U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has sent a letter to Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer expressing concern over how the company may go about its layoffs.
“I am concerned that Microsoft will be retaining foreign guest workers rather than similarly qualified American employees when it implements its layoff plan.”
“My point is that during a layoff, companies should not be retaining H-1B or other work-visa-program employees over qualified American workers.”
As someone who works for Microsoft, and who would actually benefit from Senator Grassley’s suggestion, let me say this: This is none of your business, Senator, and you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. Your protectionism is misguided, stupid, and harmful to American industry. Please shut up.
Good move Sen Grassley. The H-1B program for foreign technical workers is justified by supposed domestic shortages of technically skilled workers, so if tech companies really do layoff more expensive domestic labor to keep cheap foreign workers then I’m all for some goverment intervention. Though picking on MS specifically seems like showboating for the press I must admit.
You have this completely wrong. Because the H-1B visa program is administered by the federal government, and because the number of outstanding H-1B visas is determined by legislation, this is very much the Senator’s business. I’m glad that at least one of them is bringing this up. Also, because laid off American workers will receive government funds through the unemployment insurance program, the congress once again has a reason to question this type of business decision.
Please Senator Grassley keep talking. Don’t listen to the OP as it is obvious that he is the one who doesn’t know what they are talking about.
So, microsoft cancelled a $500M datacenter in Iowa, while keeping construction of two others elsewhere going. Wink wink, nudge nudge.
(disclaimer: no, they probably didn’t cancel huge expansion plans because one senator from the state bitched at them. But it’s microsoft, we have to make fun of them somehow and the creative mispelling of their name was getting old)
Is it more harmful to American industry than the outsourcing of jobs overseas and importing of workers? Because that doesn’t appear to have worked out too well.
It’s an interesting point. I think it has merit. All H1-B jobs require that you fill out a job-requirements form saying the skills that are required (also how long you looked, how many candidates you interviewed/rejected). If these were all collected & posted on a federal web-site, displaced american workers should be able to interview for these positions and the H1-B people can go back home.
Another tact would be for any future H1-B hires, companies are required to post the job requirements on a federal web-site for 2-4 weeks and interview candidates. Playing devils’ advocate, the problem with this of course is that 80% of people lie on their resume and you’d be interviewing a lot of chaff. Maybe to offset this, allow companies to comment on people who do interview so there are repercussions to being false on your resume.
I’m still a bit confused. Are these H1-B hires somehow sponsored by the govt.? Are there tax breaks involved? Or is this just an American vs. foriegn worker issue? In other words, if MS keeps an H1-B over an American worker, are they working the system in some way?
The federal government restricts the inflow of foreign workers just like they restrict the inflow of immigrants (well, at least try to). I’m not sure what tax issues are involved or whether H1-B’s are cheaper or more expensive. However, it is a legitimate question to ask why a company is laying off qualified employees if they are also claiming they need to be allowed to import qualified employees.
Companies require a lot of different skill sets. It all comes down to who applies - I’ve hired a few H1-B’s. It was basically they were more qualified than others that applied.
Just because you get laid off doesn’t mean you can do the job of an H1-B. But, if you could see what H1-B’s your company had, it would be an interesting legal tussle if you were let go and you could prove you could do the job of an H1-B.
Yes, it’s quite a bit more harmful. By attempting to artificially restrict the pool of candidates that a company can choose from, it gives companies located in more open countries a competitive advantage. You can argue that the American government should give American workers an advantage, but the only thing that this particular implementation of immigration restriction accomplishes is to give companies reason to locate development centers abroad.
Immigration controls aren’t necessarily a bad thing. However, when you’re dealing with a product that costs literally nothing to ship across borders, this method of controlling immigration isn’t terribly effective. Or at least, it doesn’t work in a way that’s helpful to America.
In addition, the whole “did you fire Americans or foreigners first?” angle is unbelievably retarded. Software teams consist of a set of people that, in theory, have specific skills that are needed. When you choose to layoff people from these teams, whether or not the person is foreign or domestic should not be a consideration; you should be laying off whichever person (or people) will hurt the team the least. As we saw from the EE thread on this topic, reality doesn’t always match theory, but throwing in “Were the fired people Americans?” into the equation doesn’t affect how things should be handled.
If MSFT fired Americans over foreigners as some sort of cost-saving measure, then I can see an argument for the Senator’s position. However, H1-B’s cost more than Americans to employ. They’re paid the same as domestic people, plus MSFT often handles the cost of at least a portion of their immigration costs.
But anyways, it appears that knee-jerk protectionism is alive & well here, so I’ll leave you to it. Good luck with that whole “competitiveness” thing.
All this does is allow corporate America to get around the laws of supply and demand. If supply is short, then companies should have to pay more to attract more workers. But instead of paying more, they insource with H1-B’s. So wages end up being depressed. Corporate America loves free markets except when it doesn’t benefit them.
If we’re paying more to import foreign workers than competitiveness is already an issue, first at today’s costs and then down the road when those workers are able to command a higher global salary and we can no longer afford them. It’s an extremely short sighted solution, no matter what your Microsoft bosses tell you.
You make some good points. I think there is protectionism/nationalism going on as well as venting for past transgressions. “if someone is going to get fucked, line up the non-american’s first”.
As most H1-B candidates have been employed at a company for less than 3 years (by then they’ve got their green cards and can go whereever they want), I find it hard to believe a team really knows they have the perfect person.
For example, I’ve learned in the past when a large company lays people off, they don’t coordinate very well. In many cases, it’s just a peanut-butter approach of pain - everyone cuts 10% for example. Or they cut entire programs, regardless of who is on the team. I think it’s so that management can distance themselves from the decision and not think of it as people leaving. It’s not really management’s fault, as being on that side of the equation a few times, it really tears me up.
There really isn’t any real good way to lay people off, but keeping good people should be paramount and since I think it’s doubtful that companies will ever come up with a perfect solution, having a partial solution where people could retain good workers in place of H1-Bs that are still around - would at least satisfy some portion of that.
In many cases, I think you’d find you’d get a better skilled and experienced person from the hundreds/thousands that were laid off. You just don’t know about them yet.
Regarding my use of a plural pronoun when I should have used the singular, I noticed that mistake on a reread, but I was too lazy to edit it. The mistake has now been locked into the history of the internet. since normal internet emoticons are discouraged here, insert a virtual smiley here
