The H1-B visa is fundamentally broken though, so you apply for just under 10x as many as you need and end up with the number you want, so it’s not Microsoft’s fault the US Government is actively encouraging importing cheaper, average employees by using a lottery rather than filtering based on “you must earn n% more than the median income in that sector” or a similar metric to avoid reducing wages for Americans and companies using them to cut costs…
Microsoft fired 15,000 people in the last year, and applied for 14,000 H1-B visa.
They are cutting costs and improving productivity by taking advantage of people from other countries who have the threat of deportation hanging over their heads to keep them compliant.
1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days ago
Death_Equity@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Adding mandated wage requirements would undermine the whole H1-B program, which is great. I don’t think we should allow H1-Bs for jobs that we have adequate domestic supply for and it should be a pain in the dick to get.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
Ok I have an idea, why don’t we just pay a living wage to US tech workers whether they are immigrants or they were born and raised in the US?
Death_Equity@lemmy.world 2 days ago
They are generally paid well over a living wage for a position that a citizen could occupy at a market wage that is even higher. Median tech job income is over $100k, twice the national average.
Hiring a citizen costs more, so profit chasing dictates hiring an immigrant that can be paid less than market rate. Hiring an immigrant under an H1-B not only is cheaper in wages, but also gives the company more power over the employee because they can fire that person and then they get deported for not being sponsored.
Hiring an H1-B at a cheaper rate also suppresses wages for citizens.
Unemployment in tech is like 3%, we don’t need H1-B visa for tech jobs. We don’t even need H1-Bs for the industries with the highest unemployment, they need to increase wages to attract the nearly 7 million unemployed in the US, and there are even more people that are underemployed or have given up because wages are too low across the board.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 days ago
us tech workers paid well though, just not the visa holders, thats why these tech companies are mostly hiring them now or in the future.
1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days ago
Would it though?
If the requirement is “worth paying 50% more for than the average worker” then instead of picking someone worse for cheaper at random then you’re making sure that only jobs where there likely isn’t an adequate supply for due to how bell curves work,
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 days ago
biotech abuses the heck out of to, when i was searching like in the mid 2010s, yup you can guaranteed 1/4, would be asking for VISA help, if you need it. i feel like bio research is only kept alive because of the visas, or the current scientists they are holding onto, while refusing to hire more BS/MS holders so they can get into a proper career track and grad school.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
Good thing programmers were smart and organized into unions inspired by other industries instead of naively thinking they were too valuable to the ruling class in the US to be betrayed.
…
Image
Death_Equity@lemmy.world 2 days ago
If CS tried to unionize, they would get replaced with AI and H1-Bs so fast at this point. They should have tried that like 20 years ago when they were in hot demand.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
Yes and no.
Yes because this is why there is a massive body of leftist academic, philosophical and political writing on the topic… yes because this is why organizing is a skill and unions can be good or bad. It is hard and you are gonna need all the help and tactics you can get.
No because there is or at least was a prevalent belief in US tech culture circles that being an expert in programming by extension made you an expert or a soon to be expert on everthing else. An expert on education, an expert on health care… just the damage from those two categories alone to the wellbeing of US citizens…
Far from me to say there isn’t a basic beauty to aspects to programming that speak to logic and math… but no… the world is full of a million different kinds of craftspeople because every form of genius has its own peculiarities. Unfortunately however this delusion reached a degree of popularity that I think undermined the ability of tech work in the US to effectively establish the prerequisites for effective organizing and unionizing.
I am not saying that this is unique to tech workers, simply that the demographic reached a critical point of naivety that corporations were able to solidfy their power.