I’m asking…no, I’m begging you. If you read this post, please share it with everyone you know. This information must become viral, if the economy of the United States is going to survive in the long run.
This is a call for action. PLEASE, call the office of your representative in Congress, and your state’s senators.
The layoffs of 400 IT employees at the utility company Southern California Edison has finally caught their attention.
The time for action is now. PLEASE — call every politician you know. The only power the American worker still holds is their vote. The politicians need them.
The corporate terminology used to describe this sordid business of laying off qualified American employees is called a reduction in force. As in, when you now get the pink slip, you say “I just got RIFFed” instead.
Here is the obscene lie — the workforce isn’t being reduced. They’re probably bringing in three or four foreign employees to replace one American worker, because they are that much cheaper than experienced American talent.
Those numbers are empirical evidence, observed through personal experiences, not from some “study.”
The unemployment rate for American-born workers as a percentage of the workforce is at an all time high. Uber-rich businessmen and women have convinced Congress that their businesses cannot flourish without importing wave after wave of technically skilled people from India, China, and other sources of plentifully cheaper labor.
So they literally bring in these people, have them trained by the U.S. employees, and then lay off the American worker. Once upon a time, I had a really good technology job that paid somewhere around $85k about ten years ago.
A bunch of the people in my team decided to leave for another opportunity. I hadn’t liked my job really, until everyone else quit. Because they all left at the same time, I turned down an offer for an interesting opportunity, because in part, I knew the company for which I currently worked would not be able to continue supporting the product for which we were responsible.
Partly out of a sense of loyalty, I stayed, so that product would continue to exist.
The company brought in foreign workers to join our severely understaffed team. I trained them. I taught classes on the product.
When the new people had been in the group about a year, my boss announced one of the people I had trained would now be the team leader.
More people were brought over from India. Eventually the work environment became such that one set of rules existed for everyone else who reported to the boss, and a second set of rules only for me.
Everyone else enjoyed a flexible schedule in which they could come and go as they pleased. I was counseled in a disciplinary session that included the Human Resources representative and told in no uncertain terms my assigned schedule would be from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. every day.
It wasn’t difficult to see the career path the job offered me — there wasn’t one. They didn’t want me there. I can take a hint, so I resigned.
I was burned out software development by that point, so my wife and I made the ill-fated decision that I would become a real estate investor, only about two or three years before the market crashed.
Fortunately, my lifelong yearning to become a professional writer then became a reality. I now love what I do.
Unfortunately, if my family tried to survive on my writing income, we’d have starved to death about five years ago.
Because I have a wonderful, brilliant wife who happens to be a very talented IT professional with both extraordinary technical skills as well as superb management abilities, we has pursued my dream.
When we met more than 25 years ago, we both worked for the same company, but in different offices. She taught a class in UNIX system administration, which I took mostly so my boss couldn’t send me out of town over Christmas. It was the luckiest break of my life.
Over time, Lisa’s technical skills and achievements won her the respect of her peers and appreciation of her bosses. She became an IT director for a small financial software company that flourished for a dozen years under superb management and with an excellent assemblage of American employees.
Three years ago, a larger but much less efficient company managed to acquire the company where my wife worked in a hostile takeover. Immediately, the most upper management and “non-essential” or “duplicate” employees were RIFFed.
My wife’s position was deemed so invaluable that she was offered a significant retention bonus, to be paid upon completion of a two-year period after the takeover. Her team gradually shrank through attrition to the point where my wife worked roughly 60 to 80 hour workweeks on a routine basis, and she literally performed the work of five people that used to work for her.
A few months ago, she found out she was going to lose her job because the company sent her a request to approve the hiring of five people in India who are going to try to replace her. Management termed it “global optimization.”
I was never worried about us. I know how good my wife is at what she does. She’s been my primary editor for six books now, and she started a new IT management job today. We’ll be fine.
However, I am worried about the millions of Americans who’ve been forced to give up, because this process that has been going on for more than a decade continues unabated.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce wants H1-B visa immigration to increase. Mark Zuckerberg wants it.
What they want is NOT in the best interest of American workers. Please, call your congressional representatives. Call your senators.
We must unite and insist they stop this nonsense. Make your voice heard.
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