Posts Tagged Employment

Cagle Post – Political Cartoons & Commentary – » Bureau of Labor Statistics Job Deception Deepens

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Employment, Opinion, Perspective on January 10, 2013


JOE GUZZARDI

Bureau of Labor Statistics Job Deception Deepens

 

Last month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics continued its monthly deceit and deception exercise. The December unemployment rate, according to the BLS, is 7.8 percent. In the same report, BLS announced that 155,000 new jobs have been created.

Nate Beeler / Columbus Dispatch

Immediately after the BLS released its statistics, major media outlets spun the falsely calculated data into an optimistic analysis which concluded that the economy is rebounding strongly, a vindication of President Obama’s policies. One headline read that the latest BLS figures, broadly referred to as the U-3 unemployment rate, prove Obama’s “naysayers” have been wrong all along. However keep in mind that under the U-3 definition some counted as employed could work as little as an hour a week.

If the naysayers include African-Americans, women and young adults, then their skepticism is justified. Unemployment for women rose to 7.3 percent in December from 7.0 percent while the rate for African-Americans increased sharply to 14.0 percent from 13.2 percent in November.

Even though December normally experiences a job creation spike in temporary positions because of seasonal retail shopping patterns, black employment fell in December from nearly 16 million to 15.8 million.

As for young Americans age 18-29, their plight is equally grim. Generation Opportunity, a national, non-partisan organization which advocates for what it calls millennials, announced that the overall non-seasonally adjusted December youth unemployment rate is 11.5 percent including Hispanics,12.2 percent and women, 10.4 percent.

A more comprehensive unemployment rate is the U-6 which counts all unemployed individuals 16 years and older seeking full-time employment (the aforementioned U-3 rate), marginally attached workers and those working part-time despite wanting full employment. Marginally attached workers include the discouraged who have given up the employment search. The December U-6 unemployment rate is 14.4; the 2012 average nearly 14.8 percent.

Analysts rarely address the question of which types of jobs have been created and, by extension, what wage they pay. The so called FIRE economy—finance, insurance and real estate—continued its twenty-year soft trend. Many of those jobs have commission based salaries. Manufacturing, once the backbone of the American middle class, continued its two decade decline.

On the other hand, low paying leisure and hospitality jobs remain strong. In the hospitality sector, the average wage is $13.41 per hour with 26 hours representing an average work week. Few leisure positions offer health care, paid vacation or pension programs.

Even the liberal Economic Policy Institute unequivocally stated that the job market is stuck in a depressingly deep hole—4 million jobs away from returning to pre-recession employment levels. Add the jobs that should be created in a normal economy and the United States is short nine million jobs. Assuming December’s growth rate, the EPI estimates that the labor market won’t catch up until the end of 2021.

As if all this discouraging news isn’t bad enough for beleaguered American workers, legal and illegal immigrants have taken two-thirds of the net employment increase since 2009 when President Obama took office. A Center for Immigration Studies found that 1.94 million more immigrants were working in the third quarter of 2012 than at the start of 2009 when the president was inaugurated compared to a 938,000 increase for natives during the same time period.

Despite overwhelming, irrefutable evidence that 20 million Americans are either unemployed or underemployed and equally compelling proof that authorizing more foreign-born workers adds to U.S. worker displacement, immigration remains on autopilot. An average 1 million new legal immigrants annually with work authorizations compete with Americans, often successfully, for scarce jobs.

The federal government’s craven immigration policy that hurts suffering, unemployed Americans is inexplicably set to continue in perpetuity.

 Cagle Post – Political Cartoons & Commentary – » Bureau of Labor Statistics Job Deception Deepens.

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Robots Don’t Destroy Jobs; Rapacious Corporate Executives Do « naked capitalism

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Opinion, Perspective on January 5, 2013


WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 2, 2013

Robots Don’t Destroy Jobs; Rapacious Corporate Executives Do

By William Lazonick, professor of economics and director of the UMass Center for Industrial Competitiveness. He cofounded and is president of the Academic-Industry Research Network. His book, “Sustainable Prosperity in the New Economy? Business Organization and High-Tech Employment in the United States” (Upjohn Institute, 2009) won the 2010 Schumpeter Prize. Cross posted from Alternet

Americans are understandably upset about profits without prosperity. Corporate executives seem to be the big winners, while the middle class is declining and young people face a bleak economic future. How did this happen? It’s easy to blame technology, especially the automation that supposedly displaces workers. But that’s not the real story. The fact is that automation creates jobs. It’s the misuse of corporate profits that are destroying them.

There was a time when high corporate profits meant bright employment prospects for most members of the US labor force. That relation between profits and prosperity was strongest in the immediate post-World War II decades when US corporations led the world in manufacturing, provided workers with career-long employment security, and reinvested profits in productive capabilities in the United States. For the past three decades, however, the pursuit of corporate profits has been at the expense of prosperity for an ever-growing proportion of the American population.

This disconnect between profits and prosperity began in the 1980s with permanent plant closings that cost production workers their middle-class jobs. It increased in the 1990s as major US corporations scrapped the career-with-one-company norm that had prevailed for salaried employees, and it became common even for college-educated people with a couple of decades of work experience to find themselves on the wrong end of the pink slip. Then in the 2000s, as US corporations accelerated the globalization of production activities, the jobs of all members of the US labor force, no matter what their level of educational attainment, became vulnerable to competition from qualified people in lower wage areas of the world.

Profits without prosperity is now starting to get attention in the mainstream press. In his New York Times op-ed, “Robots and Robber Barons” (Dec. 9, 2012), Paul Krugman seeks to explain why, with corporate profits up, labor compensation is down. As part of the ongoing digital revolution, he argues, robots are throwing American workers out of their jobs. In addition, he claims that corporations are making high profits through price gouging, and are not sharing these gains with their employees.  

Krugman is on to something important that needs to become part of the national policy debate. But he is off target in blaming a combination of automation and monopolistic practices for the disconnect between profits and prosperity.

Automation is not the problem. As part of a process that could reconnect profits and prosperity, the US economy needs more, not less, corporate investment in automation. A company that successfully invests in automation creates far more, and typically better, jobs than those it destroys. Indeed, the study of industrial history reveals that when a nation’s leading companies fail to make sufficient investments in automation its economy runs into trouble. 

As Krugman himself notes, the argument that automation is bad for workers’ employment and incomes dates back almost two centuries to the British economist, David Ricardo, who was writing during the world’s first industrial revolution. By definition, automation displaces the need for workers to perform the tasks that have been automated. If, however, automation only destroyed jobs, advanced economies such as those of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States would not have risen to positions of world industrial leadership with strong middle classes.

Some of these new jobs are created in the industries that produce automated equipment. By far Japan is the world leader in both the production and use of robotics. An original source of Japan’s competitive advantage in this capital-goods sector was the willingness and ability of production workers to cooperate with engineers in automating tasks they performed on the shop floor  Under Japan’s system of “lifetime employment,” these production workers did not fear that the introduction of robots would result in loss of employment, while their involvement in the automation process gave them experience that, post-automation, could be put to productive use in other parts of the business organization. 

Increasingly, moreover, in the age of nanotechnology, automation performs productive functions that no human being could ever have possibly done. Rather than destroy jobs, these automated processes make it possible for companies to produce all kinds of sophisticated goods and services. These products are the hallmark of an advanced economy, and open up all kinds of new employment opportunities in companies and countries in which these goods and services are produced.

Automation entails huge upfront investments. Companies that invest in automation have to build organizations to ensure steady supplies of high-quality materials, improve and maintain machinery, and capture sufficiently large market shares to achieve economies of scale. These investments in the development and utilization of automated facilities create lots of high-value-added jobs, especially for companies that, because of their investments, can grow large by producing higher quality, lower costs products than the competition.

To repeat, automation is not the problem. The three-decades long erosion of middle-class jobs in the United States is the result of, as stated earlier, permanent plant closings, layoffs of older employees, and the globalization of employment – none of which have been the result of automation. In the process, many US industrial corporations have become very profitable (for now, but by no means forever). The question that needs to be asked is why US corporations are failing to reinvest these profits in new products and processes that can create large numbers of new high value-added employment opportunities in the United States.

The problem lies in the ideology that corporations should be governed to “maximize shareholder value,” which became prevalent in boardrooms and business schools in the 1980s, and has become totally dominant since. In the name of shareholder value over the decade 2001-2010, the 500 corporations in the S&P 500 Index (representing about 75 percent of US stock-market capitalization) expended not only 40 percent of their profits on cash dividends – the normal mode of rewarding shareholders – but also another 54 percent on stock buybacks, the purpose of which is to give a manipulative boost to a company’s own stock price. Large established companies did hardly any buybacks in the early 1980s. Over the past decade, buybacks by S&P 500 companies totaled about $3 trillion, which has left scant corporate resources for investment in innovation and high-value-added job creation.

When companies do massive buybacks to boost their own stock prices, the big winners are the very same top executives who make these resource-allocation decisions. Why? Because the largest single component of top executive pay is the income from exercising stock options – which become more lucrative when the stock price goes up, even if for just a short period of time during which the options can be exercised and the acquired stock sold. 

Many corporate executives justify buybacks by arguing that they represent the best corporate investments available. How about investments in innovation and job creation? Or how about corporate support for government investments in the national knowledge base, which typically provides the foundation for enterprise innovation and profits? If top executives have been the big winners of this financialized buybacks-options game, then the big losers have been erstwhile members of the US middle class as well as tens of millions of younger Americans who will never have the opportunity of entering the middle class.



Robots Don’t Destroy Jobs; Rapacious Corporate Executives Do « naked capitalism.

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Cagle Post – Political Cartoons & Commentary – » Right to Work is Part of Economic Liberty

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Opinion, Perspective, Politics on December 20, 2012


RON PAUL

Right to Work is Part of Economic Liberty

 

Many observers were surprised when Michigan, historically a stronghold of union power, became the nation’s 24th “Right to Work” state. The backlash from November’s unsuccessful attempt to pass a referendum forbidding the state from adopting a right to work law was a major factor in Michigan’s rejection of compulsory unionism. The need for drastic action to improve Michigan’s economy, which is suffering from years of big government policies, also influenced many Michigan legislators to support right to work.

Eric Allie / PoliticalCartoons.com

Let us be clear: right to work laws simply prohibit coercion. They prevent states from forcing employers to operate as closed union shops, and thus they prevent unions from forcing individuals to join. In many cases right to work laws are the only remedy to federal laws which empower union bosses to impose union dues as a condition of employment.

Right to work laws do not prevent unions from bargaining collectively with employers, and they do not prevent individuals from forming or joining unions if they believe it will benefit them. Despite all the hype, right to work laws merely enforce the fundamental right to control one’s own labor.

States with right to work laws enjoy greater economic growth and a higher standard of living than states without such laws. According to the National Institute for Labor Relations Research, from 2001-2011 employment in right to work states grew by 2.4%, while employment in union states fell by 3.4%! During the same period wages rose by 12.5% in right to work states, while rising by a mere 3.1% in union states. Clearly, “Right to Work” is good for business and labor.

Workers are best served when union leaders have to earn their membership and dues by demonstrating the benefits they provide. Instead, unions use government influence and political patronage. The result is bad laws that force workers to subsidize unions and well-paid union bosses.

Of course government should not regulate internal union affairs, or interfere in labor disputes for the benefit of employers. Government should never forbid private-sector workers from striking. Employees should be free to join unions or not, and employers should be able to bargain with unions or not. Labor, like all goods and services, is best allocated by market forces rather than the heavy, restrictive hand of government.  Voluntarism works.

Federal laws forcing employees to pay union dues as a condition of getting or keeping a job are blatantly unconstitutional. Furthermore, Congress does not have the moral authority to grant a private third party the right to interfere in private employment arrangements. No wonder polls report that 80 percent of the American people believe compulsory union laws need to be changed.

Unions’ dirty little secret is that real wages cannot rise unless productivity rises. American workers cannot improve their standard of living simply by bullying employers with union tactics. Instead, employers, employees, and unions must recognize that only market mechanisms can signal employment needs and wage levels in any industry. Profits or losses from capital investment are not illusions that can be overcome by laws or regulations; they are real-world signals that directly affect wages and employment opportunities. Union advocates can choose to ignore reality, but they cannot overcome the basic laws of economics.

As always, the principle of liberty will provide the most prosperous society possible. Right to work laws are a positive step toward economic liberty.

 Cagle Post – Political Cartoons & Commentary – » Right to Work is Part of Economic Liberty.

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How America, Inc. Can Rise Again | LinkedIn

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Employment on October 31, 2012


How America, Inc. Can Rise Again

Jim Clifton

Jim Clifton

October 30, 2012

 

 

One way to look at America is as one big company with about 100 million full-time employees and sales (GDP) of about $15 trillion. So that is America, Inc. — a huge enterprise that competes with the rest of the world for the best customers and the best jobs. When this workplace is juiced and its employees inspired, only good things happen because thrilled employees create more customers worldwide.

The problem is that only about 30 million, or 30%, in America, Inc.’s workforce are engaged. Another 50 million or so, about half, are not engaged — they’re just showing up. The remaining roughly 20 million, or 20%, are actively disengaged: These are super-negative employees who not only bring their lousy attitudes to work, but wander the halls spreading them around.

Now, just imagine how strong America, Inc. could become if its managers everywhere worked to double the number of engaged employees, from 30 million to 60 million. This would double the productivity of America, Inc. The enterprise would create new customers all around the world. The national economy would not only recover, but boom. Hiring would explode everywhere. America, Inc. would return as a corporate colossus.

But to significantly boost engagement of America, Inc.’s employees, its managers at all levels must understand what’s happening with the 30 million engaged employees that isn’t happening with the remaining 70 million. Simply put, the 30 million probably have great jobs, where the others maybe have good jobs or OK jobs.

What makes a job great? My answer may surprise you. The 30 million aren’t necessarily making more money than the rest. In fact, after $75,000 in annual income, researchers don’t find that happiness increases as income does. Bluntly, it’s not about money.

No, what differentiates a great job from a mere good one is when a worker answers yes to two questions that Gallup has asked of millions of people around the world. The first is: “Is there someone at work who encourages my development?” The second is: “At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?” – or, put another way — do you get to use your strengths at work daily?

If employers make it so that twice as many employees can answer a strong yes to those two questions, America, Inc. will not only rise up again, but it will re-win the world economy.

 How America, Inc. Can Rise Again | LinkedIn.

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H-1B visa abuse limits wages and steals US jobs

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Work Place on October 27, 2012


H-1B visa abuse limits wages and steals US jobs

 

 

The H-1B visa program was created in 1990 to allow companies to bring skilled technical workers into the USA. It’s a non-immigrant visa and so has nothing at all to do with staying in the country, becoming a citizen, or starting a business. Big tech employers are constantly lobbying for increases in H-1B quotas citing their inability to find qualified US job applicants. Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and other leaders from the IT industry have testified about this before Congress. Both major political parties embrace the H-1B program with varying levels of enthusiasm.

But Bill Gates is wrong. What he said to Congress may have been right for Microsoft but was wrong for America and can only lead to lower wages, lower employment, and a lower standard of living. This is a bigger deal than people understand: it’s the rebirth of industrial labor relations circa 1920. Our ignorance about the H-1B visa program is being used to unfairly limit wages and steal — yes, steal — jobs from US citizens.

H-1B Explained

There are a number of common misunderstandings about the H-1B program, the first of which is its size. H-1B quotas are set by Congress and vary from 65,000 to 190,000 per year. While that would seem to limit the impact of the program on a nation of 300+ million, H-1B is way bigger than you think because each visa lasts for three years and can be extended for another three years after that.

At any moment, then, there are about 700,000 H-1B visa holders working in the USA.

Most of these H-1B visa holders work in Information Technology and most of those come from India. There are about 500,000 IT workers in the USA holding H-1B visas. According to the US Census Bureau, there are about 2.5 million IT workers in America. So approximately 20 percent of the domestic IT workforce isn’t domestic at all, but imported on H-1B visas. Keep this in mind as we move forward.

H-1B is a non-immigrant visa. H-1B holders can work here for 3-6 years but then have to return to their native countries. It’s possible for H-1B’s to convert to a different kind of visa but not commonly done. The most common way, in fact, for converting an H-1B visa into a green card is through marriage to a US citizen.

H-1B isn’t the only way for foreigners to work in America. They can work to some extent on student visas and, in fact, many student visas are eventually converted to H-1B for those who have a job and want to stay but maybe not immigrate.

Poorly Understood

There is a misconception about the H-1B program that it was designed to allow companies to import workers with unique talents. There has long been a visa program for exactly that purpose. The O (for outstanding) visa program is for importing geniuses and nothing else. Interestingly enough, the O visa program has no quotas. So when Bill Gates complained about not being able to import enough top technical people for Microsoft, he wasn’t talking about geniuses, just normal coders.

I don’t want to pick on just Microsoft here, but I happen to know the company well and have written over the years about its technical recruiting procedures. Microsoft has a rigorous recruitment and vetting process. So does Google, Apple — you name the company. All of these companies will take as many of O visa candidates as they can get, but there just aren’t that many who qualify, which is why quotas aren’t required.

So when Microsoft — or Boeing, for that matter — says a limitation on H-1B visas keeps them from getting top talent, they don’t mean it in the way that they imply. If a prospective employee is really top talent — the kind of engineer who can truly do things others simply can’t — there isn’t much keeping the company from hiring that person under the O visa program.

H-1B visas are about journeyman techies and nothing else.

Visa Shuffling

Companies can also transfer employees into the country who have worked for at least a year for the company overseas under an L-1 visa. These, too, are limited by quota and the quota is typically lower than for H-1Bs. Back in the late 1980s when the H-1B program was first being considered it was viewed as a preferable short-term alternative to L-1. It has since turned into something else far darker.

So has the B visa, which is intended for companies to bring their foreign employees into the US for business meetings and trade shows. You’d be amazed how many such business meetings and trade shows last 30 days as companies use B visas to enable foreign employees to work awhile in the United States.  I’m told that IBM sometimes platoons workers on B visas, sending them to places like Mexico for a short time then bringing them back across the boarder for another stint.

Tourist visas are also commonly abused even though they specifically prohibit work.

The more interesting question here isn’t which multinational corporations consistently abuse B and tourist visas but which ones don’t, it is so common.

No Labor Shortage

A key argument for H-1B has always been that there’s a shortage of technical talent in US IT. This has been taken as a given by both major political parties. But it’s wrong. Here are six rigorous studies (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) that show there is no shortage of STEM workers in the United States nor the likelihood of such a shortage in years to come.

You may recall a recent column where the IT community in Memphis, TN proved there was no labor shortage in that technology hotbed.

The whole labor shortage argument is total hogwash. Yes, there is a labor shortage at substandard wages.

Can all of this be just about money? Yes.

What are the Rules?

The rules for H-1B visas state that they must be for technical positions for which there is no comparable US citizen available and the position must pay the prevailing wage or higher.

It’s this definition of prevailing wage where we next see signs of H-1B abuse by employers. The intent of the original law was for companies not to use H-1B workers simply to save money. In the enabling legislation from 1990, however, there are two different definitions of the term “prevailing wage.” The first is quite strict while the second, which is used by self-certifying employers to set actual pay scales, has plenty of wiggle room.

Warning, dense reading ahead!

Here is the initial definition of “prevailing wage” in 8 USC 1182(n)(1)A):

1.    The employer­

(i) is offering and will offer during the period of authorized employment to aliens admitted or provided status as an H–1B nonimmigrant wages that are at least­

(ii) the actual wage level paid by the employer to all other individuals with similar experience and qualifications for the specific employment in question, or

(iii) the prevailing wage level for the occupational classification in the area of employment,

And here is the redefinition of “prevailing wage” in 8 USC 1182(p)(4):

(4) Where the Secretary of Labor uses, or makes available to employers, a governmental survey to determine the prevailing wage, such survey shall provide at least 4 levels of wages commensurate with experience, education, and the level of supervision. Where an existing government survey has only 2 levels, 2 intermediate levels may be created by dividing by 3, the difference between the 2 levels offered, adding the quotient thus obtained to the first level and subtracting that quotient from the second level.

Note that section (p) requires that the Department of Labor set up four prevailing wage levels based upon skill but section (n) only requires a prevailing wage for occupation and location. There is no statutory requirement that the employer pick the skill level that matches the employee.

Let’s see this in action. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the mean wage for a programmer in Charlotte, NC is $73,965. But the level 1 prevailing wage is $50,170. Most prevailing wage claims on H-1B applications use the level 1 wage driving down the cost of labor in this instance by nearly a third.

If you were casually reading the statutes, by the way, you would never see this redefinition. That’s because section (p) does not refer to H-1B but rather to section (n) which is referenced by 8 USC 1101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b).

Got that?

Greed gone Wrong

But wait there’s more!

It’s not hard to suppose from this information that an influx of H-1B workers representing an average 20 percent of the local technical work force (those 500,000 H-1Bs against a 2.5 million body labor pool) would push down local wages. There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that it does, too, but most of the more rigorous academic studies don’t show this because there is no easily available data.

What data is available comes from the initial employer applications for H-1B slots These Labor Condition Applications, called LCAs, include employer estimates of prevailing wages. Because there are always more H-1B applications than there are H-1B visas granted, every employer seeking an H-1B may file 3-5 LCAs per slot, each of which can use a different prevailing wage. But when the visa application is approved, it is my understanding that sponsoring companies can choose which LCA they really mean and apply that prevailing wage number to the hire.

Because the visa has already been granted of course they’ll tend to take the lowest prevailing wage number, because that’s the number against which they match the local labor market.

Remember that part of this business of getting H-1Bs is there must not be a US citizen with comparable skills available at the local prevailing wage. If we consider that exercise using the data from Charlotte, above, a company would probably be seeking a programmer expecting $73,965 or above (after all, they are trying to attract talent, right?) but offering $50,170 or below (the multiple LCA trick). No wonder they can’t get a qualified citizen to take the job.

Based solely on approved LCAs, 51 percent of recently granted H-1B visas were in the 25th percentile for pay or below. That’s statistically impossible under the intent of the program.

We have no clear way of knowing what companies actually pay their H-1Bs beyond the LCAs, because that information isn’t typically gathered, but remember that whatever level it is won’t include benefits that can add another 30-40 percent to a US citizen’s wage.

Extent of Abuse

Here is the Government of India touting its H-1Bs as cheaper than US workers, which of course they aren’t by law supposed to be.

I wish this was the extent of abuse, but it isn’t. A 2011 Government Accountability Office study found that approximately 21 percent of H-1B visas are simply fraudulent — that the worker is working for a company other than the one that applied for the visa, that the visa holder’s identity has changed, that the worker isn’t qualified for H-1B based on skills or education, or the company isn’t qualified for the H-1B program.

H-1Bs, even though they aren’t citizens or permanent residents, are given Social Security numbers so they can pay taxes on their U.S. income. A study by the Social Security Administration, which is careful to point out that its job doesn’t include immigration monitoring or enforcement, found a number of H-1B anomalies, the most striking of which to me was that seven percent of H-1B employers reported no payments at all to H-1B visa holders. This is no big deal to the SSA because these people qualify for no benefits, but it makes one wonder whether they are under-reporting just Social Security or also to the IRS and why they might do so? Those H-1B employers who do report Social Security income do so at a level that is dramatically lower than one might expect for job classifications that are legally required to pay the “prevailing wage.”

Maybe at this point I should point out that the H-1B visa program is administered by the Department of Homeland Security. Feel better?

One defense of H-1B might be that it raises overall skill levels, but studies show H-1B employees to be consistently less capable than their US citizen counterparts. This data point is especially interesting because it is drawn from the LCA data where applying companies claimed that 56 percent of H-1B applicants were in the lowest skill category and could therefore be paid the least.  So at the same time companies are claiming they need the H-1B program to bring in skilled workers, the workers they are bringing in aren’t very skilled at all. Or if they are skilled, then the sponsoring companies are fudging their paperwork to justify paying lower than market wages.

Either truth is damning and the latter is downright illegal.

Here’s where I’ll give a shout-out to the Libertarian contingent reading this column because they’ll tend to say “So what? It’s every man or woman for himself. Employers should be able to do whatever they damned well please while workers can always go elsewhere.”

But it’s against the law. 

Lawyer’s Perspective

At this point a longtime reader of this column speaks up:

I have been a practicing immigration attorney for over 13 years.  I have done many H-1B visas and like any other government program it was loaded and is still loaded with abuses… In my opinion, employers who need H-1B Visa workers should have to go through a screening process before they are allowed to submit the application and a bond should be posted if they violate the law.

For a large multinational corporation to play this game is not new.  The reason that they carry on with these activities are for one reason only — control. Control of the employee and uneven bargaining at the end of the day.  I have dealt with this with different multinational corporations… and they have, can and will act in the same manner.  As always, it takes either an investigation by the USDOJ or massive fines (or both) to redirect bad behavior to federal compliance.

Even if I wasn’t at ground zero in this stuff, it would still bother me,” wrote another longtime reader who has spent his entire career in IT.  “Our country spent decades learning to treat workers fairly and with respect.  The driving force behind unions in the first place was to address serious problems in the workplace.  With all this offshoring and H-1B crap, we’ve dumped 100 years of improving society down the drain.  Maybe USA workers do cost too much.  The problem is we are not fixing the actual problem.  As more and more jobs go off shore, the damage to our economy grows.  If we would fix the problemsthe playing field would be more level and USA workers could compete for jobs.  These abuses by corporations are not only hurting USA workers, they are hurting our nation.

 H-1B visa abuse limits wages and steals US jobs.

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Wall Street Pay Remains High Even as Jobs Shrink – NYTimes.com

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Wall Street on October 9, 2012


 

Wall Street Pay Remains High Even as Jobs Shrink

BY SUSANNE CRAIG AND BEN PROTESS

Thomas P. DiNapoli, the New York State comptroller, issued his annual report on the securities industry on Tuesday.

Brendan McDermid/ReutersThomas P. DiNapoli, the New York State comptroller, issued his annual report on the securities industry on Tuesday.

It still pays to be on Wall Street.

Even as the financial industry in New York has slashed jobs by the thousands, the average worker who remains is collecting a near-record paycheck.

In a report released on Tuesday, the New York State Comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli, said that the average pay package of securities industry employees grew slightly last year and was up 16.6 percent over the past two years, to $362,950. Wall Street’s total compensation rose 4 percent last year to more than $60 billion.

That tally is the third highest in Wall Street history, trailing only the total amounts in the years 2007 and 2008, when the financial crisis was gathering force. The results are sure to raise eyebrows on Main Street and in Washington, where lavish pay packages have come under attack since the crisis.

But the report provides only a limited snapshot into Wall Street’s finances. The wage data, which largely covers 2011, is somewhat outdated and other jobs figures in the report do not account for the remaining months of 2012. Nearly half of all revenue on Wall Street is earmarked for compensation, and employees typically learn the size of their bonus at the end of the year.

Expectations for this year appear to be high, according to another study out today on pay. Nearly half, 48 percent, of 911 Wall Street employees surveyed by eFinancialCareers.com said they felt their bonuses this year will higher than in 2011. This is a marked rise from 2011, when 41 percent of survey respondents believed their annual bonus would increase.

The comptroller’s annual report also depicted a cloudy outlook for the broader industry and its thousands of employees. In the face of new regulation and a lethargic economic recovery, the report notes, Wall Street has undergone a series of layoffs and lagging returns.

“The securities industry remains in transition and volatility in profits and employment show that we have not yet reached the new normal,” Mr. DiNapoli said in a statement.

After posting a “disappointing” $7.7 billion in earnings last year, Wall Street in the first half of 2012 earned $10.5 billion, he said. The industry “is on pace” to earn more than $15 billion by the end of the year.

But even with signs of improvement, Wall Street is rapidly shedding jobs. The austerity efforts have claimed 1,200 positions so far this year, according to the report. Mr. DiNapoli estimated that the industry lost more than 20,000 jobs since late 2007.

Banks have also taken aim at lavish cash bonuses. The comptroller in February estimated that cash bonuses declined 13.5 percent, to $19.7 billion. In his latest report, Mr. DiNapoli said he expects that trend to continue.

As Wall Street reins in cash payouts to top executives, the banks have been encouraged to give more compensation in stock and other long-term compensation to reward employees. Such a move discourages outsize risk taking and ties an employee’s interest to the long-term health of the bank.

While pay remains high across the board, senior executive has fallen since the financial crisis. In 2007, the year before the financial crisis, Goldman chief executive Lloyd C. Blankfein made $68.5 million. In 2011 he took home $12 million.

For an executive like Mr. Blankfein, $12 million may be a pay cut, but it is still a princely sum compared with other industries. Between 2009 and 2011, compensation in the securities industry grew at an average annual rate of 8.7 percent, outpacing 5.3 percent for the rest of the private sector.

In 2011, financial jobs accounted for nearly a quarter of all private sector wages paid in New York City, even though it accounted for just a fraction, 5.3 percent, of city’s private sector jobs.

Wall Street Pay Remains High Even as Jobs Shrink – NYTimes.com.

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Jobless Rate Falls to 7.8%, Lowest Since January 2009 – NYTimes.com

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Economy, Job Search, Jobs on October 5, 2012


 

Jobless Rate Falls to 7.8%, Lowest Since January 2009

By SHAILA DEWAN

Published: October 5, 2012 

 

John Moore/Getty Images

Job applicants met with potential employers at 7 World Trade Center in New York last month.

 

The nation’s unemployment rate dropped below 8 percent in September to its lowest rate since the month President Obama took office, the Labor Department said Friday.

While employers added only a modest 114,000 jobs last month, the jobless rate declined to 7.8 percent from 8.1 percent, even though more people entered the labor force.

Adding to the positive news, job gains were revised upward by 40,000 for July (to 181,000) and by 46,000 for August (to 142,000), which had been considered a disappointing month, casting a slightly rosier hue on the summer slowdown.

The private sector, which has been adding jobs since March 2010, grew by 104,000 workers in September. Governments, where cuts have been a drag on the recovery, added 10,000 jobs.

Manufacturing, one of the bright spots that Mr. Obama has showcased throughout the re-election campaign, fell 16,000 jobs after losing  a revised 22,000  in August, and construction jobs grew by 5,000. The number of temporary jobs, usually considered a harbinger of future growth, fell 2,000.

Coming a month before the presidential election, the jobs report offered ammunition for both sides as the candidates vie to convince voters that each is better equipped to steer the economy.

Mr. Obama can point to the 24th straight month of overall job growth after a severe financial crisis and a drop below the stubborn 8 percent jobless rate that has dogged his presidency. Republicans can — and did on Friday — continue to criticize the slow pace of improvement.

Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential challenger, took particular issue with any positive interpretation of the report.

“This is not what a real recovery looks like,” he said in a statement. “We created fewer jobs in September than in August, and fewer jobs in August than in July, and we’ve lost over 600,000 manufacturing jobs since President Obama took office.”

Representative Kevin Brady, a Republican from Texas and vice chairman of the joint economic committee, said the drop in the unemployment rate “was driven primarily by an increase of 582,000 in the number of workers employed involuntarily in part-time jobs. These workers need and want full-time jobs.”

“If not for all the people who have simply dropped out of the labor force,” Mr. Romney said in his statement, “the real unemployment rate would be closer to 11 percent.”

Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the majority leader, conceded that numbers were an improvement but added, “it simply isn’t good enough.” A jobless rate of 7.8 percent “should not be cause for celebration.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Democrat from Nevada, countered that “with unemployment dropping below 8 percent to the lowest level in four years, our economy is on the right track.”

Consumers and businesses, too, seem to have divergent views of the economic situation.Consumers have shown increasing confidence as stocks rise and home prices stabilize.

Business leaders have been hanging back, though, more focused on global economic slowing and domestic concerns. They say they are uncertain what the election will mean for the business climate and are waiting in part for a resolution of the so-called fiscal cliff, a host of tax increases and budget cuts that will be triggered at the end of the year if Congress fails to act.

Harry Kazazian, the chief executive officer of Exxel Outdoors, a maker of camping equipment in Alabama, said the election, the fiscal cliff and rapidly shifting regulations had put him in a cautious mood.

With sales on the rise, Exxel has restarted a capital investment plan that it suspended three years ago, but is doing so slowly. “We’re moving forward, but we’re doing it in steps rather than being much more aggressive and putting ourselves out there,” Mr. Kazazian said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if things start turning the other way, meaning down.”

But at a Walmart in Atlanta, shoppers were loosening the reins a bit, buying what they described as small indulgences like scented candle oil and seasonal beer.

Linda Avery, 50, a food service manager, said her income had not changed but her daughter had moved out of the house, reducing her food and utility expenses.

Michael Peacock, 43, said that although his house was in foreclosure, his chosen field, online marketing, was improving to the point where he could even turn down some jobs that were outside his specialty.

“I can see people shopping,” Ms. Avery said, surveying the store. “You just feel like things are getting a little better.”

The polling firm Gallup pinpointed September’s rise in consumer confidence to the first day of the Democratic National Convention, and said it was almost entirely because of increased optimism among Democrats, while confidence among Republicans held steady at low levels. But Gallup could not say whether politics or improving economic conditions drove the change.

The discrepancy between consumers’ mood and the outlook of companies can be easily explained, economists said. “Businesses are much more forward looking,” said Ellen Zentner, the senior United States economist for Nomura Securities International.

Concerns over the fiscal cliff had begun showing up in business surveys in April, she said. “It’s been weighing on their investment and hiring decisions for quite some time.”

In a survey of 400 chief financial officers conducted this summer, Grant Thornton, a management consulting firm, found that many had shifted from neutrality to pessimism, with 45 percent of respondents saying they expected their work force to hold steady and 18 percent saying they expected it to shrink over the next six months. A large majority said they expected both health care costs and salaries to increase.

Stephen Chipman, the chief executive of Grant Thornton, said there appeared to be genuine growth in the technology, high-end manufacturing and energy sectors, while growth in health care was largely a result of consolidation and increased efficiency, and financial service hiring was largely driven by the need to comply with more regulations.

Before Mr. Obama took office, he pledged that his stimulus plan would keep unemployment from rising above 8 percent, based on projections that greatly underestimated the depth of the recession. Instead, unemployment has exceeded 8 percent since February 2009, peaking at 10 percent in October of that year.

There are now almost the same number of jobs as there were when Mr. Obama took office, but there are 426,000 more than when the economy stopped hemorrhaging jobs in February 2010. A mere 62,000 increase in the number of jobs would allow Mr. Obama to claim a net increase in jobs over his tenure.

This year, the economy has added an average of 146,000 jobs a month. Economists say that job growth of 100,000 to 175,000 a month is essentially neutral in terms of its effect on the election, while anything higher would favor the incumbent.

The government’s first estimate of September’s payrolls, while eagerly awaited, is less than precise and will be revised in coming months as more data is collected and verified. In an annual recalibration last month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that there were actually 400,000 more jobs added in the 12 months that ended in March than was previously thought. That benchmark will not be incorporated into the monthly jobs figures until early next year.

“The economy seems since the recovery began to have three gears,” said Patrick O’Keefe, a labor economist and director of economic research at J. H. Cohn, an accounting firm, “slow, idle and reverse. It’s stuck in slow. We don’t have a gear faster than slow.”

 Jobless Rate Falls to 7.8%, Lowest Since January 2009 – NYTimes.com.

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USPS, postal union agree on retirement incentives – The Hill’s On The Money

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Government on October 2, 2012


 

http://thehill.com/templates/thehill/images/space.gif

USPS, postal union agree on retirement incentives

By Bernie Becker - 10/01/12 09:49 PM ET

  

The Postal Service and one of its largest unions have agreed to offer retirement incentives to a wide swath of postal employees. 

The American Postal Workers Union said in a Monday statement that full-time career employees could receive $15,000, in two separate installments, under the agreement.

“Our goal was to achieve an incentive for members who are ready to end their postal careers; to ensure that no groups of employees are excluded, and to lessen the hardships of excessing for those who remain,” Cliff Guffey, the president of APWU, said in a statement. “This agreement accomplishes those objectives.”

Employees who accept the buyout – who must have at least 20 years tenure at 50 years old, or have worked at least 25 years – would leave USPS at the end of January 2013. 

They would receive $10,000 in May 2013, and then the last $5,000 in May 2014.

The agreement between USPS and APWU comes after months of negotiations, and marks just the latest example of the cash-strapped Postal Service using buyouts to try and cut costs. 

USPS already this year offered a deal similar to the APWU agreement to thousands of mail handlers, as it tries to cut $22.5 billion from its annual budget by 2016. The Postal Service lost more than $5 billion in the third quarter of fiscal 2012, and recently defaulted on a payment to the Treasury for the second time in two months.

The deal also comes as USPS officials – and lawmakers – continue to hope that Congress can craft a broad overhaul of postal operations before the end of the year. Democrats and Republicans in Congress generally agree that USPS could thin out its ranks of employees.

But while the Senate passed a bipartisan postal bill in April, the House has yet to act on a GOP bill that passed out of the Oversight Committee almost a year ago. 

Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) and Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) on Monday both praised the USPS agreement with APWU while also continuing to chide House Republicans for failing to act on postal reform. 

“It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Postal Service is moving forward to reduce costs with the limited tools at its disposal,” Carper, one of the authors of the Senate postal bill, said in a statement. 

“This latest cost-cutting measure by the Postal Service is substantial and takes similar steps to those outlined in the Senate bill to reduce the postal workforce, but the reality is that efforts of this scale are not enough to fundamentally fix the Postal Service’s financial problems.”

But House Republicans weren’t so quick to get behind the deal, even as they have urged USPS to make better use of the cost-cutting abilities they already have.

“Sixty percent of APWU’s workforce is eligible to retire,” Ali Ahmad, a spokesman for the House Oversight panel, said in a statement. 

“Until we see whether this agreement actually leads to retirements from workers who weren’t going to retire anyway, it’s premature to assess the impact it will have on USPS’s financial situation.”

 USPS, postal union agree on retirement incentives – The Hill’s On The Money.

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Newly Unemployed Woman Enjoys Equal Pay For First Time In Career | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Humor/Parody, The Onion on September 27, 2012


 

Newly Unemployed Woman Enjoys Equal Pay For First Time In Career

 

SEPTEMBER 25, 2012  

 

BOSTON—In a historic development for gender parity in the American workplace, recently laid-off consultant Paula Saunders, 32, is at last earning an income identical to that of her unemployed male counterparts. “Right now, I’m earning the same amount of money for the same amount of work as [former coworker] Greg [Lowell], who, just like me, started in 2004 and was laid off last week with no severance package,” a visibly proud Saunders told reporters Monday while sitting on her couch at two in the afternoon. “Finally, after years of trying to achieve equality, it’s nice to know that my gender isn’t a financial strike against me. The glass floor has been shattered.” According to company sources who wished to remain anonymous, it was no coincidence that Saunders’ employment was terminated two months after telling her bosses she was pregnant.

 Newly Unemployed Woman Enjoys Equal Pay For First Time In Career | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source.

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Recession hit older tech workers harder, labor data shows – Computerworld

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Employment on August 23, 2012


 

Recession hit older tech workers harder, labor data shows

Older women in computer, math jobs face unemployment rates near 10%

By Patrick Thibodeau and Sharon Machlis

.

Computerworld - Unemployment rates for older IT workers increased during the recession faster than they did for younger employees, according to new U.S. government labor data obtained by Computerworld. But that’s something that Maribeth McIntyre, an IT professional with some 30 years of experience, already suspected.

McIntyre was laid off from her job of seven years in early 2007 at age 55. Until that layoff, finding a job had “always been as easy it can be,” so she hit the then still-growing pre-recession IT job market to look for a new job in her area of expertise: as a business system analyst and project manager specializing in HR and payroll applications.

In 2007, McIntyre said she had two or three phone interviews a week and many in-person interviews that were often enthusiastic and seemingly successful. But it was eight months before she landed a consulting job. “I was beginning to suspect it was an age problem,” she said.

What is certain is that unemployment for people 55 years and older has become a problem, especially during the past two years. In the U.S. government’s “computer and mathematical occupations” category, the overall unemployment rate jumped from 6% to 8.4% from 2009 to 2010, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. For women 55 and older, the unemployment rate hit 9.4%. For men in that age group, it was 8%.

Meanwhile, unemployment declined for workers in that category who were between 25 and 54, dropping from 5.1% in 2009 to 4.5% in 2010 (see chart below).

The recession ended McIntyre’s consulting job, so she found contract work for a few months in 2009 and last year landed a six-month contract gig that recently ended.

McIntyre, who keeps an online journal on the Daily Kos Web site (under the name Embee), had noticed other older workers talking about the problem of finding work. Seeing a trend, she started an online forum called the “50+ and Unemployed (Underemployed) Support Group” this month and got lots of positive feedback about the endeavor.

McIntyre said the forum is for sharing ideas and venting, because “after a while, your friends don’t want to hear it anymore,” she said with a laugh.

Although the labor data confirmed what McIntyre believed to be the case about the labor market, it didn’t stop her from calling the unemployment numbers for older workers “scary.”

 

U.S. unemployment rates
2009-2010

 

25-54 yrs.

55+ yrs.

All 16+

 

 

2009

2010

2009

2010

2009

2010

Total population

8.2

8.5

6.5

7.0

8.6

8.9

  All professional

4.2

4.1

4.3

4.6

4.4

4.5

    All computer & math

5.1

4.5

6.0

8.4

5.2

5.2

    Architecture & engineering

6.2

5.2

9.9

9.4

6.9

6.2

    Life, physical, social science

4.3

4.2

4.0

5.5

4.5

4.6

    Community & social service

3.8

4.7

4.3

2.9

4.3

4.6

    Legal

3.6

2.7

2.8

2.3

3.4

2.7

    Education, training, library

3.8

4.1

3.7

3.6

4.1

4.2

    Health

2.3

2.3

2.1

2.7

2.3

2.5

    Arts, entertainment, sports, media

8.0

8.1

7.4

8.4

8.4

8.9

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Male all

9.1

9.2

7.0

7.7

9.7

9.8

  Male professional

4.5

4.3

4.6

5.1

4.8

4.9

    Male computer & math

5.1

4.3

4.9

8.0

5.1

5.1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Female all

7.0

7.6

6.0

6.2

7.4

7.9

  Female professional

4.0

4.0

4.1

4.1

4.2

4.2

    Female computer & math

5.2

5.1

8.9

9.4

5.7

5.7

Rates are percentage of total workers in each category. Data comes from the federal Current Population Survey of about 50,000 U.S. households conducted monthly. Margin of error for these demographic slices was unavailable. Workers are counted in a profession’s unemployment pool only if their previous job was in that field and if they’ve been in the workforce within the past few years, thus factoring out both new graduates and those who have been out of the workforce for some time.

 

Nanci Schimizzi, the president of Women in Technology, a mentoring and advocacy group, said she knows a number of women who are 50 or older and are looking for work.

“They remain unemployed for long periods of time — years — to the point where many of them have more or less given up” and gone into alternate careers, said Schimizzi, who works in technology operations at an organization she asked not be named.

Four years ago, before the economic downturn, unemployment for computer and math professionals was 3.5% for men 55 and over and 4.2% for women the same age. The overall rate for younger professionals — between the ages of 25 and 54 — was just 1.7%.

Older workers, particularly when a company is changing its systems, can “find themselves highly paid, without the needed skills, and then they are the easiest targets,” said Schimizzi.

Schimizzi said she isn’t expecting the unemployment rate for older workers to decline, even when hiring picks up. If employers do hire older workers, it is likely to be for short-term contracts, she said. “I think full-time positions are going to be staffed from the younger workforce.”

Al Williams, vice president of Share, an independent IBM user group and a director of IT at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, Pa., said people who are over 50 may face problems if they resist change. But the fact that they’re likely to have higher salaries than their younger colleagues may put them at risk, too.

“I think the biggest risk in IT is we tend to define ourselves with the technology we like, rather than aligning ourselves with the strategies the business needs,” said Williams.

Overall, the jobless rate for workers in computer and math fields was 5.2% last year, unchanged from 2009. Average unemployment for all professional occupations was 4.5%, with the lowest levels in the health and legal occupations, according to the government data. Architects and engineers had a higher unemployment rate, and those in the arts, entertainment, sports and media fared the worst.

IT job employment has been picking up, and the jobs that are most in demand favor young as well as older workers, according to Todd Thibodeaux, president and CEO of the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), which runs a large IT skills certification program.

Thibodeaux says there is high demand for IT workers, particularly for those who can build mobile applications, work on a combination of security andcloud computing platforms, and handle cloud integration generally. People familiar with various cloud platforms, such as those run by Google, Amazon and Microsoft, as well as healthcare specialists and electronic medical records integrators, are also in demand.

While the mobile realm favors the young, “cloud and healthcare may be favoring older and more seasoned workers,” said Thibodeaux.

The age issue is likely to gain importance because of the sheer size of the baby boom generation — people born between 1946 and 1964, who make up more than 25% of the U.S. population and a substantial segment of the IT workforce. The federal government reports that people between 45 and 63 years of age accounted for 60% of its IT workforce in 2008, according to a federal study last year.

Farrokh Hormozi, a professor of economics and public administration at Pace University in New York, said the unemployment rates for older workers are what he would have expected.

“Older people have less opportunity to get back to the job market than younger people,” said Hormozi, who tracks IT employment in the New York region as co-investigator of the Pace SkillProof IT Index.

The only time when older people could go into the job market and readily find work was during the boom years of the mid-1990s leading up to 2000, he said. “If you discount those years, the labor market has not been acting unexpectedly,” said Hormozi.

“I hate to say it is human nature,” said Hormozi, but “you always want to give an opportunity to younger people.”

 Recession hit older tech workers harder, labor data shows – Computerworld.

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