Bear Flag Republic Radio Weblog

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Meanwhile, Bush proposes enlarging the H-1B program to fill everyone's job, with potentially millions of temporary imported workers. To see how this proposal is riddled with loopholes to drive down wages, read this. The primary purpose of this proposal is apparently to use your future salary to bid for Hispanic votes. Amazing.

And the same day, tech CEO's say firing U.S. workers is good for the U.S. economy and suggest we probably need to send more work overseas to "remain competitive". HP's CEO says, "Truthfully, over the long term, the greater threat is the source of well-educated labor. And if you look at the number of college-educated students that China graduates every year, it's close to 40 million" and in an apparently stunning revelation, discovers that China has a huge population.

In fact, China has 10 times more people of college age than does the U.S., and India has 5 times more than the U.S. Their proposal (train more engineers and scientists) are non-starters. We can not - can not - address the raw numbers of graduates of colleges in China and India. Their huge population works against us when it comes to labor intensive work whose product (e.g. design, software, financial analysis) can be shipped anywhere in the world for almost free. What is our comparative advantage? Are we left with construction, may be teaching, health care, lawyers, police and firefighters - stuff that needs to be done on site? Apparently not, since Bush would like to flood our labor markets with imported workers to do those jobs too.

The same economic arguments this CEOs use to justify moving offshore are the same economic arguments that our college students are using to justify not pursuing flakey high tech employment (its a job, not a career anymore) at decreasing pay scales with increasing demands for more hours of work per day.

What can we do to cope with the likely loss of our much of our technological expertise? Training more tech workers for lower salaries with decreasing job prospects is nonsense. We are not having a policy discussion on how we as a country will address this. Instead, we are heading down a path that could very well see our country becoming a technologically weak country, run by wealthy corporate holding companies, but devoid of domestic technical skills. [Edward Mitchell: Common Sense Technology]

comments < 7:57:15 AM        >

If you live in Southern California, this will shake you up a bit. [Edward Mitchell: Common Sense Technology]
comments < 7:56:38 AM        >