Edison's plans to cut jobs, hire foreign workers is assailed

[ripcord]

Source: L.A. Times

Southern California Edison's plans to lay off hundreds of employees and hire foreign workers instead is coming under attack from lawmakers in Congress and local unions.
Meanwhile, members of Congress are upset about reports that Edison is laying off workers in favor of bringing in cheaper labor from overseas under the controversial H-1B visa program. The visas are intended to bring in skilled and educated foreign workers.
The company "is not hiring H-1B workers to replace displaced employees," Edison said in a statement. "Any H-1B visa workers SCE does hire for its own workforce are paid a wage comparable to SCE's domestic workforce."
The Southland's largest utility said it is laying off about 400 information technology employees, with an additional 100 leaving voluntarily. The layoffs are necessary, the company said, to stay competitive.

Read more: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-edison-layoffs-20150211-story.html

---

I'm getting more than a little tired of the few middle class jobs being given away, hopefully this will be the tipping point and the H-1B program will be eliminated to at the very least have the rules tightened.

[safeinOhio]

1. Stay competitive?

They are a monopoly

[LibDemAlways]

2. I live in Southern California. So. Cal Edison

is, indeed, the only game in town. If I had a choice, I'd have bailed long ago. Stay competitive? With who?

[safeinOhio]

16. My favorite place in the world

Headed to SD a week from today.

[sdfernando]

27. Welcome..and hope you enjoy your visit.

Just so you know So Cal Edison doesn't provide power for San Diego. We get it from SDG&E, or Sempra Energy. Still a monoply though.

[LibDemAlways]

3. There is tremendous H1-B abuse. I substitute

teach in a suburban school district where more and more of the students are children of parents here on H1Bs. Meantime, older tech workers who've been laid off can't find jobs anywhere. And if politicians care, they sure don't do anything about it. It's a disgrace.

[groundloop]

10. But we need those foreign workers, we have a shortage of engineers in the US

A SHORTAGE OF ENGINEERS WILLING TO WORK FOR PEANUTS.

[LibDemAlways]

17. My software guy husband was laid off in 2010

at age 59 after 20 years with the company and just a few months before our daughter was starting college. After 6 months he was finally offered a job way below his skill level at a 40% pay cut. He wasn't happy, but he took it. Gets lots of pats on the back for a job well done, but no raises.

The company is so cheap, by the way, he had to bring his own computer from home. They won't even give him the tools he needs to do his job.

Older guys like him hate working for peanuts at a shitty company, but their options are incredibly limited. Between age discrimination and the H1Bs, they are screwed.

[antigop]

19. older women are also screwed. nt

[LibDemAlways]

28. Oh, absolutely. I didn't mean to be gender specific. Getting

hired past 50 is tough all around. As a substitute teacher, I see the parade of new hires in schools. The full time teachers being hired are all just out of college and wet behind the ears. Anyone past 30 need not apply.

[outside]

4. I hate

to say it but the right wing guys were calling this two years ago.

[ripcord]

5. Darrell Issa says this was not the intent of the program

I can't stand him but I hope he is successful in dealing with this.

[outside]

6. I'm

not talking about the GOP/chamber of commerce boobs. The tea party guys called it.

[ripcord]

9. I'm not worried about who called it

I just want someone to fix it.

[antigop]

11. Maybe Hillary will fix it...oh, wait.

[OhioChick]

15. And HRC's stance hasn't changed

From 10 months ago..

"Clinton also backed increasing the number of H-1B visas issued by the United States."

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/04/08/hillary-clinton-on-2016-im-thinking-about-it/

[hedda_foil]

21. We left wing guys were calling out the H1b scam way before that.

I'm glad the opposite wingers have caught on, though.

[C Moon]

7. Sickening.

[KeepItReal]

8. Technically, Tata and Infosys (Indian companies) are the ones hiring the H1Bs, not SoCal Edison

So Edison can say "we're not hiring H-1B workers to replace displaced employees" and not be lying.

It's their contractors, Tata and Infosys bringing on the H1Bs.

They are also the firms who got slammed for abusing other types of Visas.

It's a f*cked up practice. But all these MBA-run organizations care about is boosting the share price by cutting labor costs by any and all means.

[antigop]

12. Hillary and Tata

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2007/07/30/clinton-woos-outsourcers-workers-fear

Joining Tata Consultancy's chief executive at a downtown hotel, Clinton announced that the company would open a software development office in Buffalo and form a research partnership with a local university. Tata told a newspaper that it might hire as many as 200 people.

The 2003 announcement had clear benefits for the senator and the company: Tata received good press, and Clinton burnished her credentials as a champion for New York's depressed upstate region.

But less noticed was how the event signaled that Clinton, who portrays herself as a fighter for American workers, had aligned herself with Indian American business leaders and Indian companies feared by the labor movement.

Now, as Clinton runs for president, that signal is echoing loudly.

Clinton is successfully wooing wealthy Indian Americans, many of them business leaders with close ties to their native country and an interest in protecting outsourcing laws and expanding access to worker visas. Her campaign has held three fundraisers in the Indian American community recently, one of which raised close to $3 million, its sponsor told an Indian news organization.

But in Buffalo, the fruits of the Tata deal have been hard to find. The company, which called the arrangement Clinton's "brainchild," says "about 10" employees work here. Tata says most of the new employees were hired from around Buffalo. It declines to say whether any of the new jobs are held by foreigners, who make up 90% of Tata's 10,000-employee workforce in the United States.

[antigop]

13. IBM: "The Cost Difference Is Too Great for the Business Not to Look for" H-1B Workers

http://cis.org/miano/ibm-cost-difference-too-great-business-not-look-h-1b-workers

Workers from around the country send me examples of H-1B abuse that is taking place around them. I organize this data to decipher patterns. There is usually no legal action that can be taken due to the way the law is structured and the circumstances of the information provider. Generally, I just collect.

Separately, I have been preparing a case in which discrimination against Americans in favor of foreign workers is a factor. As part of the preparation I have been collecting advertisements from companies that say they only want foreign workers.

The companies that publicly advertise illegal recruitment tend to be small. Many of these small companies publish lists of companies they supply workers to. I compiled the advertisements and customer lists in a database and found a striking feature in the data. The median percentage for companies showing up as customers of companies making foreign-workers-only advertisements was 1 percent. However, at the high end there is a small cluster of customer companies that show up much more frequently. IBM leads the pack here, being claimed as a customer by 35 percent of the companies only seeking foreign workers. Let me rephrase that. Among advertisements seeking only foreign workers that had lists of companies it supplied these workers to, over one-third listed IBM (With Verizon and JPMorgan Chase close behind).

The frequency with which IBM appears suggested that I should return to my IBM collection and write about it. One item in the collection seemed particularly appropriate for showing how H-1B abuse takes place in big corporations behind the scenes.

[Samantha]

14. Thank you for sharing this information

Truly disturbing.

Sam

[antigop]

20. I really would have a hard time encouraging any college student to go into computer science or

engineering right now. The game is rigged.

[whereisjustice]

25. +1 this should be a post of its own, must read link

[blkmusclmachine]

18. Trickle down/TBTF

[closeupready]

22. Outrageous.

K&R

[William Seger]

23. I worked for Verizon before I retired

... and I've heard from a friend that after announcing a great quarter a few months ago, they've had two IT layoffs at the same time that they've been contracting development work to companies in India.

This won't stop without regulation. Fuck the stupid, short-sighted libertarians.

[whereisjustice]

24. H1Bs are compliant and rarely challenge authority or innovate due to fact that they

will be punished by being sent back to India if they upset their bosses. They also have few worker protections. Many are here to learn as much as possible with idea of returning to India to work for competitive companies. They will happily watch as bad products, failed systems, non-functional s/w moves out the door, afraid to speak up. This seems to be a trait that more and more managers prize.

And in a more interesting recent twist, workers in India are very sensitive to class, many view US as lower class and will not be supervised from the US. Offices in the US are hiring H1Bs from India to act as an interface between US management and the workforce in India.

And then there are the problems I've seen first hand with male workers from India and how they interact with female workers from India and US.

Never forget how factory workers and returning military struggled after being jobless and/or laid off by the millions. They were told it was their own fault for not retraining every few years for technology. Millions incurred massive debt going back to school to learn IT related trades only to be laid off again as India works for a substantial discount AND no one gives a fuck which university they graduated from or their GPA.

Edison is lying. They are just doing what every other company in the US is doing, selling everything they can to Asia for pennies on the dollar. They are transferring wealth from the middle class into the pockets of a few super rich executives and investors.

[candelista]

26. Is it possible to be for illegal immigration and against the H1B visa?

Or do they stand or fall together?

[outside]

29. IMO.

Both do the same thing. Foreign workers will work for less money and will not complain as much as American workers. With the threat of deportation over their heads the workers are very compliant. Where as the foreign workers with the H1B visa are taking white collar jobs the illegal immigrants are taking the blue collar ones.

[candelista]

30. Good point well stated.

Lots of people here don't seem to see this.

[appalachiablue]

31. There was an article here several months ago about an electronics corp. in CA, Fresno maybe

that brought in Asian workers, housed and paid them $1.44 an hour. The workers were actually employed by the company in India I think. The company claimed that they were unaware of the wage laws for this in the US to the investigating labor officials. The multimillion $ company was fined $3,500. You can't make this stuff up. A poster wrote that the penalty was actually an incentive to do it again.

In the last month I've read here of increased bipartisan efforts to step up the H1-B Visa program. Also about people who spent time and money to obtain IT degrees in the 90s for a lucrative career and then lost jobs. What's the point of stressing STEM training with this pattern, beats me. It's unfair and harmful to US workers and the economy. It's not the Visa immigrants fault, who wouldn't want to secure advanced employment and a better life. Business will grease the needed wheels to hire the cheapest labor possible if it can.

[Skittles]

32. believe me, they used the word "skilled" very loosely