To be sure, outsourcing has been common practice in corporate America for decades. Walmart warehouses are filled with temp workers. Contractors account for more than half of Google’s workforce. Amazon relies on independent contractors to deliver goods.
UC outsources thousands of jobs to private contractors. Is that a good idea?
Maria Torres, a certified surgical technologist, joins other unionized University of California healthcare and service workers picketing in front of the Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center and Orthopaedic Hospital on Nov 13.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Maria Torres loves her job.
A surgical technologist at UCLA’s Santa Monica medical center, the 54-year-old mother of two makes sure operating rooms are sterile, protecting patients against wayward germs. She assists physicians as they repair hernias, operate on cataracts and fix injured knees. She comforts the fearful. She coaches medical students on how to scrub their hands.
And, after 13 years on the job, Torres makes a decent wage: $29.72 an hour plus benefits. “It’s amazing to work at such a prestigious place,” she says. “When I got hired there, I was so proud.”
So what was Torres doing on a November picket line, swinging a sign reading, “Inequality Hurts Patient Care,” and chanting, “Hey-hey, ho-ho, UC greed has got to go”?
The University of California is at war with its largest union, the 26,000-member Local 3299 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). November’s one-day strike, with picket lines at 10 UC campuses and five university hospitals across the state, was the sixth such angry walkout in the three years that the two sides have been fighting over a new contract.
The issue is outsourcing: the sprawling university system’s use of workers from temporary help agencies and staffing firms to fill low- and middle-wage service and healthcare jobs.
Several hundred health care workers cross Wilshire Blvd marching through Westwood from the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center Wednesday as they joined thousands of UC service and patient care workers during a statewide one day strike, accusing the UC of unfair labor practices through unlawful outsourcing of jobs.
(Al Seib/Los Angeles Times)
UC, the state’s third-largest employer, spends some $523 million a year on outside contracts for an estimated 10,000 parking attendants, security guards, custodians, cafeteria workers, groundskeepers and patient-care technicians among dozens of occupations normally represented by Local 3299.
“UC has accelerated the practice of replacing middle-class careers with less stable, lower-wage contract jobs,” says Local 3299 President Kathryn Lybarger, who rose through the ranks from a job as a UC Berkeley gardener. “This creates more poverty and less social mobility for thousands of California’s most vulnerable workers.”
To be sure, outsourcing has been common practice in corporate America for decades. Walmart warehouses are filled with temp workers. Contractors account for more than half of Google’s workforce. Amazon relies on independent contractors to deliver goods.
This “fissured workplace,” as some economists call it, is increasingly blamed for the nation’s growing divide between haves and have-nots.
University officials say contractors give them flexibility to meet complex hiring needs. It also saves money at a time when the UC complex, with a $37.2-billion annual budget, is trying to curb tuition hikes and expand the student body. Temp workers have traditionally been paid less than regular employees and lack the costly benefits that union members enjoy.
Should a public institution be held to stricter standards than for-profit companies?
Under pressure from elected officials, and from a union-led speaker boycott that caused the Democratic National Committee to yank its scheduled Dec. 19 presidential debate away from UCLA, the UC Board of Regents adopted new outsourcing guidelines last month. They require staffing firms to give workers pay and benefits equivalent to what university employees earn for the same job, a move that will cost UC an additional $108 million a year.
University of California President Janet Napolitano, left, 20th president of the University of California, announces she is stepping down as chairman of the board John Perez, right, leads audience in applause, September 18, 2019.
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
“We recognized that this was an area of some concern for our workers,” UC President Janet Napolitano said. “We are serious about having a contracting-out policy that protects our workers from displacement, that limits the use of outside labor.”
Yet the new five-page policy stops short of strict restraints, saying only that outsourcing should be used “sparingly.” So-called perma-temps who work for the university a year or more are not definitively offered employee status, as the union would like, but may “request to be converted,” with no guarantee.
Napolitano cites the need for “some limited flexibility where using outside or temporary workers is unavoidable.” Examples, she said, would be a sudden need for respiratory therapists following a wildfire, the closing of a lab requiring environmental expertise, or readying dorms for arriving students.
Napolitano cites the need for “some limited flexibility where using outside or temporary workers is unavoidable.” Examples, she said, would be a sudden need for respiratory therapists following a wildfire, the closing of a lab requiring environmental expertise, or readying dorms for arriving students.
On the picket line, UC workers said contractor hiring far exceeds such circumstances.
“Nobody is safe,” Torres said. “I’m putting my daughter through college. I have a car payment. I have a mortgage. But UC can outsource anybody’s job. They bring in people who are paid less. A lot of us are afraid our jobs are in jeopardy.”
In her surgery center, she said, workers who sterilize instruments are mostly temps. “People leave their job for whatever reason, and instead of hiring a permanent employee, they hire a contractor. They bring them on for six or nine months, and then they extend them.”
Amanda Crawford, center, a certified phlebotomy technician, and Jenny Takakura, right, a senior radiation therapist, join other unionized UC healthcare and service workers picketing in front of the Santa Monica UCLA Medical Center and Orthopaedic Hospital on November 13.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
Amanda Crawford, a 26-year-old phlebotomist and mother of a 5-year-old, was also on the picket line, wearing a T-shirt with the message, “END UC OUTSOURCING.” Hired to work at UCLA in February by PROCEL Nurses and Allied, a San Pedro agency, she said she was paid $20 an hour — less than the $27 an hour earned by employee phlebotomists.
“It made me feel devalued when I’m very good at what I do,” said Crawford, who had two years of experience at a Rancho Cucamonga hospital. Of about 30 phlebotomists at the Santa Monica facility, she said, five were contractors.
Staffing firms can terminate anyone who complains, she said, “so UCLA took advantage of us, gave us crazy schedules” and played favorites. Crawford, who is African American, filed a race discrimination case against her supervisor, who has been placed on leave pending an investigation. Now she works as a “per diem” UC employee, an interim status without benefits, paid $2 an hour less than full employees.
Picketing workers shrugged off the university regents’ new guidelines, saying UC has adopted policies in the past but individual campuses and hospitals routinely ignore them. The November strike was billed as an unfair-labor-practice walkout to protest 26 alleged violations of previous policies, including a university pledge to pay temps at least $15 an hour, as well as contractual obligations to notify the union when and why UC plans to outsource.
The union’s charges, filed with the state’s Public Employment Relations Board, which oversees labor contracts, range across campuses. They involve custodians at UC Irvine, security guards at UC Merced, food service workers at UC Davis and UC San Diego, patient care technicians at UCLA Health and UC San Francisco Medical Center, and laundry and mail services at UC Berkeley.
In October, the board issued a formal complaint against UC, alleging that it “refused to meet and confer in good faith” with AFSCME over contracts with 24 outside agencies.
UC spokesman Andrew Gordon declined to address the allegations’ specifics, saying in an email, “We are currently reviewing the union’s complaints and will be responding in the due course.”
But AFSCME’s gripes mirror a 2017 report by the California state auditor, which found UC’s decentralized management meant it was unable to track “even the most basic contract information.” UC failed to justify displacing university employees with contract workers and repeatedly avoided competitive bidding on contracts, the audit found.
It cited, for example, a food service contract that UC Davis amended 24 times without bidding it out, extending its term from seven to 19 years and upping its value from $71 million to $237 million.
“We’ve been raising these concerns for decades,” said Liz Perlman, Local 3299’s executive director. “Now the university has finally acknowledged it has a problem. But the devil is in the details. What UC says is different from what it does. The way to enforce it is through collective bargaining.”
In a statement responding to the November strike, UC noted that it has “reached agreements with seven other unions during protracted negotiations with AFSCME,” and suggested the impasse may be less about outsourcing than wages.
“Our latest proposal aligns with the compensation of other UC employees,” it said. “It would be unfair to provide AFSCME-represented workers more than double the raises of other UC employees, which is what the union is demanding.”
An AFSCME spokesman said its wage proposal is in line with other unions’ raises, and that a UC plan to hike healthcare premiums would offset gains.
In an interview, John Pérez, a former Assembly speaker who became chair of UC’s Board of Regents in July, said outsourcing “is the biggest issue” in the dispute. “A stable workforce brings greater efficiencies to the university. If we want folks to be loyal to the university, the university has to be loyal to them as well.”
Pérez, who once worked as a top official for the United Food and Commercial Workers, the nation’s largest grocery union, said he expects the regents’ new policy to be enforced through collective bargaining agreements and “dramatically” curtail contracted work.
“I have tremendous respect for what AFSCME does,” he said. “Anyone working over a year should be converted to direct employment. The union is reasonable to say, let’s make it real.”
But even if UC agrees to enshrine the new outsourcing policy in its union contracts, it may face a reckoning in the Legislature.
The California Constitution grants broad independence to UC, leaving policy decisions to the regents and limiting legislative oversight to a few narrow issues of finance and bidding procedures. Nonetheless, from 2015 to 2018, lawmakers passed four bills seeking to curb UC outsourcing.
They were fiercely opposed by university officials, and all four were vetoed by then-Gov. Jerry Brown, who called them “unreasonable interference into university management.”
In his last veto message, Brown noted that UC had taken steps to “improve transparency and reduce pay disparities.” But at the same time, he urged the regents to “promptly turn their attention to this matter,” noting that “there is more work to be done.”
UC health care workers rallied at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Westwood Wednesday as they joined thousands of UC service and patient care workers for a statewide one day strike.
(Al Seib/Los Angeles Times)
This year, lawmakers seemed to have run out of patience. A proposed constitutional amendment, ACA 14, passed the Assembly in June, 57 to 12, guaranteeing UC temp workers pay and benefits equal to that of employees performing similar work and limiting contracted labor to a few exceptional circumstances.
“Time and time again, UC has said it will do something about outsourcing,” said Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego), the measure’s author. “We never found UC to be trustworthy on this issue. On any contract, UC can break its own policies, and it does.”
Gonzalez, a former San Diego labor leader, said the university has raised executive salaries “by exorbitant amounts. It’s the same kind of greed we see in business. But it is a constant race to the bottom for low-wage workers. Why are they creating jobs where people have to be on public assistance like food stamps or housing vouchers?”
UC has defended its administrative pay in the past, saying the university competes for talent with other world-class institutions. And although enforcement may be questioned, the university’s policy since 2017 has been to require contractors to be paid $15 an hour, higher than the statewide minimum.
In September, Gonzalez’s bill earned a majority of Senate votes — 23 to 12 — but failed to get the necessary two-thirds for a constitutional amendment.
She plans to pursue its passage next year, believing voters would approve it. “It will be so much more protective to codify,” she said. “UC must finally be required to do right by all their workers.”
OPEN BORDERS: IT’S ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES
DEPRESSED!
"In the decade following the
financial crisis of 2007-2008, the capitalist class has delivered powerful
blows to the social position of the working class. As a result, the working class
in the US, the world’s “richest country,” faces levels of economic hardship not
seen since the 1930s."
"Inequality has reached unprecedented
levels: the wealth of America’s three richest people now equals the net
worth of the poorest half of the US population."
PELOSI,
FEINSTEIN, KAMALA HARRIS AND GAVIN NEWOMS’S MEXIFORNIA
Report:
California’s Middle-Class Wages Rise by 1 Percent in 40 Years
Justin
Sullivan/Getty Images
3 Sep 2019172
6:24
Middle-class wages in
progressive California have risen by 1 percent in the last 40 years, says a
study by the establishment California Budget and Policy Center.
“Earnings for California’s
workers at the low end and middle of the wage scale have generally declined or
stagnated for decades,” says the report, titled “California’s Workers Are
Increasingly Locked Out of the State’s Prosperity.” The report continued:
In
2018, the median hourly earnings for workers ages 25 to 64 was $21.79, just 1%
higher than in 1979, after adjusting for inflation ($21.50, in 2018 dollars)
(Figure 1). Inflation-adjusted hourly earnings for low-wage workers, those at
the 10th percentile, increased only slightly more, by 4%, from $10.71 in
1979 to $11.12 in 2018.
The report admits that the
state’s progressive economy is delivering more to investors and less to
wage-earners. “Since 2001, the share of state private-sector [annual new
income] that has gone to worker compensation has fallen by 5.6 percentage
points — from 52.9% to 47.3%.”
In 2016, California’s Gross
Domestic Product was $2.6 trillion, so the 5.6 percent drop shifted $146
billion away from wages. That is roughly $3,625 per person in 2016.
The report notes that wages
finally exceeded 1979 levels around 2017, and it splits the credit between the
Democrats’ minimum-wage boosts and President Donald Trump’s go-go economy.
The 40 years of flat wages are
partly hidden by a wave of new products and services. They include almost-free
entertainment and information on the Internet, cheap imported coffee in
supermarkets, and reliable, low-pollution autos in garages.
But the impact of California’s
flat wages is made worse by California’s rising housing costs, the report says,
even though it also ignores the rent-spiking impact of the establishment’s
pro-immigration policies:
In just the last decade
alone, the increase in the typical household’s rent far outpaced the rise in
the typical full-time worker’s annual earnings, suggesting that working
families and individuals are finding it increasingly difficult to make ends
meet. In fact, the basic cost of living in many parts of the state is more
than many single individuals or families can expect to earn, even if all adults
are working full-time.
…
Specifically, inflation-adjusted
median household rent rose by 16% between 2006 and 2017, while
inflation-adjusted median annual earnings for individuals working at least 35
hours per week and 50 weeks per year rose by just 2%, according to a Budget
Center analysis of US Census Bureau, American Community Survey data.
Many workers are being paid
little more today than workers were in 1979 even as worker productivity has
risen. Fewer employees have access to retirement plans sponsored by their employers,
leaving individual workers on their own to stretch limited dollars and
resources to plan how they’ll spend their later years affording the high cost
of living and health care in California. And as union representation has
declined, most workers today cannot negotiate collectively for better working
conditions, higher pay, and benefits, such as retirement and health care, like
their parents and grandparents did. On top of all this, workers who take on
contingent and independent work (often referred to as “gig work”), which in
many cases appears to be motivated by the need to supplement their primary job
or fill gaps in their employment, are rarely granted the same rights and legal
protections as traditional employees.
The center’s report tries to blame
the four-decade stretch of flat wages on the declining clout of unions. But
unions’ decline was impacted by the bipartisan elites’ policy of mass-migration
and imposed diversity.
In
2018, Breitbart reported how Progressives for
Immigration Reform interviewed Blaine Taylor, a union carpenter, about the
economic impact of migration:
TAYLOR: If I hired a framer to do
a small addition [in 1988], his wage would have been $45 an hour. That was
the minimum for a framing contractor, a good carpenter. For a helper, it was
about $25 an hour, for a master who could run a complete job, it was about $45
an hour. That was the going wage for plumbers as well. His helpers typically
got $25 an hour.
…
Now, the average wage in Los
Angeles for construction workers is less than $11 an hour. They can’t go lower
than the minimum wage. And much of that, if they’re not being paid by the hour
at less than $11 an hour, they’re being paid per piece — per piece of plywood
that’s installed, per piece of drywall that’s installed. Now, the subcontractor
can circumvent paying them as an hourly wage and are now being paid by 1099,
which means that no taxes are being taken out. [Emphasis added]
Diversity
also damaged the unions by shredding California’s civic solidarity. In 2007,
the progressive Southern Poverty Law Center posted a report with the title
“Latino Gang Members in Southern California are Terrorizing and Killing
Blacks.” In the same year, an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times described another murder by Latino
gangs as “a manifestation of an increasingly common trend: Latino ethnic
cleansing of African Americans from multiracial neighborhoods.”
The center’s board members
include the executive director of the state’s SEIU union, a professor from the
Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and
the research director at the “Program for Environmental and Regional Equity” at
the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
Outside
California, President Donald Trump’s low-immigration policies are pressuring
employers to raise Americans’ wages in a hot economy. The Wall Street Journal reportedAugust 29:
Overall, median weekly earnings
rose 5% from the fourth quarter of 2017 to the same quarter in 2018, according
to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For workers between the ages of 25 and 34,
that increase was 7.6%.
The New York Times laments that reduced immigration does force wages
upwards and also does force companies to buy labor-saving, wage-boosting
machinery. Instead, NYT prioritizes "ideas about America’s identity and
culture.” http://bit.ly/2Zp2u2J
NYT Admits Fewer Immigrants Means Higher Wages, More Labor-Saving
Machines
.
Free
Trader Paul Krugman Admits Failure of Globalization for American Workers:
‘Major Mistake’
Jae C. Hong/Associated Press
13 Oct
2019780
3:21
Economist
Paul Krugman, the longtime defender of global free trade and a member of the
failed “Never Trump” movement, now admits that globalization has failed
American workers.
In a column for Bloomberg titled “What
Economists (Including Me) Got Wrong About Globalization,” Krugman admits that
the economic consensus for free trade that has prevailed for decades has failed
to recognize how globalization has skyrocketed inequality for America’s working
and middle class workers.
Krugman writes:
In the past few years, however,
worries about globalization have shot back to the top of the agenda, partly due to new research and partly due to the political
shocks of Brexit and U.S. President Donald Trump. And as one of the
people who helped shape the 1990s consensus — that the contribution of rising
trade to rising inequality was real but modest — it seems appropriate for me to
ask now what we missed. [Emphasis added]
…
The pro-globalization consensus of
the 1990s, which concluded that trade contributed little
to rising inequality, relied on models that asked how the growth of
trade had affected the incomes of broad classes of workers, such as those who
didn’t go to college. It’s possible, and probably even correct, to think of
these models as accurate in the long run. Consensus economists didn’t
turn much to analytic methods that focus on workers in particular industries
and communities, which would have given a better picture of short-run
trends. This was, I now believe, a major mistake — one in which I
shared a hand. [Emphasis added]
Krugman, though, writes that he and
his fellow free trade economists “had no way to know” that globalization of the
American economy or a surge in trade deficits “were going to happen,” though
the anti-globalization movement had warned for years of the harmful impact free
trade would have on U.S. workers — including Donald Trump.
In an interview with SiriusXM
Patriot’s Breitbart News
Tonight, economist Alan Tonelson said that
Krugman’s acknowledging that he and the free trade economic consensus has been
wrong is “better later than never,” but “the damage has already been done.”
LISTEN:
“There’s been an even more
startling, in fact jaw-dropping, development on that front. Paul Krugman, the famous
Never Trumper, the famous pro-free trade economist, the Nobel Prize winner just
published an article … saying that for the past 20 years, he and his other
globalist, free trade economist friends have been substantially wrong about the
effect of globalization, particularly more trade with low income, low wage
countries like China,” Tonelson said.
“They’ve been substantially wrong
about its effects on the American economy and American workers in particular,”
Tonelson said.
Meanwhile, decades of free trade
have spurred mass layoffs, unemployment, and offshoring of high-paying American
jobs while surging trade deficits. Since China entered the World Trade
Organization (WTO), the U.S. trade deficit with China has eliminated at least 3.5
million American jobs from the American economy. Millions of American workers
in all 50 states have been displaced from their
jobs, which have been lost due to U.S.-China trade relations.
Report:
Immigration Encourages Job Discrimination Against Americans
29 Oct 2019118
9:50
Mass migration encourages mass discrimination against Americans,
especially black employees, according to federal data unearthed by the Center
for Immigration Studies.
“You really have to be out of touch with reality to argue that
there are no negative effects of immigration on native workers,” said Jason
Richwine, a statistician who studied the issue for the Center for Immigration
Studies.
“Forty
percent of the decline in labor participation rates among black workers over
three decades was attributable to competition from illegal immigration,” labor
lawyer Peter Kirsanow said at a CIS press
event at the press club. That “comes to nearly 1 million fewer jobs for
black Americans as a result of the competition from illegal immigrants … and it
is the wage levels also,” Kirsanow told the audience on October 25.
The huge impact of this discrimination is mostly ignored by
wealthy “woke” professionals, who prefer to use discrimination claims as a
political club against conservatives. The documented discrimination is just
“the tip of the iceberg,” but left-wing critics have gone silent since Donald
Trump was elected, said CIS director Mark Krikorian,
Yet white-collar workers are also losing salaries and jobs
because of discrimination, said Kevin Lynn, founder of Progressives for
Immigration Reform:
The gains made by women and minorities in STEM fields over the
past three decades have really been reversed. For example, today on average 12
percent of women earn degrees in computer science. In 1984 it was 37 percent.
So you have to ask yourself what’s going on. Well, when the opportunities
become scant and the workplaces become hostile to women, they typically choose
other career alternatives.
….
There is a preference for hiring Indians over Americans in these
[Indian-run] consulting firms because, one, they will work longer hours. It’s a
quiescent workforce, largely because they’re here on H-1B visas. And a lot of
what goes into this is they are given the hope that their company will sponsor
them for an – a green card, and then they’ll eventually get citizenship here in
the U.S. Unfortunately for the American worker, that means that they’re
competing with someone who is willing to work for less, work for increasingly
lower benefits and other benefits that go along with their salaries, and it
just ultimately makes things a lot more difficult.
The press club event was scheduled to spotlight Richwine’s study
of discrimination lawsuits by the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission. He summarized several of the EEOC cases, often quoting
directly from the commission’s reports:
When a warehouse in Memphis began using a new employment agency
to fill its daily work crew, the agency, quote from EEOC, “essentially replaced
the African Americans with Hispanics.” End quote. Potential workers would line
up outside the warehouse each day, but the agency would select Hispanics over
blacks even when black workers were farther ahead in line. Sometimes managers
would send potential black workers home by announcing in English that there
were no more positions. After the African Americans left, the Hispanics were
allowed to come into the warehouse and work. Again, systematic – neither
subconscious nor subtle.
Richwine described cases where Hispanic managers discriminated
against American blacks:
Perhaps the most egregious example of this comes from Prestige
Transportation Services. It would discard or refuse to accept employment
applications from non-Hispanic blacks. Quote from EEOC: “On multiple occasions
when a black person applied for employment, Prestige managers Mr. Ramirez and
Ms. Rodriguez would stand behind the applicant and rub their hand on their skin
to display their disdain for black people.” End quote. Staff meetings were
conducted in Spanish only.
The record shows that some Indian immigrants also discriminates
against blacks, he said.
At a Hampton Inn in Colorado, three non-Hispanic white
housekeepers were fired by the new general manager and replaced by Hispanics.
The owners, Falgun Patel and Mukund Patel, told the general manager that they
prefer that maids be Hispanic because in their opinion Hispanics worked harder
while American employees are lazy. The general manager allegedly told a
Hispanic employee to recruit friends for the incoming vacancies because the
owner preferred a Hispanic workforce. After three months, all of the Hampton
Inn’s non-Hispanic housekeepers were gone.
The pattern of lawsuits by Hispanics is very different, said
Richwine. Instead of losing job opportunities because of discrimination,
Latinos lose workplace protections that were once normal for Americans, he
said:
When Hispanics file suits, they are not complaining that they
are being replaced by some other group in the workforce; instead, they’re
complaining about working conditions, they complain about low pay, they
complain about dangerous situations on the job site, and they complain about
harassment. Harassment oftentimes is ethnically based, ethnic slurs and so on
directed at them. The saddest part is that when we’re talking about Hispanic
women, sexual harassment is a very pervasive problem if you believe these EEOC
lawsuits,
The examples are merely the most egregious ad straightforward
cases, he said, ensuring that they are likely many other cases of
discrimination that do not end up in court.
Deputies for President Donald Trump have partly reversed some
discrimination against blacks, for forcing wages up to record levels.
But his deputies done little to curb the white-collar
discrimination, partly because there is so much more money at stake for
high-tech firms, hospitals, and investors.
Another lawsuit alleging discrimination by
Indian managers in the US, this time at Intel Corp. One Indian manager rejects
a US graduate, says "It would be easier to hire a younger, unmarried
Indian man."
Many US grads have similar stories, so share yours. http://bit.ly/2ocutR4
Many US grads have similar stories, so share yours. http://bit.ly/2ocutR4
Lawsuit: Intel's
Indian Managers Discriminated Against American | Breitbart
For example, the federal government rewards companies that
discriminate in favor of Indian “OPT” work-permit workers by rejecting American
graduates, Lynn said.
American companies which hire Indian graduates are not required
to pay Social Security taxes, he said, adding:
That’s about a 15 percent premium that is added to hiring
someone on the OPT program and, again, these people compete directly with our
new [American] graduates in the workplace … [where] a [U.S.] student today
might exit university with anywhere from $35 [thousand] to $85,000 in debt.
That’s a lot of money, and … they’re having their legs broken as they leave the
gate into the workplace.
Instead,
American victims of Indians’ discrimination are suing the Indians firms in
court. For example, in a 2016 lawsuit against a giant Indian software firm,
Infosys, American witnesses alleged:
Hiring Manager Instructions: an Infosys hiring manager admitted
“There does exist an element of discrimination. We are advised to hire Indians
… because they will work off the clock without murmur and they can always be
transferred across the nation without hesitation unlike [a] local workforce.”
Talent Acquisition Unit Observations: Recruiters in Talent
Acquisition observed that Indians were highly favored, and it was extremely
difficult to move non-South Asians ahead in the hiring process. Non-Indians
were regularly rejected as being “not a good fit,” – an Infosys euphemism for
“non-Indian.” This discrimination is on-going. In 2016 for example, an Infosys
manager in their Talent Acquisition Unit observed that of Infosys’ 2,900
hires in the United States, 2,200 (76%) were Indian. She observed a similar
hiring disparity in prior years.
Applicant Data Manipulation: Infosys manipulates applicant
tracking data in such a way that consideration of non-South Asians and
non-Indians is minimized, and the hiring of South Asians is maximized. For
example, recruiters have observed that non-South Asian applicants were
repeatedly deleted from Infosys’ applicant tracking system, forcing one
recruiter to keep a separate spreadsheet of applicants on his computer.
Recruiters have also observed South Asian applicants, located by Infosys’
“sourcers” in India, manually entered into the applicant tracking system
despite those individuals not having formally applied, thus streamlining the
hiring process. Individuals sourced in this way were moved “to the front of the
line” ahead of applicants in the U.S. A recruiter also observed that applications
for United States positions were regularly not reviewed, and in 2016,
approximately 11,000 to 12,000 were rejected en masse.
Census data shows how huge numbers of
American software graduates have been replaced by Indian & Chinese
visa-workers in N.J., California, N.C., Georgia, N.Y., Texas, Virginia,
Florida, and other states. Next: Healthcare professionals. @S386 http://bit.ly/2o0X4cp
Census: Indian Visa
Workers Drive Americans Out of Middle-Class Jobs
Immigration
Numbers:
Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the
workforce after graduating from high school or a university. This total
includes about 800,000 Americans who graduate with skilled degrees in business
or health care, engineering or science, software, or statistics.
But the
federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants. It also
adds replacement workers to a resident population of more than 1.5 million
white-collar visa workers — including approximately one million H-1B workers
and about 500,000 blue-collar H-2B, H-2A, and J-1 visa workers. The
government also prints more than one
million work
permits for
new foreigners, and it rarely punishes companies for employing illegal
migrants.
This policy
of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth and
stock values for investors. The stimulus happens
because the extra labor ensures that employers do not have to compete for
American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.
The federal
policy of flooding the market with cheap,
foreign white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor shifts wealth
from young employees toward older
investors. It also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech
investment, increases state and local tax
burdens, reduces marriage rates, and hurts
children’s schools and college educations.
The
cheap-labor economic strategy also pushes Americans away from
high-tech careers, and it sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including
many who are now struggling with drug addictions.
The labor
policy also moves business investment and
wealth from the Heartland to the coastal cities, explodes rents and housing costs, undermines suburbia, shrivels real estate values in
the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.
But President Donald Trump’s “Hire American” policy is boosting
wages by capping immigration within a growing economy.
The Census
Bureau said September 10 that men
who work full-time and year-round got an average earnings boost of 3.4 percent
in 2018, pushing their median salaries up to $55,291. Women gained 3.3 percent
in wages, bringing their median salaries to $45,097 for full-time, year-round
work.
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