economic tsunami

[Rufus T. Firefly]

As a manager at a tech company for many years, I can tell you there's a bogus economic side to hiring as well. The tech companies like to promote the H1b process as an avenue to the best people, folks that are unavailable in the candidate pools in the US. That's baloney...

Not in my field it wasn't. I'd get 300 applicants for 1 position of which 275 were not qualified at all, and of the remaining 25 only 5-6 were possibly qualified on paper or were not in China, India, or somewhere similar - I would not hire someone I could not interview despite the fact that we had had a very, very good person in the group from China - he was on an H1b and went back to be a VP in a pharma company.

We did not hire at a reduced rate - we actually set the salary rates for the country for research positions, so that was not a consideration.

As for hiring someone cheaper from elsewhere vs a fresh out of school grad - ok, you really want to hire someone with zero real work experience when you can get a guy with experience and real knowledge cheaper? Anyway, electrical and software engineers from India and other countries now command some real money.

[healey36]

As for hiring someone cheaper from elsewhere vs a fresh out of school grad - ok, you really want to hire someone with zero real work experience when you can get a guy with experience and real knowledge cheaper? Anyway, electrical and software engineers from India and other countries now command some real money.

The guys we took in from south Asia were pretty much recent grads or had less than six months experience. I think we are talking apples and oranges here...I suspect you're talking high-end research folks. My folks were code and development people, implementation types, primarily software development wonks where proof-of-concept was already complete. Also, the difference between private and public sectors (a lot of people want a government gig).

Similarly, if I listed a job for a staff accountant, it wasn't unusual to get applications from former controllers, audit managers, finance directors, etc. The world is a cruel place...lots of folks jettisoned before their time.

I would agree that the pressures of globalization are slowly bringing pay-scales up in the developing world. However, they are still substantially below what Americans would hire in at.

[G3750]

As a manager at a tech company for many years, I can tell you there's a bogus economic side to hiring as well. The tech companies like to promote the H1b process as an avenue to the best people, folks that are unavailable in the candidate pools in the US. That's baloney...the big reason guys like Cook, Nadella, Ellison and others promote hiring from overseas is that they can get electrical and software engineers from India and other countries at sixty percent of the wage scale they'd have to pay to an American fresh-out. When the H1b's run out, they simply set up shell companies in-country, hire the engineers, then ship them here as contractors on six-month rotations. These rules need a serious revisit.

Amen, amen, amen!!! This is all about price for these companies. And, at least in IT, a lot of the STEM "shortage" is bogus. In the 1990's in Pittsburgh, I can recall a law firm training HR staff (formal classes) how to write job requisitions that no locals could qualify for. Then they would have an excuse to hire H1bs. I can recall seeing and responding to job ads with outrageous requirements and getting no answer whatsoever. These were being run solely to justify H1b hiring.

As a project manager with a product to deliver and quality metrics to maintain, I fought hard to hire qualified American citizens. A large % of the H1B hires and contractors were totally useless, even at 60% of normal scale.

Remember, the railroads went through a similar process in the late-1940s/early-1950s...it was called dieselization. It wiped out many thousands of jobs related to steam...crews, locomotive maintenance workers, infrastructure upkeep, etc. The railroad operations labor pools were slashed, and would have been cut further if it hadn't been for the resistance of the labor unions which required continuation of some jobs in a nonsensical manner (firemen on diesel-electric locomotives, for example). Fortunately the economy was in the massive postwar expansion, and these folks were eventually absorbed elsewhere. That won't be the case this time when a robot replaces ten workers, and just one person is required to service/maintain every 10-20 robots.

Exactly, when 1 robot replaces 10 people, there will be a huge employment problem.

George

[robert.]

Watch this video. Skip past the first 30 sec.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLVCGEmkJs0

[rogruth]

IMHO a very, very interesting discussion from persons that have been involved in the process.
Now what can be done to turn this around so we can improve our country?

[G3750]

Watch this video. Skip past the first 30 sec.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLVCGEmkJs0

Yes, my mind was blown.

I remember reading that Henry Ford made the conscious decision to pay his workers a decent daily wage ($5 at the time) so that they could afford to buy the Model T automobiles his assembly lines produced.

Having eliminated human beings from the fulfillment equation, I wonder who will be able to afford goods from Amazon? And who they will pay an adequate wage to do so?

George

[robert.]

Who can afford it ? Not this guy's landscaper. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4JyTL5racw.

[chuck]

Now what can be done to turn this around so we can improve our country?

The biggest issue with the great recession was it pushed companies into adopting automation in a big way. Manufacturing didn't leave the country, high paying low skilled manufacturing jobs are what left and they aren't coming back. The jobs that are left require flexible skill sets from workers who can actually think and deal with the unexpected. Watch about 20 episodes of "How it's Made" and you begin to see how far (and advanced) robotic or robotic assisted manufacturing has become. While companies will balk at a reduced work week, they need to look farther down the line and take into account that those robots that boost efficiency don't need to buy most of what is being manufactured.

The 40 hour 5 day work week needs to be revised to 4 days and 32 hours or maybe 36 hours? There just isn't enough "manual" labor to support the population we have without having a lot of people sitting around not doing anything. If this isn't addressed in a reasonable fashion you will see society further break down into have's and have not's and all that could portend. When you mix in a population that's armed to the teeth and pissed off about this it could get very ugly very fast.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Now what can be done to turn this around so we can improve our country?

It's the whole world.....Just 8 men own same wealth as half the world

https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pres ... half-world

Slightly dated, but the one prediction of the 1st trillionaire in 25 years portends nothing good for the majority of the world.

[robert.]

As of jan. 2018
Larry Ellison — $60.4 billion.
Carlos Slim Helu and family — $67.6 billion.
Bernard Arnault — $68.7 billion.
Mark Zuckerberg — $72 billion.
Amancio Ortega — $75.8 billion.
Warren Buffett — $90.1 billion.
Bill Gates — $91.9 billion.
Jeff Bezos — $108.9 billion

You need to step on a lot of toes to get this rich. What if each one kept $50 mill and gave the rest away?

[Rufus T. Firefly]

As of jan. 2018
Larry Ellison — $60.4 billion.
Carlos Slim Helu and family — $67.6 billion.
Bernard Arnault — $68.7 billion.
Mark Zuckerberg — $72 billion.
Amancio Ortega — $75.8 billion.
Warren Buffett — $90.1 billion.
Bill Gates — $91.9 billion.
Jeff Bezos — $108.9 billion

You need to step on a lot of toes to get this rich. What if each one kept $50 mill and gave the rest away?

Just like many charities, 90% of the give away would never reach where it's needed.

Gates does give away quite a lot - foundation funds a lot of research and other projects.

[rogruth]

This won't get me any friends but I don't understand why "we" are always expecting the people with a lot of money to give it away. I think what is really meant is for them to give it to the "we" mentioned earlier which probably means "me". The argument is made that those with a lot of money didn't do anything to deserve it. Of course that is just an opinion. Teachers are not usually considered to be very "well-to-do" however many persons in this area consider teachers to be rich when the average teachers pay is compared to the average area residents pay. I am a retired teacher and have always considered our family to be upper lower class. This idea of using the money of someone else for the puposes that "we" want is part of the "give back" idea that permeates to days younger and early middle aged people. Now for the real self-killer. IMHO these are communist ideas.
Thank you for your time.

[E7]

While companies will balk at a reduced work week, they need to look farther down the line and take into account that those robots that boost efficiency don't need to buy most of what is being manufactured.

Makes one wonder if the people who run things are so effing stupid that even if they reduce the cost of production to the lowest possible point, it won't matter if there aren't customers out there able to buy their CRAP. A few posts ago in one of these topics there was a statement that Henry Ford paid his factory workers a decent wage so they could afford to buy his cars! Makes sense to me.

The 40 hour 5 day work week needs to be revised to 4 days and 32 hours or maybe 36 hours? There just isn't enough "manual" labor to support the population we have without having a lot of people sitting around not doing anything. If this isn't addressed in a reasonable fashion you will see society further break down into have's and have not's and all that could portend. When you mix in a population that's armed to the teeth and pissed off about this it could get very ugly very fast.

Back during my working days i used to make what I called "fearless predictions" and was pretty good at it. My ultimate one was: The next American Revolution will be the VERY RICH against the VERY POOR because there won't be any MIDDLE left.

At what point or amount of wealth does an individual reach a figure where anything earned beyond that is totally meaningless. I would guess that Bezos and Gates are pretty much there if the figures given are accurate.

[Roy]

I am a retired teacher and have always considered our family to be upper lower class.

I've never heard of upper lower class. My mother had a Masters degree in bilingual education, and was at the top of the pay scale for such teachers. But then, she did the teaching because she enjoyed it. We didn't need the extra money.

[HONDO74]

It appears to me (my opinion) that the country and also the world is going through an economic evolutionary process

Darwin's Theory of Evolution - Natural Selection

The inferior (disadvantaged) members of the same species would gradually die out, leaving only the superior (advantaged) members of the species.

We either adapt or we die.

It wasn't too many years ago that everyone was wringing their hands about Walmart going to take over all of retail sales in this country, and then the internet exploded and upstarts like Ebay & Amazon came along. The internet is the replacement for the industrial revolution.

It was manufacturing and the industrial revolution that created the middle class in this country. But the internet/computers the digital age is not going to create a new middle class.

And China has their own Amazon. Its called Alibaba. China now has as many if not more millionaires than the US thanks to all the companies moving to China and Americans buying all the crap made with cheap labor.

"Any man who thinks he can be happy and prosperous by letting the government take care of him better take a closer look at the American Indian.”
Henry Ford