Multinational corporations are one trick ponies when it comes to their agenda. By hell or high water they want to offshore outsource jobs and have controlled, unlimited migration per their globalization agenda.
It should be no surprise when putting these same greedy bastards in the White House who outsource, they publish a faux job creation agenda. Such is the case of the latest report.
Instead of hire America, buy American or a manufacturing policy, we get these multinational's typical labor arbitraging agenda wish list. The corruption is so bad, literally corporate lobbyists' economic and statistical fiction is used in this report. Probably the most debunked economic fiction spinner of them all, the NFAP, is used. The NFAP is also these very multinational's personal white paper spin machine.
Guess what folks, labor arbitraging U.S. professionals does not create jobs, it loses jobs. The statistics show it and anyone with a 2nd grade education would know this to be true. You fire people, that is a job loss, not a job gain as this jobs agenda report tries to claim.
Multinationals, headed by G.E., want to import foreigner workers and to do so they tout, literally a pack of lies in their demands report. Lie #1 is bold faced, a claim there is a talent shortage. There is not a talent shortage. These multinationals want foreigners for the purposes of global labor arbitrage. They believe foreigners enable them to bridge between the United States and Emerging Economies (China, India, Asia), plus enable wage repression, continue their disposable worker syndrome, repress competition, all the while hopping around the globe, moving jobs to cheap geographical locations on a whim.
Yes, this report is connected with the President of the United States and yes, it's pure absolute bunk and spin.
A favorite trick is to use the college degree unemployment rate in comparison to the high school graduate unemployment rate. This is a fictional comparison. The reality is the college educated unemployment rate has over doubled what it should be.
Again, There Is No Talent Shortage. U.S. citizens are more than capable and very obviously at this point, need the jobs. Here are the lobbyists demands and they are even inventing more visa alphabet soup to do it:
- Granting automatic green cards or provisional visas to all foreign students after they earn a STEM degree from a U.S. university
- Establishing a new provisional visa program for immigrant entrepreneurs
- Fully implementing within two years the August 2011 immigration initiatives regarding EB-2, H-1B, EB-5 and E13 categories, primarily around speeding up the process for making visa decisions;
- Increasing, by a factor of at least four, the number of entrepreneurs from other countries allowed entry into the United States, mainly though expansion of the EB–5 program.
The above will squeeze out U.S. citizens from STEM degree programs, flood the labor market with even more offshore outsourcing firms and squeeze out U.S. citizen entrepreneurs from obtaining investment and loans for their own start-ups. Of course discrimination will be rampant with older STEM specialists not being able to get any job in their field, never mind a guarantee U.S. citizen inventors and innovators will unable to get funding, especially women and minorities.
It's so bad, if Steve Jobs came back reincarnated as an older black women, you can bet he wouldn't get a dime from these people to form a start-up.
The United States has third largest population of the world:
Through 2050, the United States is projected to remain in third place behind India and China among the world's most populous countries, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Clearly we have more than enough people to spawn the latest geniuses, as if one believes genius is in the genes, instead of culture, financial and societal supports. In other words, a strong middle class has been proven to spawn innovation and invention, not some innate race, sex or age.
There was a hearing by the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees and Border Security titled, The Economic Imperative for Enacting Immigration Reform. Bear in mind some hearings are often really propaganda where invited corporate lobbyists spew like fountains, under oath, a pack of statistical lies. Unfortunately, testimony representing actual real live U.S. Citizen engineers has become a token exercise at these Congressional hearings. In this one, Ron Hira stepped up to the plate as the token U.S. STEM professional representative, to a degree. Here's the first fact and Hira actually uses real live government statistics:
According an analysis of BLS data by IEEE-USA more than 300,000 American engineers and computer professionals are unemployed.
Gets worse. Currently offshore outsourcers are abusing an on the job internship training program designed for U.S. Scientists and Engineers, OPT, for foreigners instead of Americans. OPT has been co-opted as yet another avenue of cheap labor.
Above is a graph of unemployment rates, which shows unemployment rates for computer engineers is higher than all professional workers. When answering questions from Senator Chuck Grassley, Ron Hira gives the above STEM employment statistics and proves, there is no tech worker shortage:
The unemployment rates for computer and mathematical occupations, the largest of all STEM occupations, had unemployment rates of 5.2% in 2009 and 2010, which are more than twice the levels at full-employment. In 2010, the 5.2% unemployment rate for computer and mathematical occupations exceeded those for college graduates, which was 4.7%. So, just like college graduates, computer scientists and software engineers are also experiencing a jobs recession – too many skilled workers are chasing too few jobs.
Many other STEM occupations exhibit a similar pattern. For example, electrical and electronics engineers had an unemployment rate of 5.4% in 2010, and Medical scientists had a rate of 4.1%. The U.S. does not currently face a broad-based shortage of STEM workers. Instead there are too few jobs for those skilled workers.
Engineer after Engineer and Scientist after Scientist have spoken out on how their hard earned skills and talent are being laid to waste.
To trim expenses, companies began to outsource research to India and China. It started as a trickle, but soon became a tsunami, leaving many thousands of highly intelligent and well-trained professionals with nothing to do -- a shameful waste of talent.
My colleagues and I at Wyeth watched helplessly as one company after another shed employees in huge numbers -- 300,000 since 2000. When Pfizer -- facing the looming expiration of its Lipitor patent and a poor research pipeline -- bought Wyeth for its portfolio of products in 2009, it cut about 25,000 jobs, with more to come.
Most of the combined company's research sites have either closed or are in the process of doing so. Before long, the world's largest pharmaceutical company will be conducting very little research in the US.
So, what do thousands of unemployed chemists do? Good question. The employment section of the latest (June 13) issue of our trade magazine, Chemical and Engineering News, is hardly promising. It lists a total of one industrial position and two college tenure-track faculty openings in the US. (Of course, there are online sites with more jobs, but the situation there is still bleak).
And good luck finding a high-school teaching job. Last year, one of my old colleagues decided he wanted to teach science in New Jersey -- but found out that not a single position was available in the entire state. Previous industry casualties had probably filled the few openings.
That's right, PhDs, research scientists, innovators, patent holders are having their jobs offshore outsourced and they are entering the bread lines. These are the innovators, the ones who built up these industries in the first place and this is their thanks. Microsoft laid off 6,000, Intel, G.E., pretty much all of the corporations who issued this report, have fired U.S. STEM workers and offshore outsourced. G.E. only brought back a few token manufacturing jobs when they could pay workers $13 bucks an hour.
This NPR interview, complete with more statistics, with a 67 year old tech worker, shows some ugly truths about age discrimination. It's very obvious he cannot get a job due to his age and if you listen closely to the interviewer, the discriminatory attitudes towards older workers is pervasive in the U.S. No one could work in the Scientific or Technical fields for more than 5 years if they did not continually learn new technologies and skills for they would be completely out of date. Continual learning is part of the occupation. Age has nothing to do with that ability.
This song below, along with a website, says it all. Millions of Americans, including patent holders, have had their jobs offshore outsourced and kicked to the curb.
The claim these corporations cannot find workers is pure fiction. It's a beyond the pale lie at this point, and is an excuse to age discriminate, discriminate generally, labor arbitrage, offshore outsource, flood and control the labor supply.
Comments
Americans being crowded out of technology professions.
Technology professionals are suffering from outsourcing the same way manufacturing has suffered for decades. But it's a double whammy for tech pros because even if the job remains in America it may go to a foreign "guest" worker instead of an American citizen.
How many highly talented Americans are out there that will never get a chance to show, improve, and hone their skills because the job has been sent to India or China or been filled by an H-1B visa holder instead?
Just like our manufacturing base, these skills take years to develop and once America loses them they will be hard if not impossible to get back.
In addition to the unemployment statistics you give, are there any statistics on just how many STEM pros have dropped out of their field out of despair? It would be interesting to compare the total number of STEM degrees earned over the past several decades to the number now employed in their field of study. What happened to all of those Americans that earned degrees but are not employed in their field?
Any student contemplating specializing in technology must be aware of multiple career risks such as (1) offshore outsourcing (2) being replaced by a cheaper "guest" worker (3) a higher probability of age discrimination (as opposed to, for example, business, sales, marketing, teaching, medical professions, ...).
you can be 70 and be an executive or a Senator
but if you're a professional, somehow you're too old at the age of 35. Considering how NCG's now cannot get a job, it's clearly discriminatory against any American looking for a job in STEM in many places these days.
What's worse is the occupational employment statistics include foreign guest workers on any visa in their statistics. Then, we cannot get statistics on how many people are forced out of their careers either.
So, the over doubling of the unemployment rate actually is significantly lower than what the true rate for computer occupations is....for Americans.
tax holiday
This article focused on STEM labor arbitrage because the real statistics rarely make it to the press, and the data to debunk the "labor arbitraging Americans creates jobs" mantra is harder to find. Anyone who is in the STEM fields knows MNCs and others are kicking techies to the labor curb, including advanced researchers.
That said, the "report", has a slew of MNC/corporate wish lists, which others are writing up, such as a tax holiday to bring back their offshore outsourced profits to the U.S. tax free. That's another bold faced lie, these corporations are already sitting on a horde of cash and will not invest in America, hire Americans pretty much. There has been a little movement from Intel for U.S. based FABS, but in terms of hiring U.S. citizens, they simply refuse, esp. if they are older.
There is much more to their demands, bottom line a tax holiday will not create jobs for Americans, it's just another corporate welfare gift.
I think the most odious thing of all is now we have corporate lobbyist demands being issued as a White House report. And they wonder why people have taken to Occupy Wall Street (well, they don't wonder, these corporate PR people just hope you don't figure that out).
another data point which proves this is fiction
These companies are not hiring new college grads either.
Mainstream Media Fail Econ 101 on Trade Reporting - but Keep Job
Yesterday the Gray Lady reported the horror of imports slowing down, today confirmed with the very slight drop in the trade deficit. Throughout the analysis, a one-to-one relationship was set up between consumer holiday demand and the volume of imports:
"
“We’re concerned, because usually at this time, you see this peak,” said Richard D. Steinke, the executive director of the Port of Long Beach in California. “We haven’t seen it."
In fact, the five busiest container ports in the United States said that imports in August 2011 were lower than or even with 2010 volumes. In Long Beach, the second-busiest container port by volume, August imports fell by 14.2 percent from August 2010. While the port has not yet released September volumes, a spokesman, Art Wong, said it expected about a 15 percent drop from September 2010. "
What is fascinating, is that there is absolutely no mention of demand for holiday shopping coming from domestically produced sources. In fact NYT does not even attempt to rule out the possibility, of a slight statistical wobble from domestic buying of domestic goods for the holidays. Science is all about controlling your variables and laying out the effect of each variable. If the effect of a variable like domestic demand, is slight, say so statistically.
So we assume as a macro-economy that we do not produce anything domestically for holidays whichy so many celebrate for religious reasons. You have to wonder what they worship. This analysis by NYT is the best argument anyone can dream up against the fantasy of the FTAs helping anyone but the MNCs.
Burton Leed
MSM, overview of montlhy trade deficit
I'm fairly convinced the U.S. Chamber of Commerce does a lot of "article" plants as well as others. Either regurgitated lobbyists' talking points or spin.
We get requests for article plants, i.e. someone wants to write an "article" that's either an agenda or glorified ad and post it here. I'm sure the larger media outlets sites get paid for doing something similar.
BTW: That's refused, we won't take those "plant" stories or anything that isn't clearly marked "ad" when it is one.
Trade deficit article overview coming soon. Look to the left column for it.
Real media, GOP -- RIP
Sometimes it hurts to grow older. I can remember when the Republican Party was the party of tariffs and protectionism! Well, all we can say now about that Grand Old Party is 'Rest In Peace', because it's dead and long gone. The same is true for most of what was once real unbiased major TV news coverage (including NPR).
Here's from current EP-linked Eyes on Trade (Public Citizen's blog on trade and globalization) --
China, China, China, China, China - 5 Chinas
This Senator Bernie Sanders floor speech clip says it all. He's quoting the head of Obama's "job creation team", who love China as the top offshore outsourcing manufacturing destination after passing the mother of all bad trade deals, the China PNTR.
Education
Unfortunately, we have educated a lot of the people who create foreign companies and lead foreign subsidiaries where the outsourced jobs go. It probably should be much harder to get a student visa in the US than a work visa. At least people who work here are paying taxes here and interacting and enhancing the work of others in this country. It's worse when they go back with a coveted American degree and immediately have twice the legitimacy of any other foreign contractor or researcher.
I'll tell you though, the composition of STEM classes in the US has become very foreign. There has been a boom in education despite dropping interest from US citizens. The labor arbitrage has definitely cost us in three ways 1) American talent doesn't want to go into STEM, 2) American talent that goes into STEM is more stressed about employment and less focused on new ideas or technical excellence, 3) STEM workers who get employment are working longer hours and with no faith in their organization; a monumental disaster for scientific thought and out-of-the-box creativity. This is how I see it from the ground in chemistry.
we need more STEM to speak out
I think you're right, more U.S. citizens just bail on STEM because who is willing to go $40k in debt to have a career of 5 years before you're labor arbitraged? I think we have some very discriminatory policies against U.S. citizens as well. For example, taking a BSc as a U.S. BS is absurd. Often these are high school, literally, or more like trade school, at best associates degrees. Now universities are accepting MSc of 90 credit hours, an entire year less than the U.S. BS and they are accepting them as a U.S. MS degree.
Add to that the impossible to live on stipends for RA/TA and you're lucky to get your poverty/slave wage to boot so it's no surprise U.S. citizens are being discouraged to study on multiple levels.
I guess we should remind everyone how difficult these degrees are too.
We really need more Americans calling it. Anyone at a top tier school knows what's going on and it's not a good thing.
It's one thing to compete internationally, it's another to get your knees capped right at the starting gate.