Here come the tech layoffs. Microsoft is laying off 5,000, including R&D engineers. Intel shuts 4 plants and lays off 6000, 1000 from Oregon alone.
Ebay will surely announce soon for their quarterly earnings dropped 31% and the largest garage sale in the world should be more recession proof.
But what do all of these tech companies have in common? They constantly lobby Congress for more H-1B guest worker Visas which lower U.S. wages and displace U.S. Tech Professionals. Pfizer in addition to moving offshore advanced R&D, is forcing it's U.S. workers to train their H-1B replacements.
It's so bad, Bill Gates got his very own personal Congressional hearing just to spew lies about a tech worker shortage.
Now how many experts, labor experts, economists, people who know what they are talking about, objectively, how many of them get their own personal Congressional hearing?
Lay off your early adopters
Make it so they can't afford your tech- put downward pressure on the income of all the early adopters- and this is what you get.
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Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
I had a crazy idea years ago
That if one brought in an H1 visa worker and paid them a substantially lower rate compared to the market, that companies must record that as a profit. The difference, of course, being taxed. Crazy....I know.
not so crazy
very interesting idea....to force corporations to stop squeezing their labor force generally...every time they do that, they get super taxed.
Right now it's considered perfectly acceptable and Wall Street rewards layoffs, labor arbitrage almost immediately.
It's already a part of profit
And therefore, taxed, but I assume you mean an extra tax for this form of profit.
After all, the savings doesn't just disappear- and does affect the bottom line, lower labor costs same price for sales yields more profit.
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Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
Job Shortages, Not Skills Shortages
Yes, Microsoft has relentlessly lobbied Congress for more H1 visas because they claim there is a severe skills shortage. But then why would Microsoft be laying off R&D? It's not like they're losing money. They made over $4,000,000,000 just last quarter! 4 billion dollar profit for the quarter and yet Microsoft still feels the need to layoff 5,000? Greed, pure greed.
What's evident then, and what Congress must understand, is that Microsoft does not represent what's best for the US and its citizens, but instead its duty is to do what's best for its shareholders across the world - and that is maximize profits.
Microsoft profit misses, to cut up to 5,000 jobs
" ... Microsoft posted a profit of $4.17 billion, or 47 cents per share, in its fiscal second quarter ended December 31 ...To cut costs, Microsoft said it will eliminate up to 5,000 jobs in research and development, marketing, ..."
Need more information
Of course what we really need here is a stratification of who is staying (e.g., foriegn H1Bs) and who is loosing their jobs (e.g., US workers and more specifically older US workers). You would also want to understand the entire universe (e.g., H1B/US jobs by location, by state, by country. You would also want to understand this trend over time.
And what would you see? Most probably a trend where US jobs are replaced by H1Bs in the US or where the jobs are simply moved to those new Microsoft facilities in India.
The solution? I think my "New Agenda for America" has 10 things that need to be done right now. I also think we should be giving every American about $150,000 to get them out of debt so foriegners don't continue to come in here, at the rate of 2 million legal immigrants a year, and push us out of our homes and jobs. Could it be time for a 2nd American Revolution?
NEW AGENDA FOR AMERICA: Preliminary Planks
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[Video: http://www.newagecitizen.com/NAA.htm]
(1) Universal Health Care for All American Citizens
(2) A 20-year moratorium on all immigration into the United States
(3) Legal Marijuana for all Adults and Medical Patients
(4) An immediate reversal to the Offshoring and Inshoring of American Jobs
(5) A strict enforcement on issues of Separation of Church and State
(6) An immediate move from so-called Free Trade Agreements to Bilateral Trade agreements
(7) A major R&D project to bring energy independence to the United States and the World through recycling, reuse, ending hyper-consumerism and investing in the development of sustainable energy sources (e.g., solar, photovoltaic, wind, geothermal)
(8) No further ownership of US Assets (businesses, homes, ports, stock exchanges) by foreign governments or individuals!
(9) Replace the Federal Reserve with a People's Reserve which allows public oversight
(10) Absolute support for Net Neutrality
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