G’s Place

Actually, you can buy or sell anything. People are outsourcing surrogacy to India.

Should you be able to buy and sell pregnancies and babies like that?

For those of you who have never heard this, economist Thomas L. Friedman has a theory that since places like India and China are gaining the ability to compete with Western countries for jobs and economic opportunities, the world is flattening out.

Of course, what has allowed this so-called “flattening” is outsourcing. Outsourcing is when a company sends away some function of its business. Business leaders say it’s necessary to contract out any function that does not relate to the core function of their business. Call centers, animation, computer programmers, accounting jobs, and HR jobs are just a few of the things that business leaders send offshore.

Since wages are much cheaper in places like India and China, and broadband internet connections have made communications virtually instantaneous between any two points on the globe, companies in these countries can compete for those types of outsourcing projects. And thus, according to Friedman, the world becomes flat.

This view is fine, if you leave out the detail that individuals are the ones who get the work done. So while it may be possible to flatten out the world electronically, what happens to the cultural leanings of the individuals doing the flat world’s work?

Let’s start in the US. If the world is becoming flat, that means that at one time it was hilly, or even mountainous. If we stick to Friedman’s premise, India and China are pushing up economically to become even with the US. So, where jobs for programmers or call center workers were once concentrated in the US, we pull the globe flat and some of those jobs spill over to China and India. Which naturally means that the US will be losing jobs.

So, who stays and who goes? If you have ever been in a department that starts sending work overseas, you know the drill: Don’t speak up. Don’t make a fuss. Don’t complain. Don’t do anything that will get you noticed. Otherwise you’re gonna make “the list”.

What happens if you are in one of the countries that is receiving the jobs? Let’s say you are a call-center worker in India. You are a university graduate. You go to work for a big multi-national company, let’s say Dell. You have to work odd hours…after all you are on the other side of the world from your customers. You don’t see your family much, because of the hours. You don’t get your own religious or national holidays off, because your customers are in a different country. But to keep the job, you don’t complain…you just do what you are told.

What do we lose by flattening the globe, especially if we homogenize all the world’s culture at the same time?

I have had this draft for a long time, and actually have more ideas around it. Maybe during my winter break from classes I will write more about it.

According to this blog (Carrie’s Nation), (and the Job Destruction newsletter) job ads on Dice, Monster, and in print have been directing people to mail their resumes to 700 N. Pearl, Suite 510, Dallas, TX. This is the address of one of the DOL’s backlog centers to process H1B visa applications.

In the Carrie’s Nation blog post, she lays out the scam pretty well:

I’m begging someone to correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m forming my own opinion on what’s happening based on all of these links that I’ve read. It appears that the Department of Labor, through its Team Exceed contractor, is working hand-in-hand with employers to post phony job ads in order to fulfill the job advertisement requirements for purposes of helping foreign workers obtain their Green Cards for permanent resident status.

Oh yeah, and this is all legal. It’s another loophole lawyers are exploiting.

The tone of this article is just SO wrong. Of all the comments, this one bugged me the most:

An illegal immigrant who owns a roofing company in Framingam “still makes much more money here than in Brazil, but the falling exchange rate is making him think whether his sacrifice is worth all the trouble he experiences by living in the shadows. Once, he was arrested by the police and sent to court for driving without a license, and recently his car insurance company told him it won’t renew his insurance unless he obtains a driver’s license. Insurance companies accept international driver’s licenses only the first year, said the man, and after that, he had to use three different false names to secure insurance for his car.”

That just ain’t right.

First Kuwaiti, the company that built the US Embassy in Iraq, built it using slave labor.

It’s alleged that “foreign employees were taken into Iraq under false pretenses and then could not leave because the company had taken their passports.” Oh yeah, and workers were told they were going to Dubai, not Baghdad, so they had no idea where they were going till they got there. Second link is a youtube video of the Oversight Committee hearing “Allegations of Waste, Fraud, and Abuse at the New U.S. Embassy in Iraq.”
The contractor got $600 Million and used kidnapped men to do the work. The government is pointing fingers at who to blame, so someone is making a pretty penny on this mess.

Senators Grassley and Durbin are opening an inquiry into the L-1 visa program. On Senator Grassley’s website, you can view the list of companies here. I believe the list is only for 2006 L-1 visas, so my guess is the numbers may be higher. Senator Grassley commented:

“‘This information certainly makes one wonder if companies are using the L visa to circumvent the worker protections required under the H-1B program. I’d like to know how many American workers these companies hire compared to the number of foreign workers they bring in,’ Grassley said. ‘American workers deserve the best chance at jobs in this country, and this data makes one question if they are too often overlooked.’”

Top 20 L-1 Users:

1. Tata: 4887

2. Cognizant: 3520

3. IBM: 1237

4. Satyam: 950

5. Wipro: 839

6. HCL America: 539

7. Deloitte & Touche: 512

8. Patni: 440

9. Intel: 394

10. Kanbay: 329

11. Honeywell: 320

12. HP: 316

13. Infosys: 294

14. Accenture: 291

15. Caritor: 231

16. SCHLUMBERGER TECHNOLOGY CORP: 214

17. ORACLE USA INC: 176

18. SYNTEL LTD: 171

19. PRICEWATERHOUSECOOPERS LLP: 168

20. MICROSOFT CORPORATION: 168

This is a  list of the companies with the most H1B visas, along with the L-1 usage.

I blogged about this on myspace, and tried to add it to Metafilter (they deleted it, many saying I was an idiot for criticizing lawyers). It has also been discussed on /.
The story is that a law firm in PA had a conference on immigration law. Cohen & Grigsby posted the entire conference on youtube (videos have since been removed, but watch the Programmer’s Guild’s response). The entire conference was about how to use loopholes to obtain H1B visas for their corporate clients. In one of the sessions, they talk about what is required from the DOL as far as advertising the job. The conference leader makes a damning remark:

“…our goal is clearly not to find a qualified and interested U.S. worker. And you know in a sense that sounds funny, but it’s what we’re trying to do here. We are complying with the law fully, but ah, our objective is to get this person a green card, and get through the labor certification process. So certainly we are not going to try to find a place [at which to advertise the job] where the applicants are the most numerous. We’re going to try to find a place where we can comply with the law, and hoping, and likely, not to find qualified and interested worker applicants.“

As the folks on Metafilter pointed out, the lawyers are doing the best job they can for their clients. What bugs me is that so many people think that people pointing out these loopholes are a bunch of angry old white guys who are bitter that they didn’t keep up with their skills and now they can’t get a job. But that just isn’t so.

Besides screwing over Americans (by making sure they do not recruit from the American domestic labor market) they are screwing over the immigrants they bring into the country. For example, in another part of the conference, one of the panelists recommends what to do if the prevailing wage set by the DOL comes back too high:

First, we have to remember that the wage offered to the [foreign] employee is the wage the the employee will be earning when he or she gets his or her green card, not the salary he’ll be making now.  So if the prevailing wage comes back $3,000 or $4,000 higher than the employee’s actual salary, then we can estimate that it will probably be three or four years until he gets his green card, then it is reasonable for that employee’s salary to be increased by that amount at the time he gets his green card.  Then we have no issues…

They are saying that wage listed on the application is not what the immigrant will be making now, but what they should be making in three or four years. But the law says the immigrants are supposed to make at least the prevailing US wage. So, people who have been brought into the country by companies using this firm are being cheated and misused too.
Some of the companies that have used this law firm to obtain H1B visas (according to the DOL) are Algor, Inc, Bayer Corporate and Business service LLC, Hexware Technologies, Marconi Communications, UBICS,  MEDRAD, and CM Technologies Corporation.
LouDobbs reported on how Congressmen have sent letters to the Labor Dept and Cohen & Grigsby.

Radio Open Source linked to me for their program on the food stamp challenge. I didn’t get to hear the first part of the program, because I was cooking (we had crock pot chicken legs, turnips, rice, and corn that came from leftover corn on the cob from a barbque, and ceasar salad made from romaine from the garden).

The lady from Hillbilly Housewife was on, and she was great. I have read her blog for a long, long time.

She kept going back to the idea that there is nutritious, good food out there, but poor people have the least amount of time, and sometimes now skills, to be able to prepare that kind of food.

I’m lucky, I am a real southerner. I know how to make rice and beans, how to cook biscuits and corn bread from scratch.
How to can and freeze. I hope I have taught my children well enough.

Lots of poor folk don’t have that knowledge, and I think home ec would be good. I wish my kids could have taken it in school.

I still believe the economics here need to change. Poor folk have to try and make two 30-hr a week (read PART TIME) jobs work…and if anything happens to mess up their schedules they are in trouble. Thank goodness I am out of that situation now…it sucked so much.

I am so swamped and overwhelmed that I feel sick, but I still wanted to talk about this.

If you haven’t heard, some Congressmen (one from Mass) are trying to live on $21 worth of food a week…the weekly food stamp allowance given to adult men.

I used to be poor. Not poor enough to qualify for food stamps, but poor enough that I had $60 - $80 a month to spend on food. I look at that dollar amount now and am amazed. I have been trying to remember how I did it.

• Lots and lots of Hunt’s canned spaghetti sauce. They would be on sale for 89 cents a can, and spaghetti noodles were 3 for a dollar. It makes me ill to even THINK about that stuff now, but my son will still ask me to cook it.

• No fruit, unless I got the marked down stuff. You know, the stuff that is almost too bad to sell because it’s starting to go bad. Bring that stuff home, cut off all the bad spots.
• Buy meat if it was marked down. It would keep if you cooked it right away or froze it. Once a SuperWalmart came to town, I knew the days they would mark meat down, and that is when I would shop.
• No juice. Koolaid is way, way cheaper. So is soda.
• 
• NO WASTING FOOD. I think this is why I can cook anything…I learned how to slap leftovers together to make something new. Didn’t always work, but that is why Tony Chachere’s seasoning was made. It can make anything edible.
• Go on dates. Hey, ya gotta do what ya gotta do when you are hungry. I would get alfredo and take a couple of bites and then take the rest home for the kids. Sad, I know.

Now that I can afford food, I am weird about it. I freak out when we start running low. And we are honestly no where near low…I can remember having nothing in our pantries. Going to food banks. etc.etc.

I think it is good that the Congressmen are experiencing what it’s like to not have enough food. But is adding more money to the food stamp budget the answer? In the short term, yes it may be. But let’s SOLVE the issue, let’s make jobs. Don’t let big factories in the US use illegal labor. Don’t reward big companies for sending jobs overseas to access even cheaper labor.

I can tell you from experience, folks are living on less than $21 a week because they don’t qualify for food stamps, or because they are too proud to get through the humiliating application process. People want to work, they don’t want handouts. Do something about the lack of jobs, that is what will solve the issue about hunger.

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BE CAREFUL MY BROTHER!!