"So much for the theory that the Democrat party supports American middle class workers. I swear the next time I hear some fool telling me how the Democrat party is the party of "little guy" and is the party of "Labor" I'll punch his lights out. According to some of the articles I've posted the only hope in stopping this lies with the rank and file Republicans in the House. - jgm)

Feinstein supports some immigration reform
By Phil Yost
Mercury News
U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Monday she is increasingly willing to consider a guest worker program as a way of curbing unregulated immigration into the United States. But, she added, ``I'm not entirely there yet'' in finding a specific proposal to support.
"

"Rob Sanchez writes on 16 March:
The HireAmericanCitizens website has been whacked... The owner of HAC, Richard Armstrong, notified me that his web hosting service suspended the account - without notice. The website simply went POOF!
"

Editor's Note: We received this information today from a source within India.

Anonymous writes:
For short term projects TCS has been bringing programmers via the B1 visa, especially in the SAP, I2 and Oracle related projects. The company has been falsely declaring to the INS that they are brought for "business development", "due diligence study" etc. etc. In reality, all of them do programmming / configuration/ testing and the clients are billed. No one can work and earn money when they come to the USA with a B1 visa. This is a gross violation of US Immigration law. For instance, TCS has brought in people illegally to work on the following projects in the USA :GE, Siemens (Florida), British Petroleum (Chicago), Applied Materials (Santa Clara), Alcova (Pittsburgh), Delphi (Detroit)..and surely many more... These illegal activities should be first probed and the US consulates in India should ban issue of visas to comapnies like TCS who have been doing illegal activities for the last over 25 years with impunity. Will your organization please take up this noble cause and exp!
ose the true color of Tatas? Please do not divulge my name or ID as that would result in my physical elimination. It will result in a threat to my life.Hope I can take you to confidence.
It is sad that people are not comiing forward in large numbers to expose all the illegal activities of TCS and create awareness! TCS has already used its money/muscle power to "kill" all the links related to the recent case / comments in Indian newspapers! Are you aware of that?

"Bad Day at KLA-Tencor

------------------------>>------------------------
JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER
by Rob Sanchez
February 23, 2006 No. 1426
------------------------>>------------------------

Employees at KLA-Tencor in San Jose, CA got some very bad news last night.
They were told that they will be required to train a crew of Indians that will be arriving in the morning. After their replacements have been adequately trained their employment will be terminated after 60 days. Once trained, the Indians will be moved back to India to resume operations. The most likely location for the Indians to set up the BPO will be in Nungambakkam, Chennai.
http://www.kla-tencor.com/company/offices/international.html#india

"

"Is Infosys in legal trouble?

[ Friday, February 17, 2006 12:01:48 amTIMES NEWS NETWORK ]

BANGALORE: Information available on the web says that Infosys Technologies might face a possible class action suit in California from a law firm for allegedly not paying overtime wages to its employees who are working on H-1B visas there.
"

"($50,000/year for an engineering project manager!!!! In California!!! Never have I seen a clearer abuse of the L1 visa program. Hell, as a Senior Principal Software Engineer, with no management responsibilities, I made over $74,000/year in the year 2001 while working in California. My salary was considered median! The median cost of a house in Haywood California in 2005 is over $635,000. You couldn't buy an outhouse in California making only $50,000/year.

50k/year isn't even a new grad salary let alone a project manager's! Yet now there is a push to raise the H-1b the limit. No wonder American workers can't compete. If the H-1b limit is raised then even more American workers will be replaced. If you are an American worker then you can either join us in fighting the H-1b increase or lose you job and career after a foreign worker replaces you. - jgm)

Suit alleges India firm collected employees' tax refunds

By Michele Chandler
Mercury News
"

"(Here is an article that admits that H-1b workers are often not even paid the wages they are promised. The article also talks about how difficult it is for H-1b workers to challenge a company that underpays them. Is it anyone surprised then to find out that H-1b workers are paid on $13,000 less than the comparable American IT workers that they replaced as revealed by the Programmers guild study?

Is it any wonder to find out, as was shown by the Programmers guild study, that 85% of H-1b IT workers work below the median IT salary? Of course no one gives a damn about the 500,000+ American hi-tech workers who lost their jobs and careers because of H-1bs. The IEEE-USA reported last year that between the years 2000-2004 over 800,000 H-1bs were let into the country. 44% of which were IT workers. During that same period the unemployment rate among hi-tech professionals rose by 500,000.
"

"Report: Firms use H-1B visas to avoid hiring Americans

By Kathy Gurchiek

Employers use the H-1B temporary visa program more often to import cheaper labor than to fill vacancies for which no U.S. workers are available, says a recent report by the nonprofit Center for Immigration Studies.
"

"Think tank, House eye H-1B abuses

Debra Schiff
EE Times
(01/02/2006 10:00 AM EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=175800119


Embarrassingly low wages are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to employer abuse of the H-1B temporary-visa program, new legislation and other data have revealed. Discrimination on the basis of immigration status, the loss of "at will" employment rights, the use of "body shops" and outright fraud have also surfaced, resulting in at least one class-action lawsuit
."

"(I would not be to excited by this. I believe it was nothing more than a showpiece prosecution that was designed to prove how the government is “enforcing� the H-1b law. In reality the government’s attitude is demonstrated by how the Department of Homeland security “accidentally� let in 75,000 H-1b workers last year instead of the 65,000 that had been mandated by law. I’m sure the corporate lawyers will just find another way around the H-1b law. After all the Programmers guild study demonstrates how badly the H-1b is abused and how easy it is for companies to underpay H-1b workers. - jgm)

Computech must pay old wages
Labor Dept.: Immigrants were underpaid

BY JEWEL GOPWANI
FREE PRESS BUSINESS WRITER

November 23, 2005

A Bingham Farms-based computer staffing firm plans to pay $2.25 million in back wages after the U.S. Department of Labor said it didn't adequately pay 232 employees, according to a settlement between the government and the tech firm. (Read More)
"

"Media ignored Bush administration's manipulation of outsourcing report

A Media Matters analysis found next to no media coverage of the Bush administration's delay of a congressionally mandated report on outsourcing until after the 2004 election:

The news story that the Bush administration may have defied a June 2004 deadline and delayed a congressionally directed report on outsourcing until well after the 2004 elections, then edited the final report to generally support the practice, has largely failed to gain any media attention. [...] According to these reports, the Commerce Department finally released its report on the outsourcing of information technology (IT) and high-tech service jobs to other countries on September 8, more than a year after the June 2004 deadline that was written into the conference committee report of the 2004 consolidated appropriations bill (House Report 108-401) funding the study and six months after MTN [Manufacturing & Technology News] had filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking the report.

Outsourcing was controversial during the 2004 elections, and by not releasing the report upon the deadline directed by Congress, the administration avoided a possible election-year discussion regarding its findings. In addition, MTN and Business Week found that the final report, in contrast to the original government staff's six months of research, had almost entirely edited out the possible disadvantages of outsourcing, often using data from groups that support outsourcing. This entire incident, however, has largely gone unnoticed by the news media, being picked up thus far only in a single segment on CNN and three print media stories since the initial reports. "

"Gartner Analyst: Stop Outsourcing Now
October 27, 2005
By Sharon Gaudin

It's time to stop outsourcing.

That's a pretty strong statement coming from most anyone in the industry. But it takes on even more weight when it's coming from Gartner's chief of research for outsourcing. (Read More)
"

"(What a cynical, lying, bastard Bill Gates is. How many job high tech jobs have been lost in major high tech layoffs this year alone? Well let's see: 14,500 at HP, 14,000 at IBM, 3,600 at Honeywell and now another 3600 at Unisys. These of course are only the major layoffs who knows how many IT workers have lost their jobs in smaller layoffs. This evil SOB Gates is on record as wanting to remove the H-1b cap completely, which would devastate what's left of the IT job market.

Now this scum Gates is misleading young American students into going into a dead career. What about the students? They will spend 5 years of their lives and upwards of $30,000 dollars to get degree that will be worthless. So Gates wants young American students to ruin their lives just so he can fatten his all ready bloated fortune. I am sickened by Gates’s evil cynicism. – jgm)


Gates to Students: Software Is Where It's At
Walaika K. Haskins, newsfactor.com Mon Oct 17, 5:24 PM ET

Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT - news) Chairman
Bill Gates hit the road last week to urge college students to pursue degrees in computer science. The three-day, six-college tour was the second such pilgrimage made by Gates in two years to emphasize the potential of technology careers and to dispel concerns about outsourcing. (Read More)
"

Here's a contribution from ITPAA member and founder of American Champions, Joe Valley - Come Back To India (Link).

Ed Note: You don't have to be a member of a human rights group to be upset about this - although many of us are members of these groups. Capitalism is amoral. In its purest form it will enslave women and children, sell drugs to addicts and guns to criminals. Societies manage this by passing laws making it illegal to traffic in drugs, prostitution or weapons. Perhaps it is time Congress did the same here.

US Firms Aid Repression
Source: Rocky Mountain News: (Link)

Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft complicit in China's stranglehold on information

September 24, 2005

Today, many Americans get the news by reading the headlines on the Yahoo!, Google or Microsoft Web portals. Many more Americans learn about current events by using a search engine from one of these companies. In China, however, such behavior can get you thrown in prison - sometimes with the cooperation of the U.S. companies that tout their supposed commitment to goodness and freedom.

Last year, assistant editors of Dangdai Shang Bao (Contemporary Business News) held a staff meeting about a memo sent from national Communist Party headquarters ordering journalists how to cover the anniversary of the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square murders, in which peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing were slaughtered by the Red Army. (Read More)

"Lobbying against America

By Lou Dobbs

CNN

Friday, August 12, 2005; Posted: 10:46 a.m. EDT (14:46 GMT)


(CNN) -- There's no denying both political parties in Congress are now owned lock, stock and barrel by corporate interests. Our nation's elected officials in Washington have formed a partnership with the corporate supremacists and special interest groups in an effort to drive profits to the bottom line of U.S. multinationals at the expense of hard-working Americans. (Read More)
"

"Indian call centres sell off Australians' details

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200508/s1437366.htm

Tens of thousands of Australians are at risk of computer fraud because their personal information is being made available illegally by workers inside call centres based in India.

Tonight's Four Corners program reveals a black market in information held by Indian call centres.

The program was able to get hold of personal details through a journalist who is working undercover and cannot be identified (Read More).
"

"http://weblog.infoworld.com/techwatch/archives/003672.html

August 05, 2005
Is the Department of Labor refusing to post 50,000 plus high tech openings?

A very troubling story is enfolding out of the Department of Labor [DOL] over the right for U.S. workers to view, and thus apply for, more than 27,788 possible job openings remaining for foreign workers under the H-1B visa quota system.

The problem is the Department of Labor, to date, has not made these jobs available for viewing on their Web site, according to Kim Berry, president of the Programmers Guild. (Read More)
"

Here is a link to an article that I wrote when I was unemployed over 2 years ago. Much of what I learned remains relevant today.

If you know someone who recently lost his job, pass it along.

Staying Alive - How to survive unemployment in today’s economy