“Job losses now underway far exceed anything the country has seen before.”
Jobs melting away fast as coronavirus wreaks
havoc on economy
by Jay Heflin
The coronavirus
pandemic is killing businesses
and jobs faster than anything in living
memory.
Layoffs have skyrocketed, nearly half of all U.S. companies expect to
announce furloughs, and 37% have begun a hiring freeze as the virus reaches
into every nook and cranny of commercial life.
Gap on Monday announced that it was shutting its doors
across North America and Europe on April 1 and would furlough their workers.
The company will halt wages but pay “applicable benefits” until stores reopen,
it said.
Other prominent retailers announced massive layoffs in
recent days. Macy’s and Kohl’s announced Monday that they furloughed staff
and closed their doors.
They're unlikely to open again until late spring or until
the virus is checked. It has already infected more than 184,180 people in the
United States and killed at least 3,720, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus task force coordinator, said Tuesday
that the expected peak of infection and death is still some two weeks away.
The White House recommended that everyone practice social
distancing for another month, and stay home if possible. More and more states
are issuing stay-at-home orders and extending them further into the future,
meaning that all nonessential businesses will remain closed.
A gallon of regular gasoline is selling for less than $1 in some states,
slaughtering jobs in the oil industry. Houston's Halliburton Co. has furloughed 3,500 workers. More than a
million jobs in the oilfield service sector could be cut this year as the
coronavirus slashes projected sales, according to a report by Rystad Energy.
Job losses now underway far exceed anything the country has
seen before.
More than 47 million people could be laid off, the Federal
Reserve Bank of St. Louis estimated,
and the unemployment rate could exceed 30%.
Such losses would far exceed the worst numbers of the 2008
financial crisis and eclipse those of the Great Depression.
Forecasters expect new jobless claims to be released
Thursday by the Labor Department will be higher than the record 3.2 million reported
last week.
Pictet Wealth Management projected that new claims could
exceed 6 million for the week ending March 28, meaning 9 million people in
total will have applied for unemployment insurance benefits in just the past
two weeks. Other projections are not so dire; Goldman Sachs estimates job
losses at 5.2 million, and Citigroup forecasts 4 million. The median projection
is 3.5 million lost jobs, according to Bloomberg.
Rachel Greszler, a research fellow at the Heritage
Foundation, expects the unemployment rate to at least double for March, from
the historic low of 3.5% in February.
“Based on last week’s increase in claims [of 3.2 million],
we’re probably about at 5.3% as of last week. If we see a similar jump this
week, then we’ll be a little over 7% or 7.2%,” she told the Washington Examiner. "So, I would not
be surprised if we are at least at 7% and potentially much higher, as high as
9%."
The monthly unemployment rate has not been 7% or
higher since October of 2013, according to the Labor Department.
Wells Fargo projects that the spread of the virus will
increase the jobless rate to 3.8% for the first quarter and 7.3% in the second
quarter. The unemployment rate then would drop below 7% through 2021.
The $2.3 trillion relief bill signed by President Trump
last week includes many hundreds of billions of dollars in loans and grants
designed to help businesses keep employees on their payrolls even as they face,
in many cases, a total loss of income.
In recognition of the fact that millions will have lost
jobs almost immediately, and indeed that officials want to see many workers
staying at home rather than venturing to workplaces where they could spread the
virus, the bill also contains aid to people who have been laid off or
furloughed, meant to tide them over.
The bill provides an additional $600 a week on top of
normal state unemployment benefits. It also provides tax rebates of $1,200 an
adult.
Bullard Says Unemployment Could Rise to 30%
JOHN CARNEY
The unemployment rate in the U.S.
could hit 30 percent, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James
Bullard said in Bloomberg News
interview.
“This is a planned, organized partial shutdown of the U.S.
economy in the second quarter. The overall goal is to keep everyone, households
and businesses, whole,” Bullard said. “It is a huge shock and we are trying to
cope with it and keep it under control.”
That would be the highest rate of unemployment since the Great
Depression.
Bullard said he expects economic growth to plunge 50 percent in
the second quarter but for the economy to bounce back later in the year, so
long as the appropriate measures are taken by the fiscal and monetary
authorities.
“I would see the third quarter as a transitional quarter,”
Bullard said. The next six months, however, could be very strong. “Those
quarters might be boom quarters,” he said.
Bullard also said the Fed was far from being “out of bullets,”
as some Fed watchers have claimed.
“There is more that we can do if necessary,” he said. “There is
probably much more in the months ahead depending on where Congress wants to
go.”
Jobless Claims
Soar to 3,283,000, Biggest Jump Ever
Jobless claims rose
to 3,283,000 last week, reflecting only the first round of mass layoffs
due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Jobless
claims are considered the closest thing we have to a real-time indicator of
economic conditions, reflecting claims from the prior week. Many pieces of
economic data come out with lags of a month or more, which makes it had to rely
upon them when the economy experiences a sudden shock.
The
three million claims surge easily tops the 1982 record of 695,000.
Claims
jumped in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Nine states reporting
increases of at least 100,000 from the prior week.
The
largest number of claims came from Pennsylvania, with 378,900.
A New York Labor
Department office in Manhattan, New York City, on March 6, 2015. (Spencer
Platt/Getty Images)
Think Tank Estimates 14 Million Jobs Lost by
Summer
As policymakers and investors anxiously eye
the Labor Department’s jobless claims
report, due for release Thursday, a Washington-based think tank has made
a dire forecast of 14 million jobs lost by
summertime.
“Our best guess at this point is that the
national economy could lose 14 million jobs by summer 2020,” said The Economic
Policy Institute (EPI) in a note that blamed the COVID-19 outbreak for the
dismal figures.
“These estimates assume $1 trillion in
fiscal stimulus—in other words, even with $1 trillion in stimulus, the job
losses will be enormous,” the EPI wrote on March 25.
CCP VIRUS SPECIAL COVERAGE
The 14-million forecast is an upwards
revision over figures it published last week.
“Sadly, our predictions were likely too
optimistic,” the think tank said in a report published March 25. The EPI noted that job loss
estimates are “rapidly evolving, with new forecasts from different
macroeconomic analysts being released on an almost daily basis.”
Bianca Medici (L), a corporate recruiter for CDM Media,
speaks with job applicants during a National Career Fairs job fair in Chicago
on April 22, 2015. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green)
EPI broke down their unemployment estimates
by state. Percentage-wise, Nevada is projected to lose 14.2 percent of total
private-sector employment. The state’s leisure, hospitality, and retail sectors
account for over 40 percent of all private-sector jobs.
By absolute numbers of jobs lost,
California is projected to have the most, at over 1.6 million. As a share
of total private-sector employment, this number translates into 10.9 percent.
The think tank called for “at least $2.1
trillion in federal stimulus through 2020 to restore the country to reasonable
economic health.”
Negotiators said Wednesday that U.S.
senators and Trump administration officials reached an agreement on the massive
economic stimulus bill.
The Senate will vote on the $2 trillion
package later in the day and the House of Representatives is expected to follow
suit soon after.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
(R-Ky) said Wednesday the package includes checks to help Americans pay bills
during job layoffs related to the outbreak, expanded unemployment insurance,
and emergency loans to small businesses.
‘Astronomical Increase’
The U.S. Department of Labor figures due
Thursday are expected to shatter the old record for the greatest number of new
unemployment claims filed in a single week.
Some economists project that the United
States could see around 3 million new unemployment insurance claims when
figures are released for the week of March 15-21. That would be around 12 times
as many as the previous week and would triple the all-time record of 695,000
set in 1982.
“It’s going to be an astronomical
increase,” said Constance Hunter, president of the National Association for
Business Economists and chief economist at the accounting firm KPMG. “We don’t
have any recorded history of anything like this.”
Trump’s
DHS Starts to Import 85,000 H-1B Graduate Gig Workers
President Donald Trump’s deputies announced Friday that they had
begun the process of importing 85,000 H-1B gig workers to take white-collar
jobs that will be needed after October by the millions of American graduates
who are now losing jobs in the coronavirus crash.
“This is just an unspeakable action,” said Marie Larson, a
co-founder of the American Workers Coalition, which opposes the many visa
worker programs that have transferred at least one million white-collar jobs to
foreign workers. “I don’t believe President Trump ordered this — the swamp
went ahead with this,” she said.
“If the H-1B program is just for filling jobs that Americans
cannot fill amid for labor shortages, then this would not be happening,” said
John Miano, a lawyer with the Immigration Law Reform Institute. “But it is not
a labor-shortage program — it is a cheap labor program to displace Americans,”
he said.
The 2020 lottery “is in your face that that is the purpose of
the program.”
The agency announced Friday that it had received enough
corporate requests to snatch up all of the 2020 supply of H-1B visas.
This annual supply includes 20,000
visas for foreigners who pay for graduate degrees at American colleges, plus
65,000 visas for graduates who are directly imported from India, China, and
other countries. Non-profits — such as hospitals and universities — are allowed to also import an unlimited number of “cap-exempt” H-1Bs
for white-collar jobs.
Roughly 100,000 new H-1B workers arrive each year. But they are allowed
to stay for many years, so companies have gradually built up a resident
workforce of roughly 900,000 H-1B workers, alongside several hundred thousand
additional white-collar workers carrying L-1, OPT, CPT, E-3, B-1, TN, H4EAD
documents.
The annual application and lottery
process are managed by DHS’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services [USCIS]
agency, which announced Friday afternoon:
USCIS has received enough electronic registrations during the
initial period to reach the FY 2021 H-1B numerical allocations (H-1B cap). We
randomly selected from among the registrations properly submitted. We intend to
notify petitioners with selected registrations no later than March 31, 2020,
that they are eligible to file an H-1B cap-subject petition for the beneficiary
named in the applicable selected registration.
The work visas will not be sent to the lottery winners for
several weeks after the companies submit petition packages with justifications
for each visa. The deadline for submitting the petitions is June 30.
Those justifications include a so-called “Labor Condition
Application” document approved by the Department of Labor. The LCAs describe
the intended job for each H-1B worker. Business advocates use the LCA process
to claim that imported workers do not displace Americans.
But the LCA process does not require the companies to show that
Americans cannot be hired for the job. Also, the LCA documents are
rubber-stamped by the department. A department spokesman told Breitbart News:
Under current law, “[t]he Secretary
of Labor shall review such an [LCA] application only for completeness and obvious
inaccuracies” and, unless the application is incomplete or
obviously inaccurate, the Department must certify the LCA within seven days of
receiving the employer’s application. [Emphasis added.]
Govt data shows 1 million Indian
contract-workers get white-collar jobs in tech, banking, health etc.
The Indian hiring ignores many EEOC laws & is expanding amid gov't & media silence.
It is a huge economic & career loss for US college grads.#S368 #H1B http://bit.ly/2Sy3uw6
The Indian hiring ignores many EEOC laws & is expanding amid gov't & media silence.
It is a huge economic & career loss for US college grads.#S368 #H1B http://bit.ly/2Sy3uw6
CEOs Keep 1
Million Indian Graduates in U.S. Jobs, Legally
Trump’s deputies now know which
companies asked for 2020 visas and how many visas they won in the lottery,
said Larson.
Those companies can tell Americans why they are hiring foreign workers when so many
American graduates are jobless amid the coronavirus crash, she said:
We want USCIS to name the companies that have won the lottery to
bring in foreign workers for American jobs. What specific specific skills do
these people have that American workers supposedly do not have?
All Americans must demand that these companies make public why
they need these people and why they could not hire American workers. We need
the media to question each and every one of these companies to ask them why
they could not hire Americans for these jobs. We need Americans to stand up
during this massive unemployment — which is unprecedented even under the Great Depression
and we have not hit the peak. This is a time for everyone to rise up.
It is incumbent on President Trump to ensure that he keeps his
[2016] campaign promise to put American workers first. One way he can do that
is to ensure the American public gets the answer it deserves on why Americans
are not getting these jobs.
Trump’s failure to set curbs on the
H-1B program has angered many of the swing-voting university graduates who
supported him in 2016. In March 2016, after much zig-zagging, Trump declared:
The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: these
are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose
of substituting for American workers at lower pay. I remain totally committed
to eliminating rampant, widespread H-1B abuse and ending outrageous practices
such as those that occurred at Disney in Florida when Americans were forced to
train their foreign replacements. I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a
cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American
workers for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions.
“The people surrounding President Trump don’t have his back —
they are not helping him keep his campaign promise,” Larson said.
In February 2020, a U.S. judge
struck down the token H-1B curbs set by USCIS managers since Trump’s election.
The current head of DHS, Chad Wolf,
formerly served as a lobbyist for the NASSCOM outsourcing industry,
which imports most of the H-1B gig workers. The group’s mix of Indian and U.S.
companies use the H-1B program to extract salaries and wealth from the
American college graduate class, and they split the gains among both countries’
executives and investors, plus the visa workers and India’s government.
The public & GOP blocked the business
push in Congress to keep 100K+ visa workers in US jobs.
Next, biz asks agencies for the labor giveaway, with deceptive op-eds & earnest pleas from elite professional trade associations.
OK, so who lobbies back?#H1Bhttps://bit.ly/3bsaaTk
Next, biz asks agencies for the labor giveaway, with deceptive op-eds & earnest pleas from elite professional trade associations.
OK, so who lobbies back?#H1Bhttps://bit.ly/3bsaaTk
Companies Lobby Trump's DHS
to Preserve Huge Foreign Workforce
But many of the H-1B visa workers
are hired by Indian-run staffing companies to quickly fill open slots in a wide variety of Fortune 500 companies. For
example, many of the contract jobs are in technology, accounting, health care, design, banking,
finance, engineering, science, teaching, and insurance, and even in the fashion industry. The companies include Tata, Infosys, HCL, and Tech Mahindra.
The little-publicized outsourcing industry boosts investors’
stock prices by cutting salaries for millions of American graduates. It also
pushes many older American professionals out of jobs and prevents millions of
American graduates from getting on the first rung of their career ladders.
The H-1Bs and staffing companies are often used by American
executives and hiring managers out of sheer laziness, insiders tell Breitbart
News.
The gig workers provided by the staffing companies are often
unskilled, unproductive, and expensive, said a former executive assistant at a
banking company who helped managers replace many American professionals with
Indian H-1Bs. But they are compliant because the jobs pay far more than Indian
or Chinese jobs and because they hope to win green cards, she said.
American executives do not want to
go to the trouble of hiring and managing independent and innovative American
professionals — but do want to promise short-term cost savings during their
periodic calls with Wall Street investors, she said. “It was not about
[workers’] skills, not about anything else, it was about money,” she
said. “They want credit for saving the company money, so they won’t look
at anything that goes against the [cost saving] narrative.”
Multiple lawsuits and testimony from
Americans show how the H-1B program undermines professionalism,
innovation, and Americans’ careers.
The 2020 lottery was applauded by immigration lawyers who import
H-1B workers for business groups.
“I’ll keep you posted on when I
start seeing updates for my registrations!” an immigration lawyer told her clients. “Yes, we had a substantial increase in
submissions compared to last year,” she told one questioner.
“NewsFlash! H1B Registration Cap
Hit, USCIS to Post Results by March 31st,” said a post by the Murthy Law Firm, which has offices in
Indian, Seattle, and Maryland.
NewsFlash! H1B Registration
Cap Hit, USCIS to Post Results by March 31st - Murthy Law Firm | U.S...
American professionals have
organized to lobby against the H-1B program via several groups, including
the American Workers Coalition, U.S.
TechWorkers, and ProUSworkers,
and White
Collar Workers of America.
The new TechsUnite.US site
was created to help U.S. graduates anonymously collaborate.
In turn, these groups are backed up
by a few sites that track the scale and location of the outsourcing industry in each legislator’s district.
“The scope of this thing is really unbelievable,” said one researcher.
Other sites document the
conflicts created by diverse foreign business practices in the United States. The non-political MyVisaJobs.com site also provides much information about H-1B outsourcing and green card rewards in multiple industries.
DoJ/EEOC do nothing as US & Indian
execs trade US jobs to Indian #H1B
workers, cutting Americans out of careers, homes & families.
This trade choked innovation in Silicon-V, slammed insurance & banking. #SenMikeLee & #S386 will expand it to healthcare http://bit.ly/2vIHAOp
This trade choked innovation in Silicon-V, slammed insurance & banking. #SenMikeLee & #S386 will expand it to healthcare http://bit.ly/2vIHAOp
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