest.
"They have staked out a really extreme position," says Capt. Hal Myers, spokesman for the ALPA branch at Northwest. "Whenever they negotiate, they tend to overreach. This is completely outside the box of what other carriers have or have asked for." The pilot said ALPA has offered to keep that regional flying within its union at lower costs, and is worried that Northwest ultimately would spin off or sell the new unit, taking all of those jobs away from the union.
Northwest also is seeking to outsource all ramp workers' positions except at its hubs and all customer-service-agent jobs at its non-hub airports, according to the carrier's proposals to the International Association of Machinists union. Bobby DePace, head of the IAM district that represents 14,600 ground workers, says those changes probably would end up eliminating 5,000 jobs.
Northwest officials declined to comment on details of their cost-cutting proposals or the remarks of union officials.
Several of the largest U.S. airlines -- including AMR Corp.'s American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and UAL Corp.'s United Airlines -- already employ less expensive foreign nationals as flight attendants, but the practice is limited -- and mostly inherited from the days when these carriers bought international routes from ailing forebears like Pan American World Airways and Eastern Airlines.
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http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/05_38/b3951434.htm?chan=gl
SEPTEMBER 19, 2005
BW SMALLBIZ -- FRONT LINE
The Visa Maze
Pending legislation could make it tougher to hire immigrant workers
Every year, Michael Rhodes's $2 million business, Commercial Landscapers in Kansas City, Kan., butts heads with the nation's scrambled immigration system.
Rhodes's 18 employees are mostly foreign nationals with H2B visas that allow them to work in the U.S. for just 12 months. So each year, Rhodes tackles the paperwork to try to keep them on for another year -- and starts shelling out cash to his immigration lawyer. It costs about $5,000 to renew his workers' visas or, if that fails, file applications to hire new employees. "It's not guaranteed you'll get your workers, and you still have to pay," says Rhodes. Some years he winds up understaffed.
That's because H2B visas -- those for temporary unskilled employees -- are capped at 66,000 annually. So are H1B visas for temporary skilled professional workers. Those caps are often reached in the first months of the year. Although they have been temporarily boosted several times, the caps haven't changed since 1990.
Filing for a single H1B will run about $3,000 this year not including legal fees. That's a 168% increase over 2004, says Susan Storch, an immigration lawyer at Reed Smith in Newark, N.J. Run afoul of the system, and you could be hit with fines as high as $11,000.
NO YANKS APPLY
The situation may soon become more complex. A Labor Dept. regulation and two pending bills increase the administrative burden of hiring immigrants and could put more responsibility for making sure workers are legal on the shoulders of small business owners. Entrepreneurs who hire illegal workers could even face jail time. That's worrisome for entrepreneurs like Rhodes, who says he has no choice but to hire immigrants. "No American workers are willing to do this type of work," he says. "I didn't receive one application this year."
A new regulation known as Program Electronic Review Management (PERM) is designed to shorten the time it takes immigrant workers to attain permanent status, primarily by automating the green-card approval process. Over time, that should exempt more foreign workers -- and their employers -- from the annual application exercise. After as little as two months, workers whose employers have successfully negotiated PERM can get green-card status.
But for small business owners, the side effects of the bill include more direct wage competition with big companies plus a wave of new paperwork. PERM, which went into effect in March, requires employers to use an online filing system to submit worker documents. CEOs must also prove they tried to hire American workers by running Sunday newspaper ads, posting notices in-house, and recruiting from job fairs, Web sites, or private employment agencies.
PERM also requires businesses to offer a prevailing wage, pitting small companies against big ones that pay more. "Basically it is so cumbersome that employers are shying away from considering this," says Storch. She says once she explains to entrepreneurs how PERM works, they often give up on trying to get permanent status for workers with temporary visas.
Shirish Phatak, chief technology officer of Tacit Networks, a $10 million computer-networking company in South Plainfield, N.J., is plowing ahead with PERM nonetheless. Fourteen of his 100 employees are foreign nationals, mostly engineers from India. Phatak registers his company with the Labor Dept. and keeps records of job postings and recruitment efforts. That has meant about 15 hours of extra work each week for the past three months. "The time I have to spend on it has at least doubled," says Phatak.
RED TAPE -- AND JAIL
More changes could be in the works. This fall, Congress is expected to debate two bills, one of which would create a new visa allowing more foreigners to work in the U.S. But both bills carry harsher penalties for those who hire illegals.
The Secure America & Orderly Immigration Act, introduced in the Senate in May by John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), would create a new visa, the H5A. Each year, 400,000 visas -- good for three years -- would be granted to "essential workers" who are nonagricultural or highly skilled employees. The bill, which has already won some bipartisan support, would allow aliens already working in the U.S. to pay a fine and back taxes to attain legal status. The bill would also require employers to certify an employee's status through a central database. Entrepreneurs who hire illegal workers will face fines up to $20,000 and, most startling, up to six months in prison.
A second proposed bill, the Comprehensive Enforcement & Immigration Reform Act of 2005, is even more punitive, with prison terms of up to three years. The bill, sponsored by Senators John Cornyn (R-Tex.) and Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), requires, among other things, collection of fingerprints or other biological data on workers.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce supports the Secure America bill because of its higher cap and because it allows employed immigrants to become legal without having to return home first. (Neither the National Federation of Independent Business nor the American Small Business Assn. has taken a stand on either proposal.) The Secure America bill, says Angelo Amador, director of immigration policy for the Chamber, "will stabilize the current system and allow small businesses to build a legal workforce. Businesses that rely on these workers can stay open, and everyone will benefit."
But Dale Wood, owner of the $2 million, 66-employee Italia Ristorante in San Antonio, says he's already doing the best he can to make sure his employees are here legally. "I am not a good immigration officer, and I wasn't planning on being one when I got into the business," he says.
For now, small businesses can protect themselves by making sure to complete all I-9 employment-verification forms. Bill Reilly, unit chief for the office of investigations at the Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE), suggests that entrepreneurs join Basic Pilot, an employment-verification system run by the ICE that determines eligibility by searching Social Security Administration and Homeland Security Dept. databases. (You can find out more about the system at uscis.gov/graphics/index.htm or www.ice.gov.) But for the time being, most entrepreneurs, like Rhodes, will be paying their immigration lawyers plenty to navigate the mess for them.
By Jeremy Quittner
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,3604,1579037,00.html
We can do this the nice way ... or the nasty way
Larry Elliott, economics editor
Tuesday September 27, 2005
The Guardian
Two hurricanes in a month, petrol prices at $3 a gallon, a current account deficit of enormous proportions, a housing market that defies gravity: little wonder that the mood in the United States is a little edgy.
The International Monetary Fund made it clear last week that it saw the world's largest economy as an accident waiting to happen. The US could not continue to live beyond its means indefinitely, and there were only two ways to deal with the unsustainable imbalances in the global economy: the nice way or the nasty way.
The nice way, according to simulations by IMF staff, would involve a gradual slowdown in the pace of consumption in the US, accompanied by slightly higher real interest rates and a modest 15% devaluation in the dollar over a few years.
The US current account would decline from 6% of GDP to 3.5% of GDP by 2010 and to 3% over the long run. The other main component of the soft-landing scenario would see a 15% appreciation of currencies in the developing countries of Asia - China, for the most part - which would result in their current account surpluses shrinking to 2% of GDP.
The nasty way involves a much sharper contraction in US activity. Under this scenario, the overseas investors who have been funding the American trade deficit by buying US assets decide they have had enough. The result is a large and sudden devaluation of the dollar, which adds to inflationary pressure and forces the Federal Reserve to raise short-term interest rates aggressively. Protectionist pressures mount and this, together with the big appreciation of China's currency, leads to much slower growth. With both the world's two big growth engines - the US and China - faltering, Europe and Japan also suffer. Financial markets suffer hefty losses, adding to the gloom.
The IMF does not know how this will pan out - nor, to be honest, does anybody else. On the plus side, it points to the fact that the past year has seen some progress on the agenda it has proposed for each key part of the global economy: the US budget deficit has been reduced, the Chinese have taken the first steps towards a more flexible exchange rate regime, the Japanese and the Europeans have committed themselves to structural reforms of their economies. On the negative side, however, there has been no evidence thus far that the moves have been accompanied by an improvement in the global imbalances. On the contrary, they appear to have got worse.
The communique issued by the G7 at the weekend aptly summed up the mood of uncertainty. Although the global economy has continued to expand and the outlook was "positive for further growth", it stressed that higher energy prices, growing global imbalances and rising protectionist pressures "have increased the risks to the outlook".
Inflation
Oil prices are a real concern, despite relief that Hurricane Rita caused less damage than feared. Prices have now remained higher for longer than policymakers expected, and the futures markets suggest they are going to stay high. Demand is expected to remain strong and it will take years for investment in new fields and refineries to increase supply.
The inflationary impact of dearer energy is already becoming evident, with consumer confidence dented by falling disposable incomes and policymakers fretting about the effects on inflation. Central banks will only take a relaxed view of higher oil prices when they can be really confident that activity will not be impaired. Some analysts believe that it will not be long before the economy is affected. Janet Henry of HSBC said that if petrol prices stayed at pre-hurricane levels, American consumers would spend an extra 1% of disposable income just on fuel in the final quarter of 2005, compared with the fourth quarter of 2004. She said: "The current bout of high oil could finally spell the end of the US consumer-leveraged expansion and a near-term end to the Fed tightening."
It has certainly been the consumer that has kept the US afloat over the past few years. As the IMF put it: "Fiscal and monetary policies in the United States became sharply expansionary - both absolutely and relative to other countries - thus sustaining domestic demand."
America's spending habit has been fed by exports from the rest of the world, with China playing an increasingly important role. The forces of globalisation have given both sides of the transaction what they want: the US has been able to suck in low-cost goods while the developing countries of Asia have been able to enjoy export-led growth. In the process, they have built up a huge stock of US assets, while the US has increased its stock of liabilities.
"Looking forward, the global imbalances are clearly unsustainable in the long term. If the US external current account balance excluding investment income remained at its current level of more than 5% of GDP, there would be an unbounded accumulation of external liabilities," the IMF said. It noted that so far the US had experienced little difficulty in financing imbalances but that there was no guarantee that this benign state of affairs would persist. It is right to be wary. On any reasonable assessment, a central part of any unwinding of the global imbalances will be a considerable devaluation of the dollar, which would leave those holding US assets nursing substantial losses.
Vacuum
To trigger a crisis, holders of US assets don't necessarily need to sell them; all they need to do is to stop buying more. To be sure, the US can be allowed to continue along its current path, with the cooperation of the central banks of China, Japan and other Asian countries, but this would mean an even bigger adjustment in exchange rates when the day of reckoning finally arrived, and an even bigger haircut for those awash with US assets.
Apart from the dire consequences for the global economy that would result from a disorderly unwinding of the imbalances, there are two additional causes for concern. One is that while the IMF has analysed the dilemma with aplomb, neither it nor any other body involved in global economic governance seems to have the clout to do anything about preventing a meltdown. There is a vacuum that needs to be filled and urgently.
The second concern is this: underlying the policy recommendations of just about every global analyst is the belief that the rest of the world needs to emulate the economic model of the US. The calls for structural reform in Japan and Europe stem from the belief that the Americans and the other "Anglo-Saxon" economies have the sort of flexibility that breeds success. Yet that hardly squares with the IMF's notion that the US economy could be going down the pan at any moment. As Mark Weisbrot of the Centre for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington-based thinktank, points out, nor does it square with the long-term needs of sustainability. Europe's energy consumption per head is half that of the US: Weisbrot says the idea that the Europeans should work longer so that they can buy more things is dangerous and he's right.
Perhaps the Germans were a lot smarter than they've been given credit for in their scepticism about the need for neo-liberal structural reform.
Russia left out in the cold
All sorts of rumours were swirling around in Washington at the weekend when it was announced that Gordon Brown was to chair yet another meeting of the G7 in London in December. One theory was that it was to give political impetus to the world trade talks in Hong Kong, which start two days later. Another was that it was a special send-off to Alan Greenspan, who retires from the US Federal Reserve in January. The neatest explanation, however, was that the G7 wanted to shaft Russia.
At the moment, Russia's political clout means it is a member of the G8, which last met at Gleneagles in July, but it is not deemed an important enough economy to join the finance ministers and central bank governors of the US, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Canada and Japan at G7 meetings.
For the first time next year Russia will hold the presidency of the G8. Since meetings of the G7 are by tradition held in the country that is hosting the G8, the Russians thought this was a chance to get into the rich man's club by the back door. But instead of holding the next meeting in February, the G7 has cunningly brought it forward to December in the UK, making it possible to leave the Russians out in the cold. In reality that's a sensible decision. There is a strong case for membership of the G7 to be expanded, but China and India have a stronger case than Russia.
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http://pittsburgh.bizjournals.com/bizwomen/pittsburgh/content/story.html?story_id=1184399
Monday, October 31, 2005
Area firms, workers value H-1B visas
Reduction in number issued annually makes for short supply
Candy Gola
From the Pittsburgh Business Times
Wei Xu spent six years traveling outside of her native China before landing a job here.
"It's such a very friendly environment in Pittsburgh," said Xu, a software engineer at Vocollect Inc., a Wilkins-based designer and manufacturer of wearable computers for warehouse inventory services.
Xu said she likes the region so much that she decided to have a child here. Her co-workers hosted a baby shower for her just a weeks ago.
"I felt very happy about that," she said. "That's how friendly it is here."
Xu's time in Pittsburgh is possible because she was able to obtain an H1-B nonimmigrant working visa, which allows nonresidents to temporarily enter the United States for jobs in certain fields. She's on her second one, and it expires in two-and-a-half years.
Obtaining working visas hasn't been easy since Sept. 11. Tightened national security and a reduction in the number of H1-B visas issued annually, from 195,000 to 65,000, means they're in short supply.
Certain provisions of the 2005 Omnibus Appropriations Bill (HR 4818), which took effect on March 8, made an additional 20,000 H-1B visas to nonresidents who have earned at least a master's degree from a U.S. institution of higher education.
This increase worked in Prem Nagrath's favor. Nagrath, also a software engineer at Vocollect, is from India and earned his master's from Carnegie Mellon University.
Nagrath said he had "no problem at all" getting an H-1B visa a few weeks ago. His will be valid until the end of September 2008.
But Alex Castrodale, an immigration lawyer at Downtown-based Cohen & Grigsby, said Xu and Nagrath are exceptions.
"They're lucky," Castrodale said. "H-1B visas are snapped up immediately each fiscal year they become available, and there's usually a backlog."
That's proof that America is a desirable place to live and work for skilled workers from abroad, Xu and Nagrath said. After she graduated from Chong Qing University in China, Xu spent time in Toronto and Belgium.
"In Belgium, I was the only Asian face in my whole building. People there were either somewhat friendly or very cold," she said. "Everyone says 'Hello' to you here. The American culture is the most open to other cultures."
And Nagrath said he favors the work environment here, over his native India.
"Before I came to the States to continue my education and work, I heard people are partial and biased," Nagrath said. "But I haven't had that experience at all here.
Privately-held Vocollect recorded more than $80 million in revenue in 2004 and has been adding jobs.
"We've been putting top talent in about 100 jobs for the last couple years, so as we continue hiring, we may have more workers on H1-Bs," said Michelle Seibert, Vocollect's human resources manager.
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http://www.edmontonsun.com/News/Canada/2005/10/29/1283949-sun.html
October 29, 2005
Stripper shortageNo change in easy visas: 'still pimping for the underworld'
By KATHLEEN HARRIS, SUN OTTAWA BUREAU
OTTAWA -- Canada's welcome mat is still rolled out for foreign strippers and lap dancers who can get quick visas to fill a domestic "labour shortage."
Last December, the Liberal government announced it was cancelling a controversial program that allowed exotic dancers to gain temporary work permits based on a national labour market opinion.
But it was quietly replaced by a process that permits strip club owners to bring in foreign dancers just by filling out the proper paper work.
NDP MP Pat Martin called the stripper visa policy "deplorable."
"The door is still wide open for the type of wholesale exploitation that existed with the eastern European dancers, and, in reality, the minister of immigration is still pimping for the underworld," he said.
"Five successive ministers of immigration have been pimping for the underworld by providing an endless stream of fodder for the underworld of pornography and prostitution under the guise of legitimate dancing."
Earlier this year, the U.S. State Department released a study that condemned Canada's stripper visa for allowing clubs to hire foreign women who could face abuse and exploitation.
Martin called the policy an "international embarrassment," and said it flies in face of Justice Minister Irwin Cotler's plan to curb human trafficking.
"We're seen as a contributing factor in the international trafficking of sex slaves," he said.
Under old rules, Human Resources and Skills Development Canada would conduct a national labour market opinion that gave a blanket approval for the exotic dancer category. Under the new process, the employer must apply for an individual assessment for each dancer.
Temporary work permits can be issued for a few days up to three years, and can be extended if the labour shortage continues.
HRSDC program director Sandy MacDonald said Canada can't discriminate against professions such as nude dancing that are legal in this country.
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http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/11/2/135209.shtml
Senate Bill Will Take Even More Jobs From Americans
Diane Alden
Thursday, Nov. 3, 2005
Both political parties are bought and paid for by one economic or corporate interest or another. In the world of the Beltway Iron Triangle, the primary directive is to accumulate as much money for re-election as possible while making points with power brokers and corporate lobbying groups. What may be at stake for the professional politician and eternal inhabitant of the Beltway is a lucrative position in a post-government life, perhaps in the financial, lobbying or corporate world. It is all about connections, after all.
In Washington, cronyism is rampant, and in some cases, so is nepotism. It is less and less unusual for those on the political or policy-making food chain to connect relatives and friends or colleagues into positions of power and influence. Influence-peddling in the Beltway is honed to a fine art.
Longtime Beltway powerhouse, Reagan speechwriter and all-around thoughtful maven of the political scene, Peggy Noonan, wrote a powerful piece for the Wall Street Journal. Peggy advances what I have been trying to tell people for several years: This nation is going off in the wrong direction, a good bit of it due to our establishment elite, including the Senate of the United States. A great deal of the problem is that significant sectors of the government are bought and paid for by corporate or other interests at our expense.
In the Journal article, "A Separate Peace," Peggy writes: "How are things going in America?" She tells us there is "growing knowledge that there is no such thing as homeland security."
In addition, "A sense of unreality in our courts so deep that they think they can seize grandma's house to build a strip mall. Senators who seem owned by someone, actually owned by an interest group or financial entity. ..."
There is more to this great piece by Ms. Noonan. It should be read and sent out to every American in and out of government. [www.opinionjournal.com/columnist/pnoonan]
Peggy Noonan can sense the terrible predicament that is exemplified by the actions or inaction of the U.S. Senate. The political figures elected to represent the people of their respective states instead choose to invariably advance certain economic interests over the best interests of their constituents or the United States.
That is obvious to all but the most uninterested or partisan "Kool-Aid"-drinking true believers in the establishment. We are stuck with a government so corrupt and venal it consistently sells us out, usually to the highest bidder, whether they be foreign or domestic. In the process they continue to give away the American birthright for a corporate buck.
As many of us who are usually optimists have come to believe, establishment power brokers have no concern or interest in the limits of their power or the meaning of our freedom.
The U.S. Senate is the most obvious player in the game of obtaining power and keeping it. In that regard, Senators are shameless as they continue to do the bidding of economically powerful groups involved in "public-private partnerships" or economic interests that have no allegiance to the United States of America.
A case in point: the recent push by the U.S. Senate for more economic visas for foreign workers. The demand by economic interests, corporations, particularly Bill Gates, comes at the expense of American-born workers, scientists, engineers and thousands in other professions, skilled and unskilled.
The U.S. Senate is about to allow an increase in the infamous H-1B and attendant L-1 visa "plan," which is called the Deficit Reduction Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 2005 (S. 1932). Leading the latest attempt to do an injustice to the American worker, taxpayer and citizenry is that paragon of moderation, Senator Arlen Specter, R-Pa.
Thanks to Arlen and the other bandits and buccaneers in the U.S. Senate, particularly the Judiciary Committee, megabillionaire and leftist Bill Gates, along with a phalanx of corporate supremacists, are building empires on the backs of Americans and the American nation-state.
This effort is supported by our government and the political class as they bow to the demands to increase H-1B and L-1 visas to accommodate universities, hospitals, technology companies and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which say there is a shortage of qualified workers a shortage that exists only in the minds of profit-hungry and cost-cutting megacorporations or thoughtless groups like the Chamber of Commerce. As one former government worker stated, "The U.S. Chamber of Commerce represents Chinese business interests better than any group I know. "
The Package With the Bomb
The latest bombing of the Middle Class, particularly on the professional occupations, may be found in Specter's and the Senate budget package. It includes provisions that will make available hundreds of thousands of green cards for new permanent legal immigrants.
Without much concern about how any of us feel or what we think, the Senate Judiciary is in the process of selling 368,000 visas to foreign workers or, rather, offering them up to the transnational corporations or foreign body shops that bring workers from around the globe to the U.S. The Senate is still debating the "plan" and will vote on it within days if it has not already. [Deficit Reduction Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 2005 (S. 1932)]
The measure is supported by universities, hospitals, technology companies and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which say there is a shortage of qualified workers. That is rotten baloney, but it allows an avenue for various economic interests to maximize profits while paying wages that remain stagnant and benefits that are usually nonexistent. Often, if any benefits are paid, they are offered by a foreign consulting body shop that provides the foreign worker to corporate interests that increasingly demand them.
For the American worker, that is one more reason wages and salaries remain stagnant and have for nearly a decade. Countless economic and government reports, plus Alan Greenspan himself, refused to spin the numbers in August 2005. In effect, Greenspan admitted that wages and benefits had declined or remained stagnant and would continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Of course it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize basic market economics: When you bring in more and more cheap or docile, compliant labor into the U.S. from China, India or all points on the compass, wages and benefits will remain stagnant or depressed as long as the supply never ends. This situation exists courtesy of the U.S. Senate and Congress and multiple badly negotiated trade deals.
Regarding stipulations in Specter's bill, the Washington Times reports, "The bill's measures would 'recapture' 90,000 unused employment-based immigration visas and would exempt family members from counting toward the cap, which is set at 140,000 per year. The bill also increases H-1B visas from 65,000 to 95,000 in fiscal 2006 and raises the fee employers pay by $500."
That will garner the U.S. Treasury about $120 million per year and "help" deficit reduction. Better they should not promise drug benefits to a growing number of senior citizens. Congress and the Bush White House might have thought better of offering pharmaceutical companies a never-ending supply of drugged-out American schoolchildren in the gosh-awful mental health screening and accompanying drug "plan" that passed Congress last year.
They might have opted not to create one more huge bureaucratic black hole such as the money pit called the Department of Homeland Security. If Congress had been wise, instead of spending like there was no tomorrow, they might have reformed the CIA instead of choosing to add another layer of bureaucracy in the newly created "Clandestine Service."
The $120 million sale of U.S. worker visas is a piddly amount in comparison to what is being expended on programs we don't need and can ill afford. Worse, this "effort" is being done on the backs of the American Middle Class. The ultimate cost to the American worker, the taxpayer or U.S.-born student, as well as our future scientific and technological growth, is incalculable.
Jessica Vaughn of the Center for Immigration Studies investigated the actual nature of the foreign worker visa. She reports: "According to researcher Ronil Hira of the Rochester Institute of Technology, 'the Indian IT industry has utilized U.S. immigration regulations for competitive advantage to accelerate its growth.' Infosys, for example, is one of the leading Indian-owned IT services firms. Between 70 and 80 percent of the company's global revenues in the last few years came from U.S. contracts, and they are staffed mainly by Indian workers here on H1-B and L visas."
In addition, she says: "Hospitals and health care services firms are also heavy users of trade pact-guaranteed guestworker programs. At least 50,000 foreign nurses have entered the country in the last 10 years on temporary visas, mostly Canadians, using the TN visa. Nurses' advocates across the country are bracing themselves for the arrival of even greater numbers this year from Mexico with the lifting of the TN cap. One Mexican headhunter has a contract to provide 3,000 nurses to hospitals in four U.S. states. Stephanie Tabone, of the Texas Nursing Association, where the largest number of foreign nurses are working, says that the influx is causing noticeable wage depression for U.S. nurses. 'Hospitals can bring in even very experienced nurses from abroad, and call them entry level, so they can get away with paying them less.'"
Immigration and visa critic, Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., adds that he will vote against the bill if it makes it to the House.
Others are sounding the alarm on the approaching visa debacle. You won't find it, however, in the New York Times, Washington Post, Fox News or the alphabet electronic outfits. Immigration and visa expert and columnist Joe Guzzardi recently interviewed Roy Beck of NumbersUSA. Beck related to Joe:
"Microsoft is once again running the show up there. The whole plan came from a Microsoft lobbyist whose colleagues are overpowering all the House and Senate leaders this week demanding that the tripling (maybe quadrupling) of employment-based green cards and H-1Bs goes through!"
Added Beck,
"This is a travesty for American students studying to enter scientific, engineering and high-tech fields, as well as to those Americans who have worked hard to become masters of their craft."
On the House side, the budget bill does not raise immigration levels. Instead, the House Judiciary Committee met its budget-cutting goal by increasing the fee for L-1 visas, another temporary-worker program, by $1,500.
As I have said before, we have the best government money can buy. It is too bad that post-Cold War multinational corporations have about as much loyalty to this nation and its people as did the international business interests that helped create the industrial goliath of the Third Reich. It's too bad that those who swim in the dank waters of Washington's Iron Triangle (bureaucracies, lobbyists, corporations, military brass, U.S. senators and representatives) are so easily bought.
The Whine Is Flowing
As it often happens, the interconnected nature of the government and corporate oligarchy makes claims that there is a never-ending "shortage" of workers for high-tech and low-tech jobs. The same people claim that American students are so dumb and poor in math and science, they are hopeless as a source for technological workers or scientists. That particular con is regularly used by Bill Gates and organizations such as Harris Miller's tech association, ITAA, plus various universities, not to mention the congressional India caucus.
The caucus seems to represent the needs of foreign governments and business interests, such as India and China, before they do those of this nation and its citizens. As usual, follow the money, campaign contributions, trips and bribes, and sundry perks offered by the international business set and governments.
Not surprisingly, after a couple of years of quiet on the visa front, in 2005 the For Sale sign has gone back up on U.S. work and student visas. Attached to the visa effort is the cynical belief that Americans are such consummate suckers and fools that Congress and its corporate clients can continue to get away with this travesty.
Using Bill Gates as an example: Gates and the crew at Microsoft, Cisco Systems, etc., have been trying to convince Congress and the American people we are spawning a bunch of morons who can't compete because they are uneducated, particularly in math and science. While there is a certain sector of the American public school population that fits that description, the fact is that a significant sector stands up just fine against students from the rest of the world.
In a recent edition of The New Atlantis, Journal of Science and Technology, they ask, "Is American Math and Science Education in Decline?" The response should put Bill Gates and the crock fillers in certain sectors of the IT industry, along with the pygmy brains in the U.S. Congress, to shame.
[http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/9/soa/education.htm]
The article states:
"As if coordinated to provoke headlines, top executives at three of the nation's leading technology firms recently issued bleak appraisals of the American education system, criticizing especially how American students are taught science and mathematics. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates minced no words at a summit of the nation's governors: until high schools are redesigned, he declared, 'we will keep limiting, even ruining, the lives of millions of Americans every year.' The chief executives of Intel and Cisco Systems shortly followed suit, suggesting that America's lackluster schools will increasingly force companies to look overseas for talent."
Furthermore, "When Bill Gates and others seem to appeal for school reform in the U.S., perhaps they are merely providing their companies with political cover and a post hoc justification for employing foreign engineers who, while not better educated than U.S. workers, are often significantly cheaper."
The heart of the Atlantis piece offers the unpalatable, politically incorrect truth:
"According to a recent analysis by researchers in England and Italy ... these inequalities is no mystery. The gap in test scores between white and ethnically Asian students on the one hand and black and Hispanic students on the other is a well-known attribute of U.S. schools and is noted ruefully in nearly all cross-national studies. Two University of Pennsylvania researchers recently aggregated scores from a number of cross-national studies and found that white students in the United States, taken alone, consistently outperform the predominantly white student populations of several other leading industrial nations. 'There is compelling evidence,' they write, 'that the low scores of [black and Hispanic students] were major factors in reducing the comparative standing of the U.S. in international surveys of achievement. If these minority students were to perform at the same level as white students, the U.S. ... would lead the Western G5 nations in mathematics and science, though it would still trail Japan.'"
I would suggest reading the entire article to discover the complete, albeit politically incorrect, truth about the so-called dismal showing of American students in math and science. America can and does produce enough scientists and engineers. It is only a sector of our population that either seems to be terribly running behind in math and science. That is due to any number of factors that would require a huge book to discuss.
At the moment, it only matters that even the opportunities for minority students left behind in the math and science race will be limited or nonexistent because we are absorbing increasing numbers of workers from every nation on earth. The price of a visa for a foreign worker may in the end be the cost of the American lower and middle class.
As it is, there are not enough scientific or technical jobs for even our best students to fill. The unemployment rate or underemployment rate among engineers and techies is higher than in most other occupational groups.
What Gates and the corporate world are after is cheap, docile labor, or a choice of many to fill a few jobs. What that does is skew the "free" market, making it not so free after all.
Regarding corporations and the power they wield, particularly in the United States: The late Chief Justice Rehnquist repeatedly attacked the invention of corporate constitutional rights. In his dissenting opinion from Bellotti (a case that helped establish giving corporations the same rights as an individuals), Rehnquist warned of "special dangers in the political sphere" that result from granting political power to corporations.
But despite Rehnquist's take on the power of corporations, corporate executives and multinationals, like Bill Gates and dozens of others, they wield vast power. When they aren't intimidating Congress they are buying it.
That means the balance of power, the status of the individual in relation to the corporate, the state, and their cozy engagement, is in trouble. This is so particularly when no help is forthcoming from elected representatives in either or both houses of Congress to address the imbalance.
It should be up to our representatives to achieve a balance of interests that do not make corporations or their power supreme over our individual or national interests. We are more than corporate America. We are a culture and nation that prides itself on our careful attention to a healthy balance between the state, the corporate and the needs of citizens.
Some of us still pay attention to the concepts contained in the Constitution of the United States, our laws, traditions, and we retain a sense of revulsion at the misuse of power by our elected representatives.
In fact, unless we get this problem and imbalance under control and soon, American communities, the body politic, our ultimate survival as a free and prosperous nation will be in even more jeopardy than it already is.
Therefore, if you still care about your job, your nation and the future of your children and grandchildren, you'd better rock their tidy little congressional world with enough phone calls and letters to shut them down. Personally, I think that would do us all a lot of good and give the U.S. Senate in particular a much-needed trip to the woodshed and a drubbing they richly deserve.
As the great political philosopher and wag P.J. O'Rourke mused some time ago, "When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things bought and sold are legislators."
Please check out my new Web site: www.dianealden.com. You can get expanded versions of policy analysis on the Web site. Find out how and why corporate and government power got away from the system and who is responsible for it.
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http://washingtontimes.com/metro/20051103-103013-2489r.htm
Immigration bill gets support
By Keyonna Summers
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published November 4, 2005
Local universities and technology alliances have thrown their support behind federal legislation that would make it easier to bring in highly skilled teachers and workers from India and China.
A Senate budget bill on the floor Monday included provisions that would exempt spouses and children of highly skilled immigrant workers from counting toward the annual 140,000 cap on green cards, allowing the government to issue employment-based visas to 90,000 more workers than in the past.
The measure would help fill the demand for technology workers and reduce the backlog of applications from India and China, where those now being accepted applied at least four years ago.
"Companies [and] universities are very concerned about our ability to compete globally," said Sandy Boyd, vice president of the District-based National Association of Manufacturers and chairwoman of Compete America, a pro-legal, employment-based immigration coalition. "Our ability to innovate and create jobs is really dependent on ... developing good American talent, and it also means having access to the world's talent."
Many technology companies in the region find it difficult to recruit Americans from local universities because there are 20 percent fewer engineering majors in the United States than 20 years ago, according to Compete America.
At U.S. engineering colleges, foreign nationals earn more than half of the master's degrees in science, engineering and technology and about two-thirds of the doctorates, the coalition said. China graduates nearly four times as many engineers as the United States.
"So [American employers are] either leaving the positions unfilled or they're not taking the best talent they can find," said Jeff Lande, senior vice president of the Arlington-based Information Technology Association of America.
Part of the Senate Judiciary Committee's budget reconciliation package, the provisions also seek to increase the fee on employment-based visas by $500 each, raising $300 million in federal revenue, and to increase the H-1B temporary visa cap from 65,000 to 95,000. The legislation would "recapture" unused green cards and temporary visas previously approved by Congress.
The Senate yesterday voted down a move by Sen. Robert C. Byrd, West Virginia Democrat, to strip from the budget bill the increased visas caps and to raise by $1,500 the fee of L-1 visas, which allow U.S. and foreign companies to swap management staff between branch offices.
Among the companies that support Compete America's push for access to foreign nationals -- many of whom already reside in the United States -- are Microsoft Corp, Intel Corp. and Texas Instruments Inc.
George Washington University is one of several local universities that said they welcome the opportunity to readily hire foreign professors and researchers.
"Our business is to provide a world-class education to our students, and in order to be successful in that mission, we need to be able to attract and retain highly skilled persons, some of whom come from outside the U.S.," said Marie Rudolph, the university's director of government, international and corporate affairs.
Deborah Meyers, senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, said the influx of foreign workers would not pose competition for most American workers or day laborers in the region who migrate to the U.S. in search of construction jobs.
"These are positions that require extensive education [and] persons with extraordinary ability, persons with advanced degrees," Ms. Meyers said. "The employers have to make an attestation with the [U.S.] Labor Department that they have tried to recruit domestically for these positions. ... So there are some measures in place to protect domestic workers already, and those would remain."
Alan Merten, president of George Mason University and former chairman of the National Academy of Sciences' 2001 study "Building a Workforce for the Information Economy," said these foreign workers likely would improve the economy by starting companies and creating jobs for American technology workers.
However, Mr. Merten warned that the workers eventually might take their skills back to their native countries.
He said America should focus on cultivating its own talent or find ways to retain foreign workers.
Mr. Merten also said the influx of workers would hold down wages to some degree.
"Anytime you increase supply, you hold down wages," he said. "But we did not find five years ago that it had a significant impact on wages at all."
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