More Joy In Bad Labor News For The Robertses

The latest free trade fairy tales from Cokie and Steve Roberts here come at a particularly bad time, with the most recent employment numbers taking another negative turn for March (80,000 down, to be exact, as well as a revision of the first two months of unemployment to almost double the original number).

Oh, but rest assured that that will never stop the Robertses from labeling those who want to end the practice of providing tax breaks to multinationals who offshore our jobs (particularly outrageous when they share so little of the tax burden versus the middle class) as “fools”; the Robertses don’t claim that in so many words, I’ll admit, but that’s the motivation behind the goal of raising the number of H1-B workers entering this country, and that is something they clearly DO advocate.

The Robertses communicate the same numbers and arguments for importing skilled workers that people of their ideology do every chance they get (including Tom Friedman who they cite here, for calling our policy of “kicking out…the next generation of innovators” something that is “pure idiocy”) so I won’t rehash all of it again.

However, I do want to take note of the following…

According to a recent study by the National Foundation for American Policy, the average high-tech company has 470 jobs open. Microsoft alone has 4,000 unfilled slots. The 500 largest companies combined are looking for 140,000 highly skilled workers.

As noted here, the National Foundation for American Policy is a conservative think tank, in case you were wondering about that.

Also, here is an article I linked to previously written by Linda Musthaler of Network World from 2006 which debunks the whole argument that there is this supposed shortage of skilled workers.

Here’s something the Robertses will never tell you (from the article)…

There is a shortage of corporations that see their employees as long-term assets and not as overhead that can be ditched at the first hint of a bad quarter. There is a shortage of organizations willing to implement formal mentoring and internship programs that will help the next generation of employees grow into the labor force for the long haul.

Too many employers have set their sights on the ideal candidates - the ones who come with the right degrees in hand, the right credentials on the résumé and the right project experience under their belt. Heaven help the candidate who lacks a certification, or who has extensive experience with one application and not another.

He'll never get noticed, because the résumé screening software has already chucked him into the waste bin. The software doesn't know, of course, that someone with good Windows administration skills can learn Linux skills to become the new Linux administrator who's desperately needed.

And this comment to Musthaler’s article is infuriating, but I don’t aim my wrath at the commenter, who is refreshing actually in his or her honesty (this person must be a recruiter of some type)…

I see the same silly ignorance (re: not being knowledgeable about the way employers screen out Americans living in this country for their Asian employment peers) in such books as ‘My Job Went to India and All I Got Was This Stupid Book’. The author, claiming to be an ‘insider’, is anything but, and hasn’t a clue what he’s writing about. He puts forth that American IT workers must practice and become resounding experts in their field, and become unquestionably better than their Indian or Chinese counterparts.

This is very poor advice, I am sorry to say. And I am ashamed to say why, so I will remain anonymous. The truth is, there is no way any resume of any American citizen applicant passing over my desk at Microsoft has any chance of finding a job. I will explain: my orders were to collect the resumes of American citizen applicants who applied to positions that we were required to advertise per Federal law.

My job then was to nit pick the details of those resumes against those of existing H1-B visa holders or those whom we were trying to secure H1-B visas for, usually from India. Lastly, I was to exaggerate any differences using elaborate technical fibs, in writing, as to why the American citizen candidates were inferior to the ones from India. My report (and similar reports from my peers) went to HR who then sent them to the Feds (INS, I suppose). My question to the author of the ‘India’ book would be “exactly how is all that studying & practice going to help any American citizen get by me, or others like me, doing their job to disqualify American citizens?”

One way to try and level the playing field is to change the tax code not just in this country but internationally also, as noted here, to provide a system of partial tax exemption that would “tax foreign income only if a foreign government failed to tax it under a comparable tax system. As a result, all corporate income would be taxed at a reasonable rate once and only once.”

The goal is to remove the tax benefit of employers offshoring labor to countries or regions where a tax rate is more favorable and labor costs are cheaper (author James Kvaal’s argument is sufficiently detailed to the point where I cannot easily summarize it here, so I would suggest reading his entire article to learn more….and yes, I know, good luck trying to make it through the buzz saw of eliminating tax havens for multinationals, but at least someone has figured out a plan of attack).

And by ensuring that workers in this country receive a fairer shake in the whole “globalization” struggle, we would be less likely to read the following demonizing rhetoric from self-congratulatory Beltway know-it-alls like the Robertses…

This hunger for "foreign talent" certainly reflects a series of American failures. School systems don't prepare homegrown scholars for rigorous college courses in math and science. Families don't instill the work ethic needed to flourish in these competitive environments.

Assuming you believe these claims to be legitimate (and I certainly don’t), I would add the utter moral bankruptcy of propagandists shilling for their corporate betters (step right up, Robertses) as one of the biggest “American failures” of all.