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HP's Carly Fiorina Sell's out the American Worker

"There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore"

Carly Fiorina

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/1/7/144142.shtml

Note: Carly was a Senior Mgr at Lucent and now CEO at HP

Lucent & HP's business affiliations to the MAFIA.  She was one of the top three mgrs at Lucent the stock was flying at $80/Share Lucent used VOLT www.volt.com a Mafia Subcontractor on the Packet Star Project.  These were switches that would generate $4 Trillion in sales to Lucent over 10 yrs. Lucent loaded the project with Cheap Indian Labor using Consulting firms  tied in to the Rackets.  The project was a mess. Lucent's stock went down to $2/Share. The  FCC came in and  blamed the three top managers Jim McGinn, Pat Russo CEO of Avaya  another But Indian Firm
the is lobbying NJ Sen Shirlely Turner not to have a bill to stop outsourcing of state Project to offshore firms.  Last was Carly the Marketing Dept Head with an On-Line University of Phoneix Degree.  Carly leaves Lucent in the mess and becomes CEO of HP first  she gets rid of Dave Hewlett a founder of HP. Next she takes over Compaq/DEC gets herself an $100 Million Bonus. Here she states on the Charles Rose Show  The merger will reposition HP from number 9 the number three in professional services.  Again HP uses VOLT the MAFIA subcontractor to be the exclusive vendor of professional services. Now Carly states No one has a god given right to a job!
When Pres Bush was elected, he invited leaders of Industry to the White house.
These were John Chambers CEO of CISCO,Larry Ellison CEO of ORACLE,
Carly CEO of HP, Jim Gersher CEO of IBM. They all stood behind him on the podium in Jan 2000  Right behind him Carly stood on National TV Browe beating the US Pres. Carly showed not respect for a US President.

Is Carly's real power the business ties of Lucent and HP to the MAFIA?
 

25% of US Labor Force Now Working Poor

 ‘Occupation Collapse’ and Poverty Wages:

Consequences of Large Guestworker Programs

Testimony before the Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims

of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives

by Roy Beck, executive director

NumbersUSA Education & Research Foundation

March 24, 2004

Perhaps the first and most important question to ask about any proposed large-scale foreign guestworker program is what will be its effect on the nearly 15 million American workers who would like a full-time job but cannot find one.1 Just how much of a worker shortage can there be when so many Americans cannot find a full-time job? And the available pool of American workers is actually much larger than that 15 million figure which includes people who are actively looking or just recently gave up reporting to the unemployment office. Millions of other Americans who once were part of the workforce and who once were interested in remaining in it have dropped out of the labor force entirely. As is often the case, the worst damage can be seen among African-American men. The Washington Post recently reported the astounding statistic that 40 percent of black men throughout America do not have a job.2 In New York City where the importation of foreign workers is at one of the highest rates in the nation, 50 percent of black men are no longer employed.3 The competition from the expanded guestworker force would be fiercest with the lower-skilled and lower-educated jobless American workers. But let it be noted that most of the expanded guestworker proposals now before Congress would open every American occupation up and down the economic ladder to competition from the global labor force. Americans too qualified to do “essential” jobs? One of the arguments for importing more foreign workers even with such high numbers of Americans out of the job market is that the labor shortages are in very low-skilled and low-paid occupations and that most of the jobless Americans are simply overqualified for those jobs. But Alan Greenspan last month said America has an oversupply of low-skilled, low-educated workers.4 In fact the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the rolls of millions of unemployed Americans include a disproportionate number of workers who do not have a high school diploma.5 Official unemployment rates for Americans without a diploma are nearly twice as high as for other Americans. In other words, this country is awash in lower-educated American workers and no jobs. Yet, the primary purpose of these expanded guestworker proposals is to import low-educated, low-skilled foreign workers for jobs that require no more than low education and low skills.

Now, those jobs are not unimportant. These are jobs essential to Americans’ every day life. A group of businesses and others fighting for more foreign workers calls itself the “Essential Workers Coalition.” These ARE essential jobs. And it makes no sense to move our own essential American workers to the sideline while giving the jobs to foreign workers. While we may lament that so many American workers are poorly educated, it hardly seems fitting for Congress to punish those workers by giving away their jobs. Who would be most hurt by expanded guestworker programs for “essential” jobs? We got a stark view late last month from a new report by the Urban Institute and the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University. Entitled “Losing Our Future: How Minority Youth Are Being Left Behind by the Graduation Rate Crisis,” the study concludes that barely half of the black, Hispanic and Native American youth who enter high school in this country earn a diploma.6 The rates for the three groups are nearly identical. That report lets us know of the colossal failure throughout our society in engaging and properly educating these youth. Much needs to be done. Much has been attempted. But while the education establishment tries to figure out how to deal with these incredible drop-out rates, millions of young adults who did drop out of high school in the past need an opportunity to earn a living. Unfortunately, jobs for which a high-school drop-out are suited are being earmarked by leaders of both political parties for foreign guestworkers eager to underbid the price of labor. Adding further to the incongruity of all this talk about the need for lower-educated guestworkers is the President’s State of the Union call for assuring better job possibilities for inmates as they finish their prison sentences. The President said that some 600,000 inmates a year leave prison desperately needing a job to start a new kind of life. Most of them are qualified for the same kinds of “essential” jobs that all these pieces of guestworker legislation are designed to fill with foreign laborers. But will Americans do jobs that are this hard and pay this little? For 13 years as an author on these issues, I have done scores of radio shows and have consistently been told by callers identifying themselves as business owners that these jobless, lower-educated American workers are too lazy, too soft and too demanding to take these “essential” jobs. On NPR the other morning, I even heard a business owner say that his jobs were just too hard for Americans to do and paid too little. Of course, we all know that is the secret ingredient in why we have so many Americans unemployed and yet so much talk of job shortages. As long as the federal government allows the importation and the illegal migration of almost two million foreign workers a year from countries that pay less than a tenth of our wages, “essential” jobs that don’t require much education will be priced at levels at which American workers cannot live in an American lifestyle and will be offered with benefits and working conditions also unacceptable to Americans.3 Greatly expanding our present guestworker programs will ensure that those “essential” jobs never pay an American wage or offer American working conditions. That’s the way the free market operates. Alan Greenspan in his speech to the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce last month decried the inability of our lower-educated American workers to earn a dignified income. His solution was for great new investments to further educate them for better jobs. Members of this Congress responded in the news media by wondering where all that money was coming from. But a better question is this: If we supposedly have large numbers of “essential” jobs desperately needing workers to fill them and not requiring high education, why don’t we fill  those jobs with our own lower-educated workers? And if these jobs are so “essential” and so tough to do, shouldn’t the market be forced to raise wages to a level that can attract American workers to fill them? Why shouldn’t workers going jobs that are “essential” to our economy and to our comfort be paid wages that allow them to raise their families in dignity? One answer is that many in this government do not want “essential” workers to earn middle-class wages. They are addicted to an economy that depends on poorly paid workers who must be subsidized by taxpayers. For 40 years, this government has systematically gutted lower-middle-class occupations of their dignity, of their decent wages, of their safe working conditions and of their American benefits by flooding those occupations with foreign workers. We don’t have to wonder what expanded guestworker programs would do to American workers; we have a lot of recent history to show us quite explicitly. Expanded foreign guestworkers programs would just add to the already long list of “Occupation Collapses” created by 40 years of radically increased mass immigration, illegal migration and guestworker programs. “Occupation Collapse” has long U.S. history tied to high immigration “Occupation Collapse” has been one of the gravest blows and continuing threats to America’s working class households over the last couple of decades. By “Occupation Collapse,” I mean the process of wages plummeting, benefits disappearing and working conditions deteriorating in whole occupations. The evidence of recent history and of 150 years of U.S. economic history suggests that the initiation of a large-scale foreign guestworker program would expand Occupation Collapse into as yet untouched localities and occupations – both unskilled and skilled – in our country. Many of the pressing social problems Congress is tackling recently are directly related to the collapse of whole occupations from middle-class and lower-middle-class incomes, benefits and working conditions into near-poverty and below-poverty wages. Look at some of the issues the federal government is trying to resolve for large numbers of Americans: lack of health insurance, inadequate health care, over-crowded and substandard housing, poor education, neighborhoods torn by crime, overloaded jails and prisons. In every one of those problems, you will find a disproportionate population of households who are connected to collapsed occupations. These Americans simply can’t earn enough money to afford the goods and services that make for a life of dignity. Why have these occupations collapsed? There have been many reasons. In some cases, the 4 collapse has happened only regionally; in others, nationally. But one of the most common ingredients is the large-scale entry of foreign workers into those occupations – through the million legal immigrants a year, through nearly that many illegal aliens settling each year and through a few hundred thousand guest workers each year. These add up to numbers that are six to eight times higher traditional levels in this country. Americans are not nearly so much in need of more federal programs and assistance as they are in need of higher wages. Current high levels of legal and illegal immigration are a serious barrier to those higher wages. Adopting a program for hundreds of thousands or more guestworkers a year would almost guarantee falling wages, even with stringent safeguards attached. To imagine what would happen to American jobs and workers under a new, greatly enlarged guestworker program, we can start by looking at what the great increase in foreign workers over the last couple of decades has already done. The primary effect of all forms of adding foreign workers to the domestic labor market has been to distort the way the free market sets the value of labor by legislatively increasing supply. Examples of Occupational Collapse under the weight of heavy foreign-worker influx By the 1970s, menial jobs such as janitorial work had become middle-class occupations in many cities. The overwhelming majority of American workers of all kinds were able to live at least modest middle-class lives. That was before the advent of our new governmental ethic that some jobs are just too low-class to deserve decent wages. Cleaning office buildings was an essential task in this economy, and the economy rewarded many of those who did the task with livable wages and dignified working conditions. But a GAO study found that as federal policies allowed tens of thousands of foreign workers to enter those cities, their presence in the janitorial occupations led to a collapse of wages, benefits and working conditions.7 An especially dramatic example can be found in Miami where occupations began to collapse earlier due to earlier mass flows of foreign workers into the job market. Sociologists Guillermo Grenier and Alex Stepick found that before the 1970s, construction workers earned middle-class wages with middle-class benefits and lived middle-class lives. But the influx of foreign workers led to a series of changes that collapsed a large number of the construction jobs into little more than minimum-wage labor with few employee protections that had previously existed.8 By now, we can find construction occupational collapse in parts of nearly every state as foreign labor has swelled in local job markets. Perhaps nowhere is the role of foreign labor importation in collapsing an occupation more vivid than the meatpacking industry. Numerous studies have detailed how jobs in this industry by the 1970s were high-middle-class industrial jobs with great safety protections and benefits that allowed the employees to raise families on one income, take vacations and send children to college (many of whom came back to work in the plants because of the high income).9 Today, after 25 years of pouring foreign workers into the occupation, nearly every journalist and politician commenting on these jobs calls them “jobs that Americans won’t do” because the pay is so low that taxpayers have to provide public assistance to many of them, and the accident rate is among the worst in the nation. And in occupations that always were fairly poorly paid – such as poultry processing, farm 5 labor, hotel and restaurant work – the influx of large numbers of foreign workers has  generally driven real wages downward even further. One does not have to focus entirely on lower-skilled jobs to find Occupational Collapse. Under the combination of the dot.com bubble burst, overseas outsourcing and the presence of hundreds of thousands of foreign workers, the information-technology occupation is indeed in the middle of a collapse. Besides having an extraordinarily high unemployment rate, America’s information-technology workers have seen their wages plummet, with large portions now working at two-thirds, one-half and even one-third their incomes a few years ago.  

Although their wages surely would have fallen some even without the various existing foreign guestworker programs, adding around a million foreign workers over the last four years severely worsened the supply-demand ratio in the occupation. Historical precedence for foreign workers collapsing wages In his presidential address to the American Economic Association in 1955, Simon Kuznets laid out a theory about rising and falling income inequality in capitalist societies. Many economists since then have sought to quantify the factors that, in different countries and different decades, have depressed earnings for the lower working class while increasing the wealth of the affluent and skilled. One renowned economist who has spent a career exploring these issues is  Jeffrey Williamson of Harvard. Delivering the Kuznets Memorial Lecture at Harvard, Prof. Willison showed how economic inequality in America was greatest from 1820 to 1860 and from the 1890s until World War I. Those periods coincided with the two greatest waves of immigration prior to the present unprecedented wave. According to Williamson, the occurrence of high immigration and high levels of economic inequality at the same time was not happenstance: immigration fosters income inequality. Despite having democratic institutions, abundant land, and a reputation as a workingman’s country, America during those periods of nineteenth-century immigration surges was a land of jarring inequality. The economist Peter H. Lindert has noted in his writing that American inequality has lessened when immigration was curtailed. When World War I abruptly cut off most immigration to the United States, the huge gap between rich and poor closed incredibly fast: “Within three years’ time, pay gaps dropped from historic heights to their lowest level since before the Civil War.”10 But just as quickly, inequality grew as soon as mass immigration resumed after World War I, so that later in the 1920s, “income looked as unequal as ever,” Lindert said. Once Congress curtailed immigration in 1924, the middle class grew again and inequities preceded to historic low levels by the early 1950s. America finally had become a paradise for the common workingman and woman. Lindert found it peculiar that America would have such a robust march toward middle-class equality during a period that included widely varying external events, such as the nation’s deepest depression, a sudden wartime recovery and moderate postwar growth: “This timing suggests that the explanation of this drop in inequality must go beyond any simple models that try to relate inequality to either the upswing or the downswing of the business cycle.”11 In the egalitarianism of the era after the 1924 curtailment of mass immigration, the economic bottom of society gained on the middle, and the middle gained on the top. The closing of the gap in wages had as much of an effect in enlarging the middle class as did all the transfer taxes 6 and programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s governmental activism combined, according to Lindert and Williamson. Several factors caused the fluctuations in inequality during U.S. history. But the “central role” has been played by the change in labor supply, claims Lindert. The rise of powerful unions during that period also played an important role in moving larger and larger numbers of laborers into the middle class. But Lindert concluded that the unions were able to gain their power because low immigration and low population growth kept the size of the labor force smaller while the demand for labor remained high. Not surprisingly, unions have withered in workforce participation during the wave of mass immigration since 1965. Contrary to superficial thinking, a tightened labor pool that forces employers to pay more for scarce labor does not necessarily hurt business nor the economy. It can be a great stimulator of a country’s creativity. The economist Harry T. Oshima has helpfully described the “virtuous circle” that occurs in an economy that is far different from our own very loose labor market with  surpluses of workers.12 He has particularly studied the mid-1910s and the mid-1920s when immigration was seriously restricted. He notes that during that time, employers were forced to raise wages. That induced the employers to press for major advances in mechanization. The resulting new technological applications of gasoline and electric machines made it possible to mechanize enough unskilled operations and hand work to release many workers into more skilled jobs. Growth in output per worker hour was phenomenal. That made it possible to raise wages still further. Because of the increasing demand for skilled workers, American parents realized they would need to spend more money to help each child gain a better education. This contributed to lower birth rates, and thus to slower labor-force growth, and thus to tighter labor markets, and thus to higher wages, which pushed manufacturers to push the skill levels of their workers up even further. In this cycle of productivity and wage gains – each feeding on the other – the United States became a middle-class nation! What we have had for three decades in this nation is the opposite of that economic “virtuous circle;” we have had the “vicious cycle.” The availability of larger and larger numbers of foreign workers has led employers to substitute labor for capital development and innovation. A key example is the atrophy in our agricultural industry which relies on incredibly low-wage labor instead of continuing its once global leadership in innovation and technology. And, of course, the rising incomes of American workers during a “virtuous circle” economy drives consumer purchasing and business success. Fundamentally changing the economic and social structure of our society At stake is whether the United States manages to remain a middle-class culture or becomes what I would call a “servant culture” more on the line of Europe or even third world nations – a path we are currently traversing. Europe is a continent that long has had a servant class. When it began to find it difficult to keep its nationals in those poorly paid servile roles, it imported foreign workers to “do the dirty work.” In the United States, however, we long have been a culture in which most people live middle-class lives. People may have servants but they are expected to pay them wages that allow for at least lower middle-class conditions. If there was dirty work to do that the genteel didn’t care to do, the folks who did the dirty work tended to get paid a decent wage for their trouble. Witness the meatpacking industry jobs in all their disgusting sights, sounds, smells and squishiness before our immigration policy collapsed the occupation. The people who did that work got some of the best semi-skilled manufacturing wages in the country. 7 But most of these expanded guestworker proposals would guarantee that whole occupations would be considered “foreigner work,” always paid below American standards with below American benefits and below American working conditions. Those Americans whose wages are not pulled below middle-class by the presence of the guestworkers would be able to revel in status found in so many countries in the world of having their own peasant class. These massive guestworker programs are about assigning a certain portion of our economy to a new foreign peasant class. And inadvertently, they are about creating a much larger permanent underclass of American natives largely dependent upon taxpayers and ever-increasing government programs.

 Notes

1 David Streitfeld, “Jobless Counts Skip Millions,” Los Angeles Times, 29 December 2003, A1. 2 David Finkel, “The Hard Road to A Paycheck,” Washington Post, 4 November 2003, A01.

3 Michael Powell, “In New York City, Fewer Find They Can Make It,” Washington Post, 14 March 2004, A01.

4 Nell Henderson, “Greenspan Calls for Better-Educated Workforce,” Washington Post, 21 February 2004,E01.

5 Ibid.

6 Linda Perlstein, “Report Disputes U.S. High School Graduation Rates,” Washington Post, 26 February 2004, A03.

7 Government Accounting Office, Illegal Aliens: Influence of Illegal Workers on Wages and Working Conditions of Legal Workers (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Accounting Office, March 1988).

8 Alex Stepick and Guillermo Grenier, “Brothers in Wood,” in Newcomers in the Workplace: Immigrants and the Restructuring of the U.S. Economy, Louise Lamphere, Alex Stepick, and Guillermo Grenier, eds.(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), pp. 148-9, 161.

9 Roy Beck, “Jobs Americans Will Do” in The Case Against Immigration (New York/London: W. W. Norton& Co., 1996) 100-135.

10 Peter H. Lindert, Fertility and Scarcity in America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 233.

11 Ibid., p. 234. 12 Harry To. Oshima, “The Growth of U.S. Factor Productivity: The Significance of New Technologies in the Early Decades of the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Economic History, vol. 44 (March 1984).

High Tech Worker Visas Come Under Fire
July 30, 2003 DataMation http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/erp/article.php/2242281 By Roy Mark

U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D.-Calif.) called the State Dept.'s L-1B visa for skilled IT workers a type of "stealth immigration" that is taking jobs from the skilled American technology workforce. The visa was created to make it possible for international companies with a presence in the U.S. to bring their employees from overseas. However, Feinstein says the program is being abused by software outsourcing companies, who are bringing IT workers from abroad and placing them at U.S. companies. According to the State Depart., it is not permissible to use L-1's for outsourcing, but thousands have nevertheless been used for that purpose. Foreign workers applying for the L-1B must have "specialized knowledge" to qualify for the visa. The visas are supposed to be used for intra-company transfers and not for generic IT jobs. Applications for L-1B's increased 10 percent in the first quarter of this year. At a Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security hearing Tuesday, senators heard testimony from Patricia Fluno, an Orlando, Fla., computer programmer recently laid off by Siemens Technologies. Fluno lost her $98,000 a year job when Siemens transferred her job and 15 others to Tata Consulting Services, an Indian company. Fluno said she was required to train the incoming Tata workers and claimed they were paid approximately a third of her salary. She called the experience "humiliating." IT Industry representatives at the hearing agreed Fluno's case was very likely a violation of the L1-B visa requirements. Fluno's case and others like it have prompted several bills in both the House and the Senate to reduce the number of L-1B visas and to require employers to first seek U.S. workers before turning to the L-1B route. The bills would also require employers using L1-B visa to fill positions to pay prevailing U.S. wages to visa holders. "The L-1 program is critically important to U.S. multi-national information technology firms as they compete globally," said ITAA President Harris N. Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA). "However, as with any complex immigration program, we see some possible areas of improvement in its administration by the Departments of State and Homeland Security to insure that legitimate users have access and to prevent possible abuses." Concurrent with the hearing, the ITAA released a new white paper on the L-1 visa, focusing on the administration of visas for foreign workers brought to the U.S. to work on information technology projects. "Our paper sets forth some suggestions on how to clarify its administration. The government must clarify the definition of 'specialized knowledge,' and use that to determine whether applicants qualify," Miller said. "We offer examples of what does and does not constitute 'specialized knowledge' in the IT field. We want to work with the government officials who run the L-1 program to ease its use for legitimate employers and eliminate its use for workers who are not properly qualified." The paper gives specific examples from the IT industry of what does and does not qualify as specialized knowledge. Knowledge of software programs, programming languages such as COBOL or Java, and tools that are widely known does not, in most cases, by itself qualify as "specialized knowledge," though the worker may be eligible to enter the U.S. under other immigration categories. According to the ITAA, advanced knowledge of an employer's special process or methodology that is not generally held throughout the industry could be considered specialized knowledge and would be an acceptable case for applying for an L-1 visa.

I.B.M. Explores Shift of White-Collar Jobs Overseas

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE, New York Times 7/22/03

ith American corporations under increasing pressure to cut costs and build global supply networks, two senior I.B.M. officials told their corporate colleagues around the world in a recorded conference call that I.B.M. needed to accelerate its efforts to move white-collar, often high-paying, jobs overseas even though that might create a backlash among politicians and its own employees. During the call, I.B.M's top employee relations executives said that three million service jobs were expected to shift to foreign workers by 2015 and that I.B.M. should move some of its jobs now done in the United States, including software design jobs, to India and other countries. "Our competitors are doing it and we have to do it," Tom Lynch, I.B.M.'s director for global employee relations, said in the call. A recording was provided to The New York Times recently by the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, a Seattle-based group seeking to unionize high-technology workers. The group said it had received the recording — which was made by I.B.M. and later placed in digital form on an internal company Web site — from an I.B.M. employee upset about the plans. I.B.M.'s internal discussion about moving jobs overseas provides a revealing look at how companies are grappling with a growing trend that many economists call off-shoring. In decades past, millions of American manufacturing jobs moved overseas, but in recent years the movement has also shifted to the service sector, with everything from low-end call center jobs to high-paying computer chip design jobs migrating to China, India, the Philippines, Russia and other countries. Executives at I.B.M. and many other companies argue that creating more jobs in lower cost locations overseas keeps their industries competitive, holds costs down for American consumers, helps to develop poorer nations while supporting overall employment in the United States by improving productivity and the nation's global reach. "It's not about one shore or another shore," an I.B.M. spokeswoman, Kendra R. Collins, said. "It's about investing around the world, including the United States, to build capability and deliver value as defined by our customers." But in recent weeks many politicians in Washington, including some in the Bush administration, have begun voicing concerns about the issue during a period when the economy is still weak and the information-technology, or I.T., sector remains mired in a long slump. At a Congressional hearing on June 18, Bruce P. Mehlman, the Commerce Department's assistant secretary for technology policy, said, "Many observers are pessimistic about the impact of offshore I.T. service work at a time when American I.T. workers are having more difficulty finding employment, creating personal hardships and increasing demands on our safety nets." Forrester Research, a high-technology consulting group, estimates that the number of service sector jobs newly located overseas, many of them tied to the information technology industry, will climb to 3.3 million in 2015 from about 400,000 this year. This shift of 3 million jobs represents about 2 percent of all American jobs. "It's a very important, fundamental transition in the I.T. service industry that's taking place today," said Debashish Sinha, principal analyst for information technology services and sourcing at Gartner Inc., a consulting firm. "It is a megatrend in the I.T. services industry." Forrester also estimated that 450,000 computer industry jobs could be transferred abroad in the next 12 years, representing 8 percent of the nation's computer jobs.  For example, Oracle, a big maker of specialized business software, plans to increase its jobs in India to 6,000 from 3,200, while Microsoft plans to double the size of its software development operation in India to 500 by late this year. Accenture, a leading consulting firm, has 4,400 workers in India, China, Russia and the Philippines. Critics worry that such moves will end up doing more harm to the American economy than good. "Once those jobs leave the country, they will never come back," said Phil Friedman, chief executive of Computer Generated Solutions, a 1,200-employee computer software company. "If we continue losing these jobs, our schools will stop producing the computer engineers and programmers we need for the future." In the hourlong I.B.M. conference call, which took place in March, the company's executives were particularly worried that the trend could spur unionization efforts. "Governments are going to find that they're fairly limited as to what they can do, so unionizing becomes an attractive option," Mr. Lynch said on the recording. "You can see some of the fairly appealing arguments they're making as to why employees need to do some things like organizing to help fight this." The I.B.M. executives also warned that when workers from China come to the United States to learn to do technology jobs now being done here, some American employees might grow enraged about being forced to train the foreign workers who might ultimately take away their jobs. "One of our challenges that we deal with every day is trying to balance what the business needs to do versus impact on people," Mr. Lynch said. "This is one of these areas where this challenge hits us squarely between the eyes." Mr. Lynch warned that with the American economy in an "anemic" state, the difficulties and backlash from relocating jobs could be greater than in the past. "The economy is certainly less robust than it was a decade ago," Mr. Lynch said, "and to move jobs in that environment is going to create more challenges for the reabsorption of the people who are displaced." The I.B.M. executives said openly that they expected government officials to be angry about this trend. "It's hard for me to imagine any country just sitting back and letting jobs go offshore without raising some level of concern and investigation," Mr. Lynch said. Those concerns were pointedly raised on June 18, when the House Small Business Committee held a hearing on "The Globalization of White-Collar Jobs: Can America Lose These Jobs and Still Prosper?" "Increased global trade was supposed to lead to better jobs and higher standards of living," said Donald A. Manzullo, an Illinois Republican who is the committee chairman. "The assumption was that while lower-skilled jobs would be done elsewhere, it would allow Americans to focus on higher-skilled, higher-paying opportunities. But what do you tell the Ph.D., or professional engineer, or architect, or accountant, or computer scientist to do next? Where do you tell them to go?" The technology workers' alliance is highlighting I.B.M.'s outsourcing plans to help rally I.B.M. workers to the union banner. "It's a bad thing because high-tech companies like I.B.M., Microsoft, Oracle and Sun, are making the decision to create jobs overseas strictly based on labor costs and cutting positions," said Marcus Courtney, president of the group, an affiliate of the Communications Workers of America. "It can create huge downward wage pressures on the American work force." Mr. Mehlman, the Commerce Department official, said companies were moving more service jobs overseas because trade barriers were falling, because India, Russia and many other countries have technology expertise, and because high-speed digital connections and other new technologies made it far easier to communicate from afar. Another important reason for moving jobs abroad is lower wages. "You can get crackerjack Java programmers in India right out of college for $5,000 a year versus $60,000 here," said Stephanie Moore, vice president for outsourcing at Forrester Research. "The technology is such, why be in New York City when you can be 9,000 miles away with far less expense?" Company executives say this strategy is a vital way to build a global company and to serve customers around the world. General Electric has thousands of workers in India in call center, research and development efforts and in information technology. Peter Stack, a G.E. spokesman, said, "The outsourcing presence in India definitely gives us a competitive advantage in the businesses that use it. Those businesses are some of our growth businesses, and I would say that they're businesses where our overall employment is increasing and our jobs in the United States."  David Samson, an Oracle spokesman said the expansion of operations in India was "additive" and was not resulting in any jobs losses in the United States. "Our aim here is not cost-driven," he said. "It's to build a 24/7 follow-the-sun model for development and support. When a software engineer goes to bed at night in the U.S., his or her colleague in India picks up development when they get into work. They're able to continually develop products."

Dialogue with an IBM H1B Visa Manager via ComputerWorld Forum H1B Visa Issues

 Computerworld Forums > Gov't - Legal > Government Archive >
End the H-1B Visa lie! YOUR POWER IS IN THE VOTE!
Chondro Python - 03:59pm Jul 20, 2001
 

Mari Fleming - 03:25pm Jan 3, 2002 (#79 of 98)  [IBM Mgr NYC H1B]

Cheap Labor Vs Expensive Americans
H1B Visas are not the only reason American workers are losing jobs - most  so-called multinational (mostly US) companies are moving production  overseas - Nike to SE Asia, GM to Mexico. - where wages are cheaper and  environment protection costs are lower.  However , to get to the point re H1B Visas for IT workers - even if many of these foreign workers were asking for the same pay as Americans, I would, in 75% of cases, hire the foreigner. Reasons why.. (based on my  experiences of American & immigrant employees over 20 years):
(1) They are better - smarter, and educated properly - that is, to think,and to tackle problems. The US education system has turned out a couple of  generations of dumbed-down graduates - who can tick off answers to multi-choice questions, but who cannot, in general, analyze a problem from scratch
(2) They work harder - unlike most Americans, who attend their work place from 8:00AM to 6:00PM, chatting, socializing, web surfing and drinking coffee - with occasional work breaks totaling 3 hours approx...foreign workers WORK when attending their place of employment.
(3)They can be directed more easily - every American worker seems to think s/he should be boss, and that his/her opinion is as valuable as the Managing Director's - even if they are only 22 and left College just this
year...foreign workers are more receptive to taking direction and acting  on management guidance.
In summary - when I can find an American worker of the same competence, intelligence, diligence and enthusiasm as an equivalent foreign worker -  s/he will be given the job by me - and very enthusiastically too.
Being an American and 'qualified' does not entitle you to a job - competence and capability are key employment requirements.

Dave Tong - 03:38pm Jan 3, 2002 (#80 of 98)
Oh the advantages of slavery Maria,  Do you miss the days when you could whip people  if they did not work hard enough too!

Mari Fleming - 04:50pm Jan 3, 2002 (#81 of 98) [IBM Mgr NYC]
Work Vs Slavery
You have demonstrated one of my points excellently - you equate ''hard work'' with slavery - an all-too-common attitude in this country from those who expect inflated salaries for little productivity. Because I expect employees to actually work & give value for their salaries, you somehow infer that I approve of slavery and slave-level wages....what a strange leap of non-logic! - such a lack of analytical  thinking & reasoned argument is surprising in an IT worker. (Note: as slavery was abolished in all the Northern USA by 1828 - to remember whippping slaves I would have to be 180-plus years old - again showing a lack of mathematical ability is strange in an IT worker) I should add that workers who are competent, capable and enthusiastic  should be paid what they are worth (in this country what the market dictates) - and should be treated with respect and given every chance to progress in their careers and increase their earning power - whatever their race, color, visa status or sex. [Speaking of (but not condoning) slavery - how many of us Americans would be out of work if our multi-national employers did not exploit workers in many countries to make huge profits..to spend on IT. We are not any of us innocent there - we eat cheap bananas because Chiquita runs plantations at slave-level wages in South America - for example. So don't trivialize a serious subject like slavery please.] H1B is, I believe being exploited by some companies - as are some of the IT workers introduced under this scheme. Fix the scheme. Fix the companies. Allow foreign workers to compete fairly with Americans, where their skills and capabilities are comparable - for comparable salaries. Life will never be perfect - it is certainly not 'fair' - but excluding  all immigrants so that lower-skilled, less efficient American workers can fill vacancies is a solution that flies in the face of competition, market forces, immigration/diversity, hard work and efficiency - some of the  keystones of the hugely successful, free-market American Capitalist economy.

 MikeF - 09:42pm Jan 3, 2002 (#83 of 98)
Maria - You must be joking.Get real Maria. I've been in this industry too long, and see what the  ethics of the H1-B candidates bring to the table. Two words: Cheap Labor.

 A1 - 10:31am Jan 4, 2002 (#84 of 98)
Interesting Notes on Current H1B Political Figures If you look back several messages you will see the details of the Jordon  Commission and how  in 1996. This was taken over by former Sen Spencer Abraham R-MI and back up by Sen Orin Hatch R-UT.

1. Eugene Scalia son of Supreme Court Justice is up for nomination for head of labor department. He is supported by Sen Hatch. One of the players from the Jordon Commission that go us into the current H1B Visa mess.
2. Sen Toricelli D-NJ found innocent of campaign issues. The same guy who Microsoft paid about $13 Million in his campaign to support H1B Visa and was a swing vote that got Microsoft off the hook for Anti-Trust.
3. Mr. Abraham have been appointed head the dept of energy by the Bush Administration after losing his Senate Seat. He was given over $10 Million  by Microsoft to support H1B Visa Immigration on the Jordon Commission.
4. The Hudson Institute showed recently on C-Span the need to support the  China trade deal. Response from the audience is they are selling out the American Labor force here. For the past 17 months American Manufacturing has declined since this bill. Prior to this Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) shows the reason for massive H1B Immigration is based on a report by them. www.hudson.org. They have a report out presented to Congress more in the Senate showing the need for H1B Visa Immigration. This was written by one  of their people who is a Russian owning a consulting firm placing H1B Visa  Candidates into IBM! Yes they are doing the dirty work for IBM!

5. The Committee for Economic Development www.ced.org Put out a report  cited the need for  continued expansive H1B Immigration (US Immigration Policy). Feel free to go their and read the report take note of the Corporate Sponsors they are the biggest offenders abusing the American High Technology Labor Force. Examine pages 58..64 CED Board of Trustees. For Example the head of Merck Ray Gilmartin is the Vice Chairman. Too bad Merck no longer hires Americans they are hooked on cheap labor. Perhaps when you need drugs one may consider not using their products and push for generic legislation. Merck got to the top using US Federal Business started with Penicillin of the WWII GI's now after using the American Taxpayers they are turning their  backs on the American Labor Force!
 

 A1 - 11:11am Jan 4, 2002 (#85 of 98)
Sen Hatch Stuffing the H1B Ballot via Appt for Dept. of Labor Sen Hatch one to the players for the current H1B Visa Message is now appointing our Sec. for the Dept. of Labor Eugene Scalia son of Judge that  ruled Bush is Pres.! In the 1996 Jordon Commission the Sec of Labor was one who defended the American Labor Force from expanded H1B Immigration. Sen Hatch was on the other side of the fence here. Now they will control the Dept. of Commerce and Labor as being pro H1B Visa Labor!  The GOA reports on the voting records showed about 85% of the Republicans voted for expanded  H1B Visa Immigration!  A suggestion for all those impacted become a Republican vote early and vote often. You have two votes this way to get the bums out of office in the primary and the main elections. This mean you double your chances to get them out! Yes I  am a Republican! The current leadership has sold out the Americans is time for us to sell them out of their jobs also! Look at the web site www.clubforgrowth.org here you will see the ideas of how to make the changes needed following this political model setup a fund and sponsor people in tight races to win. Pick and choose our battles this approach takes little money and can make a big political difference!
 

A1 - 11:28am Jan 4, 2002 (#87 of 98)
Profile of Hudson Institute who recommends to Senate Unlimited H1B Visa  Immigration Richard W. July Senior Fellow Director, Center for Work force Development President, Hudson Analytic Areas of Expertise· Economic and work force development · The future: its promises and its problems · Demographic analysis and projections · Information technology and -commerce Biographical Highlights Richard W. July is Hudson Institute's chief demographic analyst and leads the Institute's research on economic and workforce development issues. He is co-author Workforce 2020, Hudson's 1997 re-visitation of its groundbreaking  study conducted for the U.S. Department of Labor (Workforce 2000, 1987). He is currently working on a new book provisionally entitled, Worker Dearth: Prospering in an Age of Labor Market Stringency. Judy is also  president of Hudson Analytics, the consulting and proprietary research arm of Hudson Institute. He leads Hudson's projects to assist companies, industries, and regions in evaluating and designing their long-term  development strategies. He consults extensively with businesses and governments, including IBM, the World Bank, Shell Oil, Mellon Bank,  Hitachi, Toyota, the Frank Russell Company, the OECD, and the governments  of Canada, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, and the United States. Judy's previous work at Hudson has included project directorships for studies of economic reform and development in Hungary, the Baltic states, Russia, and Ukraine. He established Hudson's program to develop indigenous economic policy research institutes ("think tanks") in formerly socialist countries. Before joining Hudson in 1986, Judy was professor of economics and computer science at the University of Toronto. He also founded and served as chief executive officer of three companies: Systems Research  Group, Inc. (a Toronto computer software and consulting firm); Beef  Genetics Research Inc., a high-tech agro-business firm; and a string of computer retail stores. Judy's doctoral work was in economics at Harvard  University. Earlier he studied at the University of Kansas, Columbia University, and as an exchange scholar at the University of Moscow. He is  fluent in Russian and speaks some German, French, and Spanish. He is  proficient in numerous computer software languages and tools. Publications  and Media Exposure Richard Judy co-authored The Information Age and Soviet Society (with Virginia L. Clough, 1989). His writings have appeared in  International Executive, National Review, The Wall Street Journal, The  Wall Street Journal Europe, The Washington Times, The World & I, and elsewhere. He is a frequent commentator on local and national television  and radio programs, and is much in demand as a public speaker You will note here he is a consultant using H1B Immigration labor  to gain control of contracting in firms like IBM. This person you  can be sure has a bias towards H1B Immigration. He is making to much money in the process of putting American Labor out of Work!  This is the character whom the Members of the US Senate take as  the reason for more H1B Immigration!

 Mari Fleming - 02:01pm Jan 4, 2002 (#89 of 98)
Careful with Statements which can be construed as Defamation...you could  be sued! A1, Interesting profile of Richard July, who, you state is recommending more H1B immigration to the US Senate. However, it is a vast leap of imagination to conclude that because he consults with multiple  multi-national companies like IBM, he is somehow the instigator of a malign plot to line his own pockets through the use of H1B labor.  points to note:
(1)The statement in your last paragraph re Prof. July, which is not substantiated in any way, could be construed as untrue defamation of the Prof. He might initiate a lawsuit against you based on this.
(2) I work for IBM - and your statement than anyone could 'gain control of contracting' in IBM is laughable - IBM is so big that each region/country/solution area etc etc makes its own contracting  arrangements. Furthermore, it appears Prof. July has engaged in some strategic/business consulting for IBM - not really the area H1Bs are recruited for, as this type of consulting requires an in-depth knowledge &  experience of US business practices and culture.
(3) I agree with you general point - made many times - that big business in  the US influences politics & politicians with large injections of money. That is a structural problem with US politics (not just relating to H1B),
and it is up to us, as voters, to reclaim democracy. As a large proportion  of us these days don't even bother to vote or even become involved in local politics - do you have any suggestions as to how this might begin?
(4) I agree that the H1B program is, in general, badly thought through,  for the following reasons:
- A 6-year visa term actually encourages short-termism & does nothing to support the immigrants in building a stake in America or becoming  long-term taxpayers & contributors.
- The H1B program also effectively steals from the countries who provide H1B workers. India, for example, invests billions of dollars (well, rupees) in providing excellent mathematical & computing education for
their brightest students. To encourage these grads to leave their home country for a short-term cash gain, sometimes exploiting them by paying them less than home-grown grads., is tantamount to stealing a valuable
resource from countries who badly need it - thereby stunting their development - and continuing the cycle of deprivation & emigration.  My final point is this - workers on H1B visas, or on L1 visas, Green Cards
etc etc should not be attacked for 'stealing' US jobs. If they compete &  win on merit & competence - fine. If they are being exploited by large companies to undercut US labor - then they are the losers, as well as US
workers. As I said in an earlier post- fix the system, fix the companies responsible for exploitation, where it occurs .. but don't use the issue  to start racist and jingoistic attacks on immigrant workers.

A1 - 02:38pm Jan 4, 2002 (#90 of 98)
IBM Claims Shortages of H1B Visa Labor while Limiting Vendor List Perhaps working for IBM when one calls their vendor list 919-543-5214 which states IBM has a limited vendor list for professional services  locking out Most of the American IT Talent!! And then screaming the Congress saying IBM  need massive amounts of H1B Visa Labor (This was written up in a Prior ComputerWorld Issues). Violates the Clayton/Rayleigh Act Exclusive Tying and Dealing while the email response from supinfo@us.ibm.com showing that only vendors allowed to do business with IBM some of which have ties with the RACKETS eg.  prior vendor MANPOWER, Computer Horizons, CDI, TAC etc. Is IBM involved with restrain of trade? e.g. Steering of Competition? www.ftc.gov. If what was said involves legal action fine  I have lots of lawyers in the family no problem. I will make the point again that the report cited by Sen McCain from the Hudson Institute pointing  to the Workforce 2000 report www.ced.org that this man was involved with writing this shows a bias from him to support the H1B Visa Agenda so that he can make lots of loots selling IBM H1B Visa Labor. IBM is no angel with respect to their behavior on the H1B Visa Issue!
IF YOU REALLY WISH TO DEAL WITH THE PROBLEM THEN  REDRESS IBM TO OPEN THEIR PROCUREMENT SYSTEM TO ALLOW AMERICAN LABOR and HIGH TECHNOLOGY BUSINESS
BID on the CONTRACTS. SINCE PRESENTLY WELL OVER 90% of the IT MARKET IS LOCKED OUT OF BIDDING ON IBM's IT BUSINESS WHILE the FLOODS GATES ARE OPEN  IN IBM TO H1B LABOR along with OUTSOURCING PERHAPS ONE NEEDS TO LOOK A LITTLE HARDER AT IBM's ETHICS IN THIS AREA BY THE END YOU MAY FIND QUITE A FEW RATS IN THE POT.
Perhaps a better approach would be for the 2 Million  American IT workers to Call IBM CEO Office Lou Gerstner  914-765-1900 to let him know IBM's H1B Visa Program is hurting American Workers who need jobs. Perhaps IBM would even give preference to American Workers for jobs Right Here is America! and if Perhaps not  then at one of the next Stock Holder Meetings the unemployed  American IT workers let IBM know loud and clear the impact of their actions on the American Workforce!

 Mari Fleming - 03:46pm Jan 4, 2002 (#92 of 98)
IBM & H1B
As I don't work for IBM procurement I will not attempt to answer your  assertions in detail. However I have sent an internal e-mail to the US procurement and legal (procurement & anti-trust) teams, directing them to this website & to your statements...which they may pursue with you via  e-mail.  Forum: Some facts (rather than unsubstantiated assertions) for the interest of this forum:  IBM procurement has a policy of using a certain number of contracting companies through which it  manages all contract hires. The reasons for this are logistical, not anti-competitive. I formerly contracted (as an independent contractor) to IBM -after they had agreed to engage me, they directed me to one of their contracting companies to set up the admin. of my timesheets, expenses, tax witholding etc etc. Took a lot of hassle away from me to do it that way. The rates and terms of the contract were arranged directly with me, straight off the street - I was not forced in any way to an uncompetitive  deal. In the last 6 months of 2001, IBM US has laid off many contractors/consultants - to try to protect the jobs of its employees in a downturn. Employees are more expensive than contractors in the long term, when benefits are taken into account. I have seen no evidence of favoring  contractors, H1B or otherwise, here. I hold no brief for claiming IBM is perfect. I have found it to be very  good employer. I believe IBM actually contributes to the employment of Americans by sending Americans over to their non-US operations - for example, some IBM UK employees/contractors complain that American workers for IBM take UK jobs!  IBM chooses its business partners based on transparent business criteria and on technical criteria. For example, Siebel (an American Company) is its main CRM partner worldwide, because its business model for this segment complements IBM's. My husband happens to be an executive in an  (American) software company which is a tier-3 partner of IBM's. To reach tier-1 status (like Siebel's) his company has to prove delivery  competence, business viability, technology fit... etc.. via a transparent partner acquisition process that is explained in detail on the IBM website (see partnerworld). IBM, having been involved in a major anti-trust suit in the 1980s (like Microsoft today) is ultra-careful to avoid any practices which could be construed as restraint of trade etc. Finally - if an American company  does not win business with IBM or other large companies, it may  actually be because they were too expensive or simply not competent enough. No anti-US /mob conspiracy, just good competitive business practice!
 

Now can the Forum please return to discussing H1B Visas, and not interesting, but not really relevant, conspiracy theories?
 

 A1 - 05:29pm Jan 4, 2002 (#93 of 98)
Review Msg 60 of this Forum Mari  This is the dirty little secret of the IT business! If you examine message 60 of this forum on the 1706 issue. I will most definitely  attest that mob connections present in some of the  large technical services firms some of which have been IBM vendor's for professional services! Talk with owners of Sharp Decisions, Aetea former owner of Spectrum Concepts about Frank Viggiano  former head of the Manhattan Data Processing Mgt  Assoc, or inquire with Senior Members of the New York City ICCA www.icca.org. I myself have been offered cement shoes just to provide  consulting services Feel free to have IBM examine all the messages presented here! When they passed the 1986 tax code section 1706 my own congressman at that time Dick Schultz R-PA told me they knew the  Mafia was involved with the tax laws and into the the professional services firms. Anyone working for long up in New York City and/or Detroit and does not know about their involvement running professional services firms is either naive or darn lucky not to run into them! This is merely an extension of their labor rackets. Ever hear the reason why Volt Information Sciences in the only vendor allowed to provide professional services to Lucent? Look what  happened to the company. Also look real hard at what was said about Clinton etc. Ever wonder why Microsoft and BellSouth have Volt as their exclusive vendor for IT Services? Perhaps this is an offer they can not refuse.  In the early 1950's Frank Costello during the Senate hearing asked about his involvement with  the Phone Company Unions he said "I only run the  unions I have nothing to due with them" Ever wonder why Anderson/Accenture wins exclusive  contracts repeatedly with over $1 Billion in lawsuits for incompetence?  in just one year. They failed in their audit duties at Enron and Waste Mgt Inds (A firm in the past overrun by the rackets!). In both cases investors lost over $1 Billion! Perhaps as they said in the movies they give the firms an offer they cannot refuse! This is a big reason why we need H1B Visa Labor!
 

 A1 - 10:15am Jan 5, 2002 (#94 of 98)
Example of Why IBM needs H1B Visa Labor Mari, In the past year IBM is moving into the consulting business in the Pharmaceuticals Firms like Aventis and potentially Astra Zenca in the Northeast. Aventis had  many IT independent consultants working for them in Collegville PA then they moved the plant up to Bridgewater NJ, In the process they awarded an exclusive contract to IBM is the provider of Professional Technical  Services in this process well over 90% of the consultants refused to continue due the to deal  IBM presented to them! Well now that IBM has the exclusive contract you need H1B Visa labor to get the profits desired since small American High Technology Business which was displaced by this procurement practice lost their incomes for their families. This was not due to a lack of work or desire of most to work in the new plant but due to the deal presented to them thru IBM. Yes now that IBM has displaced American High Tech workers they need H1B Visa Labor to maintain the client relationship and as usual IBM goes to congress asking for more H1B Visa labor to keep ahead of the competition which is American High Technology Business investing in American Communities and providing growth to the local economies. This is a typical reason why IBM needs H1B Visa Labor.  In the past, IBM worked on our FAA Air Traffic Control System they failed and were disbarred from federal contracts. We suffer today with the outmoded system because IBM still influence into FAA procurement the  politics here!  In the past, IBM worked on Federal Contracts for the Navy Subs in Mananass VA. They were taken off the contracts due to the incompetence again. All of  this at the expense of the US Taxpayers!  We you said you hired into IBM, they directed you to work thru their  approved vendors. If you would not do this then you would not be allowed to work for IBM! IBM failed to recognize your right as a small business to provide them professional  technical services! This is written in the Anti-Trust laws as Exclusive ties and dealing and steering of the competition! See www.ftc.gov Clayton Rayleigh Act! All that is needed here  is the warchest to prove this point. Any lawyers out their interested in  class action lawsuits to protect American High Technology business? With respect to IBM very interesting how a typewriter company wins the  exclusive business  to become the large corporate concern of today. I would assume the mess is cleaned up now. But the prior history of IBM shows ethical concerns in business relations. Why do you think the government brought them up on anti trust  charges? To bad Microsoft beat the recent charges! This just shows how  corrupt our governmental system has become in failing to protect the interests of the  American people and that the special interests are  now in power. Make no mistake I am saying Organized Crime and Corporate  Special Interests are involved with this process. Why even today the American High Technology firms feel the impact of IBM. For example, look at the Federal Procurement laws  for Section 8A qualifications which states people of the Indian  Subcontinent  are granted special preference in awarding federal small business contracts.  This was due to the fact that both IBM and Sperry/Unisys wanted to sell the Indian Government mainframe computers in the 1960's.  Indian requested and got the via IBM's lobbyists  this written into Federal Procurement laws.  Now that IBM uses this labor and overtime they  get to bid on Federal Contracts which is locked out to American High Technology Business via Blanket Purchase order agreements (Done during the  1986 tax reform act) and the Section 8A. Now as a consequence IBM gets an  unusal advantage and preference in Federal Contracting Awards.  Since you saw some problems with the Hudson Report  with me showing the profile of a person who wrote the report and that Sen  McCain (Head of Senate Commerce Committee) uses as the reason for  unlimited H1B Visa immigration.

A1 - 11:05am Jan 5, 2002 (#95 of 98)
Note of IBM Supplier List FYI
Mari:
Here is IBM's USA Suppliers shown for this year.  If you read message 60 of this forum. Feel free to investigate what was said here about CDI which  owns MRI Mgt. Recruiters Int'l. This message shows the influence of the rackets! Most of these firms  are not very ethical in their business practices! ARC had an HR Mgr so loyal to them at Motorola that he steered all  consultants to the ARC shop Motorola almost fired him for his behavior. CTG and CDI are two of the 12  firms involved with 1706 see message 60! Global is an Indian firm loading IBM up with H1B Labor. Seems like this list excludes 99% of American High Technology Business!  International Business Machines Corporation

TO: ALL SUPPLIERS OF TECHNICAL SERVICES
SUBJECT: SELECTION OF CORE TECHNICAL SERVICES SUPPLIERS
In response to your inquiry, it is IBM's policy to maintain a certain  number of core technical services suppliers in the United States and to direct its technical services requirements to those core suppliers.  In choosing our core suppliers, IBM considered a number of factors, such as price, delivery, quality, skills, ability to meet our requirements, and, if  the supplier was found to be competitive in those areas, whether the supplier is a minority, women or gay/lesbian owned business. Only after careful consideration of the above did we select our national suppliers. While it is unfortunate that IBM cannot do business with every service provider, IBM reserves the right to determine the number and identity of its suppliers as a matter of business discretion. As we value our supplier's autonomy in selecting their business partners, the attached list is for informational purposes only. You are free to independently pursue a relationship with any or all of the core suppliers in the attached list. This information is not to be construed or presented as an endorsement or recommendation by IBM. Again, we thank you for your interest in doing business with IBM and wish you continued business success.

Sincerely,  (electronically signed by) NICHOLAS J. COX Americas Sourcing Manager, Technical Services
e-mail: coxn@us.ibm.com
ATTACHMENT 1
The information in this listing is subject to change, please feel free to contact me (see bottom of page)if you encounter difficulty reaching a Core

Supplier representative.
LEGEND:
** = Minority Supplier
ALTERNATIVE RESOURCES CORP.
CONTACT: Stephen Porter
PHONE #: (847) 620-4215
E-MAIL: stephen_porter@arcnow.com
ANALYSTS INTERNATIONAL CORP.
CONTACT: Rod Brylawski
PHONE #: (813) 288-0058
E-MAIL: rbrylawski@analysts.com
CDI
CONTACT: Patti Davis
PHONE #: (607) 770-7300
E-MAIL: patti.davis@cdicorp.com
SYNOVA CORPORATION**
CONTACT: Kevin Dacey
PHONE #: (248) 526-0602
E-MAIL: kdacey@cbsinc.com
COMPUTER TASK GROUP (CTG)
CONTACT: Janet Maszdzen
PHONE #: (800) 853-8012 ext 16 0r (518) 456-9327 ext 16
E-MAIL: janet.maszdzen@ctg.com
GLOBAL CONSULTANTS, INC **
CONTACT: Ajay Jayakar
PHONE#: (973) 560-2690
E-MAIL: ajay@g-c-i.com
OAO SERVICES, INC **
CONTACT: Angelique Kosempa
PHONE#: (919) 544-5279
E-MAIL: akosempa@oaoservices.com


Bing - 10:59pm Jan 5, 2002 (#96 of 98)
Keep Rockin A1 I think understanding government corruption is  key to understanding how such an abomination as the h1b program came into existence. Abolishing the h1b program would be a significant government reform.


A1 - 09:05am Jan 6, 2002 (#97 of 98)
Another IBM Issue with H1B Visa Mari:  In a past edition of ComputerWorld an IBM Manager Rod Adkins from Texas was cited as saying IBM has a shortage of IT Talent and that IBM Needs extensive H1B Labor to support their efforts. I have shown in the some of the recent messages here that IBM. Put on the face of trying to use  American High Tech Labor but in reality did not by any means make an honest attempt to open their procurement practices to allow American High Tech business or recognize IT Professionals right to deal with them as a small business concern they were not even the chance to bid on IBM's business! Another more recent example is the deal for the IRS Contract. Unisys lost the $5 Billion deal for not performing the job. Newt Gingrich lead the initiative to get support of congress here. The job was rebid for $12 Billion. Two of the  teaming partners were Anderson/Accenture another  was IBM! Looking at Anderson's track record  with Enron, Waste Mgt etc. They do not seem to capable to say the very least! Why would IBM  choose to work with such a teaming partner? The information of these guys was known then! Buy the way since the US American Taxpayers are
paying for this project is IBM using H1B Visa labor on a Federal Contract? Since the Federal IT Procurement laws lock out 95%+ of American High Tech Talent from bidding on these projects this is via Blanket Purchase
order agreements and Section 8A contracting preference, Does IBM Hire American High Tech IT Talent or abuse the American System by using H1B Visa labor here! When one sees the likes of Anderson/Accenture as a Teaming Partner and CDI as a subcontract vendor  for Professional Technical Services. Why would  IBM tie themselves into firms this unethical? See Message 60 in this forum! The body of evidence speaks for itself showing the real intent!  The real intent of H1B Visa is to gain control of  the American IT Consulting Business to beat the  Competition which is American Small Business in the High Technology areas. Interesting to note  that the force of American Small Business Concerns  is powerful enough that Corporate America needs to Corrupt Members of Congress, a President, setup Procurement laws in the H1B Visa area and  still show in many contracts they are incompetent  to do a job which many times small teams of American IT Businesses and Professionals can perform at a fraction of the cost! This issue is a powder keg ready to brought to American's Corporate and Political leadership. The other part of this issue is the China Trade Bill  for 17 months straight Manufacturing has been losing about 125,000 jobs each month due to this action. Couple this with the lose of 400,000 per month in high technology and it will not be long before we see many changes in the political landscape. If you think the impact of the H1B Visa program will not cause political unrest with many millions of angry voters you have to be kidding. This issue coupled with the China Trade Bill will have  everyone gunning for the heads of congress who support this agenda!

 A1 - 06:25pm Jan 9, 2002 (#98 of 98)

IBM Dealing with Conflicts of Interest Mari:  In Msg 92 here is was cited that Siebel Systems is a Tier one vendor for  IBM. Since CDI and Anderson/Acenture are IBM teaming partners and CDI and Computer Task Groups are IBM's National subcontract vendors are they considered tier one vendors to IBM. If what was said in prior messages  about the actions of Anderson/Accenture and CDI would IBM remove them as its vendors? In place of them would IBM consider using national professional organizations likes Independent Computer Consultants Assoc as a resource to help IBM with some of the best  US talent available? Would IBM provide preference
to Hire American Talent first? These are some issues IBM to consider. Another issue presented here is Procurement Ethics. You cite in message 92  that Siebel  is a Tier one Vendor. Well Time Magazine cites
an article where the former Gov. of Montana  Marc Racicot is now a lobbyist for the energy concerns
including Enron which was the top contributor  to Bush. Siebel uses lots of H1B Labor. This guy was is now the head of the national republican committee fund raising campaign. However, he did not leave his full time
job as a lobbyist. Back  in Nov 2001, he presented Siebel's product literature to Tom Ridge head of
homeland defense. His remarks were he finds it insulting to think there is  any conflict of interest in his role as a republican fund raiser and his  role as lobbyist.  Since IBM has Siebel as a tier one vendor what is
IBM's position on these types of actions? and for the matter what is  Siebel position on conflicts of
interest?  The reason here is both vendors IBM and Siebel  use H1b Visa labor to gain a competitive edge
which impacts American labor utilization. Would this influence be used to present a bias to  use H1B Visa labor to increase profits?
 

See What IBM's Unions are saying about the loss of jobs! http://www.allianceibm.org/

Displaced Americans L1 Visa Program

Paul Craig Roberts -Washington Times Mar 14 2003

U.S. corporations no longer have to outsource your high-tech or information technology (IT) job to China or India. They just bring your replacement here on an L-1 visa. L-1 visas get around the legal technicalities that Congress placed on the H-1B visa program. Employers are not supposed to use H-1B visas to bring in foreigners to displace U.S. employees or in order to cut costs by paying low wages. H-1B visas are supposed to be utilized only when there is a shortage of particular skills, and the visa holder is supposed to be paid prevailing U.S. wages. Of course, as any economist can tell you, a shortage is always at a price. H-1B visas were used to keep employers from bidding up U.S. wages and calling forth a larger supply of the needed skills. Instead of allowing the price system to work in the United States, H-1B visas simply enlarged the U.S. labor supply to include the entire world. Many American students who invested in obtaining software and IT skills graduated only to discover their careers had been given to foreigners or outsourced abroad. Several hundred thousand educated and formerly high-income Americans were displaced by the H-1B program. Complaints were rising, but before the scandal could break, L-1 visas took over.  L-1 visas were created to facilitate intracompany transfers within multinational corporations. Corporations use them to hire Asians at one-third the salary of their U.S. employees. Then the Asians are transferred to the United States, where the "downsized" U.S. employees spend their last employed months training their replacements. Loopholes in the L-1 visa law or negligence in its enforcement allow U.S. corporations to contract with foreign companies to supply them with IT workers. This keeps the foreign workers off the U.S. corporations' payrolls and permits the corporations to confine their dealings to the foreign "consulting" firms that provide the replacements for U.S. employees. This allows U.S. corporations to claim they are paying "prevailing wages" to all employees.   According to Business Week, there are now about 350,000 foreigners on L-1 visas who have displaced U.S. IT and high-tech employees. Put this number together with the number of H-1B visas, and Americans have lost 750,000 high-income jobs in the last few years. L-1 visas allow employees to remain in the United States for seven years. The program creates an ever-greater source of foreign IT workers who, on their return to their homelands, are productively employed in training their fellow citizens in the business cultures of blue-chip U.S. companies. The L-1 visa program is especially attractive to U.S. corporations, because it allows them to tap low-paid skilled labor without having to construct facilities abroad. Instead of moving to China and India in order to hire engineers and scientists at a small fraction of U.S. prevailing wages, the companies can simply import the labor.
As a significant proportion of foreign engineers are U.S.- trained or trained by their fellows with U.S. educations, the supply is sufficient to replace every American engineer and IT employee with low-cost foreigners. Free traders, who ceased to think two centuries ago, will accept the displacement of U.S. employees with equanimity as the beneficial workings of free trade. The bonuses of cost-cutting corporate CEOs will soar with their companies' profits, while the living standards of native-born Americans will fall. Increasingly, Americans will find that even domestically produced goods and services are supplied by foreigners. Americans will become an occupied underclass in their own country.
No other country in the world, with the partial exception of the United Kingdom, dispossesses its own citizens in this way. Will a people who feel betrayed by their own government and corporations support the foreign adventures of American empire, or will American identity dissipate, dissolving the country?

Is Your Job Next -- Dude Your Not Getting That Dell !

Send the CEO you Ideas: micheal_dell@dell.com 

Your Job May Be Next!
by William F. Jasper Mar 20, 2003 The New American

Millions of U.S. jobs, as well as thousands of independent businesses, face extinction under policies that favor importing cheap labor and exporting production.

The mood in the conference room was light and festive. It was just two weeks before Christmas 2002 and many of the 300 or so Dell employees were getting set for the holidays and year-end vacation time as they gathered at Dell’s campus in Austin, Texas, for a "town hall" meeting. They were ill prepared for the message that senior vice president Jeff Clarke was about to deliver. Meetings of this sort were usually big on awards, recognition, and introductions of new products and project teams. And despite the market drubbing of tech stocks in general, Dell had posted another banner year in sales, growth, and profits. The company also benefited from a nice cash balance, Mr. Clarke noted. Then came the bad news. The company was announcing new personnel "attrition goals" of 10 percent per year, about double the normal attrition rate. These positions would not be filled in the United States, Clarke explained. They would be filled by new hires in India, China, and other countries where Dell is shifting business.

Audible gasps came from the employee audience, a hi-tech assemblage of Dell software engineers, electrical engineers, test engineers, group managers, and administrative talent. A Dell employee who attended the meeting told The New American: "A definite pall came over the crowd. It did not make for a happy Christmas."

Although Clarke’s announcement came as a shock, there had been hints of an impending axe-fall. In 2000, Dell had announced the launching of its China Design Centre in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). A steady trickle of Red Chinese engineers, project planners, and managers had been brought to Dell’s Austin campus for training, and some U.S. Dell employees had made the trek to China for four-to-six-month stints to train Chinese personnel there. Around the Dell headquarters in Austin, employees had begun wryly referring to the "Chinese invasion" as "training our replacements." Few expected that the replacing would start so soon.

Invasion-Migration Pincer

Dell’s sparkling new China Design Centre in Shanghai joins similar research and design centers in China, Russia, and India built by Microsoft, Motorola, Boeing, General Electric, and other corporate titans. The hi-tech centers are a distinctly new development, in contrast to the huge number of foreign manufacturing plants — especially in Mexico and China — built by U.S. companies over the past couple of decades. These early rounds of "globalization" cost millions of U.S. jobs, but various experts assured us that this should not concern us because these were blue collar "rust belt" jobs. Old technology, they claimed. Manufacturing is passé, they said. The U.S. would enter the new global economy with the new technology. Information, services, cutting-edge research and development — these would be the clean, high-paying jobs that would keep America on top.

But guess what? After years of strip-mining America’s industrial base, U.S. corporate elitists and their political allies in Washington, D.C., Beijing, Mexico, Moscow, and elsewhere are now looking to dispense with upscale white collar jobs as well. College grads who obtained degrees in computer science and engineering are finding themselves replaced by Third World counterparts willing to work for 20-50 percent less pay. In corporate globalese this replacement process is euphemistically called "outsourcing." Adding insult to injury, many of the replacement foreign workers received tax-subsidized educations in U.S. universities.

According to Business Week:

In a recent PowerPoint presentation, Microsoft Corp. Senior Vice-President Brian Valentine — the No. 2 exec in the company’s Windows unit — urged managers to "pick something to move offshore today." In India, said the briefing, you can get "quality work at 50% to 60% of the cost. That’s two heads for the price of one."

The same issue of Business Week offered this glib forecast:

Now, all kinds of knowledge work can be done almost anywhere. "You will see an explosion of work going overseas," says Forrester Research Inc. analyst John C. McCarthy. He goes so far as to predict at least 3.3 million white-collar jobs and $136 billion in wages will shift from the U.S. to low-cost countries by 2015.

This is a massive shift that bespeaks far more than the number of jobs and the billions of dollars on the bottom line. It concerns the critical competitive edge that the U.S. has enjoyed due to our innovation and technological leadership. That competitive edge is disappearing. It is being given away — to our competitors and even to our avowed enemies. The Business Week quotes above came from the magazine’s extraordinary February 3rd cover story, which ran under the alarming heading, "Is Your Job Next?" This was followed by a long cover subtitle: "The next round of globalization is sending upscale jobs offshore. They include basic research, chip design, engineering — even financial analysis. Can America lose these jobs and still prosper?"

The very obvious answer to Business Week’s question is a resounding no! These hi-tech jobs are not luxuries that we can allow to be nonchalantly discarded. They are critically important, as are many of the low-tech jobs exported to foreign lands in recent years. Manufacturing does matter. It is essential to a strong national economy, especially for a world power like the United States with sizeable defense imperatives. We will have little hope of prosperity if we allow our nation to depend on competitors or outright adversaries for basic parts, supplies, technologies, and resources. America needs a solid base of the "old," "dirty" industries of mining, metallurgy, oil, coal, timber, steel, agriculture, and manufacturing, not only for prosperity, but for survival. All of our hi-tech advantages on the virtual battlefield will quickly prove a hollow reed if we do not have the means to produce arms, munitions, equipment, transportation, food, and clothing for our forces on the real battlefield.

Under the vaunted "globalization" process, some indeed are prospering and will continue to prosper. But only an elite few. America’s middle class is being squeezed and is in danger of being wiped out. If the process is permitted to continue, we will be reduced to a nation of peons ruled by a political-corporate elite indistinguishable from their socialist counterparts in China. In that tragic land, the privileged ruling class, the Communist Party’s nomenklatura, live in regal splendor while the toiling masses grovel in wretched servitude.

Don’t Worry, Be Happy

Incredibly, Business Week (BW) answers its own question by suggesting that the predicted hi-tech job hemorrhage — already underway — may benefit the U.S.! "By spurring economic development in nations such as India," BW avers, "U.S. companies will have bigger foreign markets for their goods and services." How so? The same promises were made regarding low-tech jobs for the "China market." But we have found after three decades of "spurring economic development" in China that the PRC allows few of our products to reach Chinese markets. Each month China erodes more of our economic infrastructure and job base with cheap goods produced by slave labor and new factories subsidized by loans, credits, and guarantees from the U.S. government, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. As Dr. Roger Canfield, author of the new book China’s Trojan Horses, told The New American, "Our largest export to Red China is empty cargo containers and American jobs. Beijing turns around and sends those containers back to us with slave-labor-produced goods that continuously undercut more and more American-based businesses and our nation’s security. For every dollar that we make from exports to China, we spend six dollars on imports from China. China’s Communist government then uses this huge cash windfall as a strategic weapon to bribe our politicians and businessmen, buy military hardware, and obtain critical technologies and long-term productive assets that will continue to widen the trade gap — while we get consumables." India is following much the same pattern.

Nevertheless, as Business Week notes, "Intel Inc. and Texas Instruments Inc. are furiously hiring Indian and Chinese engineers," as are many other U.S. companies. According to that magazine voice of the Establishment corporate community, this trend should not alarm us since "a case can be made that the U.S. will see a net gain from this shift — as with previous globalization waves." "In the 1990s," BW continued, "Corporate America had to import hundreds of thousands of immigrants to ease engineering shortages. Now, by sending routine service and engineering tasks to nations with a surplus of educated workers, the U.S. labor force and capital can be redeployed to higher-value industries and cutting-edge R&D."

Business Week is being intentionally deceptive here on several points. First, there was never any "engineering shortage" in the U.S. to necessitate importing foreign engineers. In fact, with the downsizing of the U.S. military and layoffs from the defense contractors and aerospace industries, there was a huge domestic surplus of qualified engineers, programmers, and other technical specialists to supply corporate America’s needs. But not at the Third World wages sought by the corporate elitists. So the corporate lobbyists prevailed on Congress and President George Bush (the elder) to pass legislation in 1990 creating the special H-1B visa program allowing a flood of alien hi-tech workers into the U.S. According to figures compiled by eWEEK, the number of H-1B visas granted annually hit an all-time high of 355,605 in 2000. Since then the number has been capped at 195,000 visas annually. The H-1B program has already handed between 800,000 and one million hi-tech jobs to these foreign workers, many of whom are far less qualified than American engineers, programmers, and technicians forced to take lower-paying positions.

Dr. Norman Matloff, professor of computer science at the University of California at Davis, points out that "Microsoft only hires 2% of its applicants for software positions," and that this rate is typical in the industry. "Software employers, large or small, across the nation, concede that they receive huge numbers of résumés but reject most of them without even an interview," says Matloff. "One does not have to be a ‘techie’ to see the contradiction here. A 2% hiring rate might be unremarkable in other fields, but not in one in which there is supposed to be a ‘desperate’ labor shortage. If employers were that desperate, they would certainly not be hiring just a minuscule fraction of their job applicants." The real reason for importing workers under H-1B is the same one used to justify exporting jobs to outsource workers overseas: to avoid paying realistic salaries to U.S. hi-tech workers. As Forbes magazine noted: "Indian programmers working in the U.S. on temporary H-1B visas typically earn 25% to 30% less than their naturalized colleagues." The Wall Street Journal likewise, was stating the obvious when it reported that "recruiting foreign talent is cheaper than hiring Americans."

The H-1B workers officially are not immigrants; they are "temporary" workers. However, like the desperate engineer shortage, this too is a fraud. When the H-1B legislation was passed in 1990, industry lobbyists said it was a temporary fix only necessary for a few years. However, in the year 2000, after the H-1B was renewed, Texas Instruments and other hi-tech firms said that they would need H-1B for "the next 20 years." Moreover, like every other visa category (student, tourist, business, etc.), H-1B workers know that the Immigration and Naturalization Service rarely enforces the policy. Many H-1Bs leave the jobs they used to enter the U.S. and melt into the population, the same as other illegal aliens.

The displaced American hi-tech workers have organized some effective campaigns causing Congress to feel some heat. The tech industry and the H-1B lobbyists are concerned that the present economic climate may help this politically savvy domestic labor force prevail. The H-1B program may go down the tubes this year. Thus, many tech firms have already been ramping up an alternative route for foreign workers through the little-known L1 visa program.

As reported recently in eWEEK, "the L1 visa has clear advantages for employers." "Technically," eWEEK’s Lisa Vaas reported in a January 6th article, "the L1 is an intra-company transfer visa that allows U.S. companies to import employees from foreign subsidiaries, affiliates or parent companies. One big plus for the L1 — at least in the eyes of employers — is that there’s no limit on the number that can be issued each year." Another advantage Vaas points out is that the L1 can be used to import large numbers of workers at one time. She reports that the number of L1 visas granted climbed from 112,124 in 1995 to 294,658 in 2000. And its use appears to be going up. Software company Wipro Technologies, a Bangalore, India, division of Wipro Ltd., exemplifies why this is so. eWEEK reports that "according to Laxman Badiga, chief executive of talent transformation and external relations at Wipro, the company can get L1 visa applications approved four to eight weeks faster than it takes to process an H-1B visa."

Wipro figures prominently not only in the H-1B and L1 import game; it is also a major player in exporting or "outsourcing" U.S. "information technology" (IT) jobs. As a major partner of Lucent Technologies, Inc., Wipro’s India-based software engineers are replacing many of Lucent’s U.S. employees. In the sprawling office complexes of Wipro’s various subsidiaries throughout India, thousands of hi-tech IT workers process information and handle work once done by Americans. Wipro IT workers, for instance, process insurance claims for major U.S. corporations, sift research for pharmaceutical companies, and handle customer service telephone calls long distance from the U.S. for banks, credit card companies, and Internet providers. Other Indian giants such as Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys Technologies provide similar services to corporate America. If the person answering the 800 customer service line for your American Express card, your Citibank statement, your Dell computer tech support, or your CompUSA service contract talks with a heavy Indian accent, it’s likely because he or she is an Indian and is speaking to you from Bangalore, India, if not from a H-1B "temporary" office in the U.S.

Pink Slips Made in the U.S.A.

America’s white collar work force is facing the same twin battering rams of imported cheap labor and exported production that have ravaged our country’s blue collar work force for years. Millions of American jobs in basic resource industries as well as manufacturing, residential and commercial construction, food processing, textiles, hotel and restaurant services, landscaping, nursing, and health care have gone to alien workers (both legal and illegal) here in this country, while millions more jobs have been outsourced to foreign lands. It has become a familiar, bitter story in cities, towns, and communities across the country, as layoffs are announced, pink slips are issued, and factories are closed down. The jobs often reappear at new factories in Mexico, Indonesia, India, China, and dozens of other countries. But the jobs in those factories don’t go to U.S. workers, of course. The blue collar job drain has not let up; many more companies will move off-shore in coming years, or simply sell out to foreign corporations or larger U.S. companies that have already set up operations overseas.

Bob Davis, general manager of Modern Die Systems Inc. of Elwood, Indiana, has been watching this development for years with a mixture of alarm, sadness, and disgust. "Our government has set it up so that it is unprofitable to manufacture here in the U.S." he told The New American. Mr. Davis noted the tremendous disincentives to production posed by taxes, regulations, employee medical insurance, and labor union obstruction — the combined effects of which are driving many businesses into the ground, or out of the country. Occupying a hi-tech niche in the tool-and-die business, Modern Die Systems has managed to keep going, but it has had to cut its work force by about half of what it was several years ago. The company used to be very busy producing stamping dies for the automotive, appliance, electrical, recreational, heating and air conditioning, and defense industries. But, as Mr. Davis noted, "Much of my business has gone to Mexico." So have many area employers.

Dan Neuendorf, the company’s president, told The New American about an example that typifies the dire situation he and other manufacturers face. "One of our customers in Indiana asked us to give him a quote on some metal stamping dies," he said. "We quoted a price that was as low as we possibly could go and still make any profit. But they could get it for one-fifth of our price from Red China."

Bob Davis said, "I told the customer that there is no way that we could match that price, but that it would be unfair and immoral for me to ask free men to work for the same wages as slaves. The company’s owners are patriotic, Christian men, and they agreed that since they didn’t need it right away they could let us produce it as fill-in work, according to our schedule, so that we could keep the cost down." But not all stories turn out so happily. Under tremendous pressure to cut prices, thousands of businesses opt for cheaper imported labor and/or foreign production facilities. Mr. Davis lists some of the recent losses. RCA has closed or drastically reduced its plants in Bloomington, Indianapolis, and Marion, laying off thousands. Lau Corp. of Indianapolis, a heating, ventilation, and air conditioning manufacturer, is moving assembly lines to Mexico. So is Revcor, a Carpenterville, Illinois-based producer of air conditioning fans and blower wheels. Huffy Bicycle, located in Celina, Ohio, is all but out of business, thanks to pressures from China and Mexico. Then there is the recent sale of Indianapolis-based Magnequench Inc. to China, eliminating around 400 jobs. But the Magnequench deal involves far more than jobs; it involves the sale of very sophisticated technology used to produce critical parts for smart bombs (see the article on page 17).

What is especially galling to Bob Davis is that ongoing government policies favor these trends that are killing the goose that laid the golden egg. "Our country’s entire production capability will be stripped bare if this continues," he says. "And with it will go all of the jobs and small and medium-sized independent businesses that are the bedrock of the American middle class."

Anatomy of a Dell Service Call
By Rob Wright, VARBusiness  10:29 AM EST Wed., July 16, 2003

11:53 a.m.: Grady calls Dell at 1-800-449-DELL and stays on hold for 18 minutes and 26 seconds. After being transferred, he's told to call a new number.

12:15 p.m.: Grady calls the new number--an automated service for Dell home and small business reconditioned parts. He chooses several options and talks with a customer service representative who then transfers Grady to five other reps. After being passed off several times and then left on hold for another 33 minutes, Grady hangs up.

12:50: Grady tries another number and is transferred three times to a rep who is finally able to verify the PC model and requested part. But then he is left on hold for 10 minutes.

1:15: After hanging up again, Grady calls Dell's main number again and selects several options to get a sales rep. Grady is transferred to another rep who offers an 18-inch cable but says she cannot handle an order for an 11-inch cable. Grady selects another option, this time Dell's technical support, which tells him they can't get the part to Native Systems. He is told to call an extension for Dimension support.

2:12: After calling the new extension, Grady waits on hold for several minutes and then talks with a customer-service rep who takes the request and says he's going to get the part number for the order.

2:34: After waiting on hold for several minutes, the line goes dead.

2:35: Grady calls back the main Dell number and tries the tech-support extension once again. He tries to get in touch with the rep he previously spoke to, but the new service rep says she cannot transfer him to another rep, so he gives the rep the order request.

2:44: After waiting on the line for a few minutes, the service rep hangs up. After nearly three hours, Grady ends the futile pursuit for the 11-inch cable.

Fighting for Our Jobs

If American jobs, businesses, and communities are to be saved from this devastation, American middle-class white collar and blue collar workers, together with independent business owners, must combine to force Congress to reverse the destructive policies that are importing foreign workers and exporting our productivity. That means abolishing the H-1B and L1 visa programs, drastically reducing all other levels of immigration, and insisting on credible INS and Border Patrol enforcement levels. It also means defeating all proposals to grant yet another amnesty to milli