Major U.S. banks sought government permission to bring thousands of foreign workers into the country for high-paying jobs even as the system was melting down last year and Americans were getting laid off, according to an Associated Press review of visa applications.And the motive...?
The dozen banks now receiving the biggest rescue packages, totaling more than $150 billion, requested visas for more than 21,800 foreign workers over the past six years for positions that included senior vice presidents, corporate lawyers, junior investment analysts and human resources specialists. The average annual salary for those jobs was $90,721, nearly twice the median income for all American households.
As the economic collapse worsened last year — with huge numbers of bank employees laid off — the numbers of visas sought by the dozen banks in AP's analysis increased by nearly one-third, from 3,258 in the 2007 budget year to 4,163 in fiscal 2008.
Foreigners are attractive hires because companies have found ways to pay them less than American workers.The bankers are importing workers in this economy?
Companies are required to pay foreign workers a prevailing wage based on the job's description. But they can use the lower end of government wage scales even for highly skilled workers
There's my argument: We must allow exceptions to the laws forbidding homicide.
In general, I am a law-abiding fellow who feels no desire to commit any crimes -- certainly not any violent crimes. But if the U.S. state and federal codes were re-written in order to allow me to slit the throats of the bankers who made that lovely decision, I would see my duty and fulfill it instantly. And I would sleep well that night, secure in the knowledge that I had done the work of the Good Lord. Yes, I'm serious.
Proof once again: Capitalism can work only if the capitalists are kept controlled, chained and whipped.
15 comments:
As I recall, US companies with reconstruction contracts in Iraq were reported to be importing foreign workers - sometimes from as far away as India - even though Iraqis could do the jobs, and unemployment there was climbing to 30, even 50 percent.
Exactly right, Joe, or as Teddy Roosevelt put, capitalism needs to be regulated in order to keep us safe from "the malefactors of great wealth."
Sergei Rostov
"Proof once again: Capitalism can work only if the capitalists are kept controlled, chained and whipped."
BRAVO, Joseph! Why isn't anyone else seeing this, reporting on it or talking about it??? The toxins in our food supply and environment are destroying our brain cells and leaving america impotent.
windsun
This is nothing short of criminality by corporations. They've had the go-ahead since the Reagan years. What people have to understand is there has been a class war being waged on the vast majority of the American people by the few, and it has been going on for over 25 years.
These f*cking @ssholes need to be dragged from their high-rise towers or their estates or wherever and then stoned to death!
Bastards!!
Sadly capitalism does work and is working... After we've chained and whipped the bastards, why don't we just expropriate them and have ourselves a proper, human, non-exploitative society without money, bosses, etc.? That's better than keeping the scumbags in their place. Their place, so long as they hang around, will always be above us and exploiting us.
And the thing is...after a few years of soup-kitchens-for-the-millions, breadline wages (for those lucky enough to be in a job), and the attempt to reduce the population which is obviously on the cards in the areas where there's a falling demand for labour, it's possible, just possible, that the goal of such a socialist society, based on need and not profit, will raise its head again. Because it's possible, just possible, that minds won't be controlled quite enough for the technofascist, exterminationist alternative to be achieved. Let's hope so. What we fucking well need is anger, more anger, collective anger, lucid and anti-bank and anti-capitalist anger. Absolutely no doubt about that...
Because remember this... Depressions are not times of capitalist decline. Look at the Long one. Look at the Great one. They're times of technological revolution. And this time that would mean bending down and kissing your arse goodbye as the microchip goes in your head... (If anyone thinks that's a loony suggestion, could they please criticise it constructively by either a) arguing for why, this time, unlike on previous occasions, there won't be any capitalist technological revolution, or b) arguing for why the technological revolution will lead in another direction entirely).
b
To think of the left in America as part of all this is just too much. Unions are useless now. So what the regular people to do. Just sit in front of the computers and bitch?
I am sure the thousand of banks employees who were laid off would have chosen a pay cut if they were asked instead of unemployed.
This is just one of a few things that I've read over the past couple of days that enraged me. I sent an email (not that it will do much good, but I thought I'd try) to Reid. I quoted and cited this article plus an article in the NYT about additional giveaways to banks that offer student loans, a link to a post about the hypocrisy of Dodd and Obama when they decry the $18.4 billion in bonuses given out by Wall Street firms, and an article in Bloomberg in which Stiglitz berates the "cash for trash" plan for Big Banks.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/education/28educ.html?_r=1
http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=11229
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a.GJvNfWtCX0&refer=home
John Williams of shadowstats.com estimates that the real unemployment/forced underemployment figure is 17.5% and that by the end of April the U.S. will see the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression.
http://www.c-span.org/Watch/watch.aspx?MediaId=HP-A-14748
Whatever is done about the meltdown will be owned by the Democrats. I really don't think Reid or many Democrats are smart enough (or perhaps are just too corrupt) to understand this. After all, this is the party that rolled over and supported the Republican/neo-liberal economic policies that made wholesale exportation of U.S. jobs and unsustainable trade deficits possible.
old dem
I'm glad you brought up this topic for discussion, it is important. However, people are getting a little too excited me thinks. C'mon a little perspective here, put the nationalism and fear on hold for a sec.
Banking and especially the finance parts are definitively international. That means all sorts of complicated systems and structures exists, with people communicating/businessing over the entire earth. Some traditional centers for this activity are New York, London, Boston, Chicago, Dubai, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Zurich, Luxembourg. All of these cities have recently required more labor than local talent pools provide. This will probably change now with recession. Many of the jobs in this industry required significant skills and people have been clearly well paid (maybe too well!). The fact that the article mentionned average annual salary of $90,721 suggests these jobs were of that kind.
It all seems to boil down to one real question:
1) Are significant numbers of qualified americans losing out for jobs to equally or less qualified foreigners? Dunno. But anecdotally I have worked in this space and have not found such americans.
Some counter-thoughts:
Are we suggesting all the qualified americans working abroad, say in London or Frankfurt, lose their jobs too? Should only Germans work for German banks?
The medical field has had similar skill shortages, should we not allow skillful medical people from other countries come work for us?
The U.S. seems very protectionistic lately, and there are many legitimate fights to pick, but trade has been critical to this country's success this century and isolationist populist jingoism doesn't help resolve the issues. Kinda like the way too many people made fun of the last president's speaking patterns and didn't pay enough attention to the blatant corruption surrounding him. I think we should generally be happy we've sucked many of the most talented foreigners into coming and working here.
The issue to many is not American vs not American. For an industry to fire people by the thousands and for reasons that had nothing to do with their performances, and turn around and offer the same jobs to others is just unacceptable. Unless of there are reasons we don't know about like the whole banking system is not the same any more and not in a good way I may add.
There are no qualified American workers? Millions of Americans sit in jobs that seem to go nowhere while they work their butts off, hoping for career development and advancement. Then these crooks have the gall to claim they have to import workers. How about promoting the thousands of workers you're laying off into these positions?
It's a sign of "spreading the wealth"....just not to you or me,the people who are footing the bills.
arbusto205: 1) Are significant numbers of qualified americans losing out for jobs to equally or less qualified foreigners? Dunno. But anecdotally I have worked in this space and have not found such americans.
I find it highly implausible that all the sacked American workers in the banking industry were "unqualified" or less qualified. The alleged "skills shortage" in many industries doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The fact is that a lot of large industries and services (banking, pharmaceuticals, insurance, IT, accounting, etc., etc., etc.) have all been playing "let's offshore every possible job or replace citizens with visa holders" (in blatant defiance of the spirit of the 'guest worker' laws) for a couple of decades now. (Ha, apparently they think that we can continue buying stuff from them even when we no longer have any jobs.) It's very interesting that we've had so many cases of "unqualified" American workers having to train their allegedly more qualified replacements, on pain of losing the severance package they need. (IBM, Nielsen, e.g. Funny, that, incompetents having to teach the qualified.)
Are we suggesting all the qualified americans working abroad, say in London or Frankfurt, lose their jobs too? Should only Germans work for German banks?
There will always be a class of people with a high, rare, level of skill that will be in demand internationally. But I can think of any number of social and economic reasons why deliberately replacing qualified nationals with foreign workers (for any reason) is bad policy. Deliberately replacing nationals with foreign workers when you are engaged in an obscene plundering of said nationals' pockets - well, I don't think "short-sighted social irresponsibility" quite describes it.
At any rate, some nations, like Germany and France, protect the interests of their own better than others.
The medical field has had similar skill shortages, should we not allow skillful medical people from other countries come work for us?
The problem with increasingly relying on imports to fill critical skills instead of investing in and maintaining the native skills-base (and the fact is, importing is very often done mostly or solely to cut labor costs), is that this not only drives out citizens in the short term, in the medium-term it pushes citizens away from pursuing careers where employment opportunities have been reduced. In the medium to long run the technical
base of the nation, which is really the work of generations, is lost. Large nations that aren't producing enough, say, doctors and nurses should address the reasons for this, not take the lazy way out by swinging into permanent import mode. (I know that nursing, for example, has a huge bottleneck in training slots. That can, and should, be fixed.) End result of all this short-term, bottom-line thinking: wrecked nation. Is this what we want to leave to our children?
The U.S. seems very protectionistic lately...
The U.S. is nowhere near the top tier of nations pursuing protectionist, mercantilist trade policies. And I wouldn't be surprised if it were dead last in the category of "restrictive immigration policies".
and there are many legitimate fights to pick, but trade has been critical to this country's success this century and isolationist populist jingoism doesn't help resolve the issues...I think we should generally be happy we've sucked many of the most talented foreigners into coming and working here.
There is more misapprehension about trade and "protectionism" in this comment than I have time to dilate upon at the moment, but suffice it to say that the "free" trade polices of the last couple of decades have been disastrous for the U.S. Trade policies that are a "success" do not lead to massive deficits, the loss of millions of jobs, or the necessity of ginning up bubble after bubble to sustain the unsustainable Ponzi scheme that is our current ill-conceived "globalization" regime. And no, pointing that out does not make one "anti-trade", let alone an isolationist populist jingo.
And though highly talented workers are welcome, the huge uptick in legal immigration in recent decades has not, alas, translated into any kind of general benefit to the nation. The fact is that most guest worker visas (H-1B, L-1, etc.) have squat to do with the "most talented". They are cheap labor visas, often used to facilitate offshoring, and, as Milton Friedman said, function as subsidies for corporations. (There is another category for persons of extraordinary talent, which is accessible to the actual "best and brightest", and for which, I believe, there is no cap.)
MOTHERF@#$!
Why is our press not reporting this? Have we become such frakin sheep that we will roll over and allow shit like tis to continue?
This is so freaking unbelievable! Now I really understand why so many people just snap and go gaga! It is high time that we the people, drag these greedy bastards out of their towers by their gonads!
Wake the f@#!% Up People! Soon they will be feeding you....soilent green!
Red Oak,
Thank you for your excellent remarks, all too rare in blog comments.
I agree with almost everything you wrote.
I totally agree the offshoring (at least sending work to other countries where labor is cheaper) is hugely problematic. I consider it the big question of modern day business/capitalism. Communication and transportation efficiencies are fundamentally changing our world's business system. Always have, but the newfound abilities in communication especially are huge and allow for all sorts of new models. I've been trying to understand it in the context of my own business, and it is very difficult. However I think the finance industry, at least the parts highlighted by the AP article, is not the best example of the damage caused by this transfer of labor costs to corporate/share efficiencies and executive pay.
> I find it highly implausible that all the sacked American workers in the banking industry were "unqualified".
I couldn't agree more. I think that this is a massive contraction of this industry. But to me it has very little to do with the "Americaness" of its workers. Equal layoffs/firings have been occurring across the globe. Also there is a delay in visa request statistics; because they were very high in 2008 certainly will not make it so in 2009. The gist of the AP article and Joe's complaint was that American workers were being 'replaced' here in record numbers and with taxpayer money. I do not feel this is the case. I think the imported skill was part of the bubble growing and will subside now with a ... pop.
I also agree with you that we have not been historically very protectionistic. But my point was this is changing now in a dangerous way. See today's news: Congress...work plan...EU/Canadian trade war...Obama overriding?
To sum up, I don't consider the AP example really an American issue, more of a corporate incompetence/bubble issue. I'd just rather we discussed a better example of harm to our economy than this one, and that people were more discuss-ive (you) and less shout-ive (not you).
FUNNIER PARTS
> It's very interesting that we've had so many cases of "unqualified" American workers having to train their allegedly more qualified replacements
Agreed, seems to often happen when the replacements are Americans too.
> There is more misapprehension about trade and "protectionism" in this comment than I have time to dilate upon at the moment
Laughing hard. Caught me on the blatant hyperbole, but I thought the “isolationist populist jingoism” comment was kinda self-referentionally funny. Look at some of the other comments for Joe's post, they are so...restrained.
Hi
The corruption is the part of every country. I thinks the banks performed a vital role to extend the capital of the government.In my point of view Pakistan economy can will be strong,if the government of Pakistan should be stable and work for the welfare of the peoples,
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