Where's WashTech in Latest Debates Over Visas?
The national and local press just featured two prominent stories on immigrant employment at high-tech companies: one, a look by The New York Times at the case of an Indian developer at Google who feels compelled to live in Canada; the other, a report by The Seattle Times on the dwindling number of requests for H-1B visas for such workers. Local union WashTech, which has long been on a quest to organize the high-tech field, used to be a journalist's first call when writing about this hot-button topic. The union, ardently opposed to outsourcing and insourcing, once engineered stories in the Wall Street Journal, Business Week and other publications, prompting me to profile it and its feisty president, Marcus Courtney (pictured at left) several years ago. Yet neither story mentioned WashTech. What gives?
A call to the union reveals that it has a new president and a new focus.
Courtney left in June, according to new president Les French. The former WashTech head now lives in Switzerland, working as director of telecommunications for UNI, an umbrella organization of international unions. And while French says the union still works on issues like immigration, its main focus is now handling the contract it signed with AT &T Mobility, representing some 1,000 call center workers in Bothell. That makes it a more practical union, certainly, but also apparently a duller one.
4 comment(s)
way to keep up SW says:
A call to the union, or, you know, actually reading the local tech press: http://www.techflash.com/microsoft/37066169.html
Posted On: Monday, Apr. 13 2009 @ 1:23PM
Shapiro says:
Fair catch, and a valuable Q & A to read. It's still interesting, though, how WashTech has become so much less vocal on the issue, even though Courtney says in the TechFlash piece that the union is still going strong.
Posted On: Monday, Apr. 13 2009 @ 1:31PM
Common Sense says:
The 4.5 million Google spends on having to hire Christine Doyle whose job is to help Google employees who are seeking visas, or caught in limbo with the U.S. government could have been better spent on training Americans if their really was a specialty "need", yes? However, there is no need other than being guiding by apologist CEOs who know how to suck taxpayer money because they are too big for the so-called Americans' britches to let it fail.
Imagine a small business that trains Americans instead of the universities we are forced by the HSBC's of the world to finance AND give tax breaks to. Can't see it? That used to be the U.S. before the HSBC's started doing business with the universities of the world -- both of which get unlimited foreign labor to keep the cost of tuition down. Yeah right!
How's that working out America? Tuitions down now that cheap labor is here? How's that working out Americans? Doctor's fees and healthcare costs down? How's that working out Americans? Credit fees are down now that the big wigs of finance have gotten the H1B help that saves money that eventually "trickled down", right?
Did anybody read about the CEO bonuses that were the highest EVER while Americans were laid off to support their bonuses? Yeah. Leave your apologies at the door because you need a different kind of help when you hate on your own so much that you allow H1Bs to destroy your future generations of education and economic prosperity just to say you're for "globalism", "capitalism" and "not a racist" all in one sentence instead of looking at the facts!
Nobody is benefiting except the CEOs! Your child will never be a CEO unless an Indian decides there are no more Indians in the world to hire or the EEO calls the H1B body shops on their Indian hires only policy. It is illegal to discriminate against ANY race in job preference -- except when it comes to the H1B visa which is owned by the H1B Indian mafia.
No government FOR the people should employ or contract with companies that hire H1Bs over American citizens! Bring your tax bill down by just saying NO to H1B body shops contracting with the government.
Posted On: Monday, Apr. 13 2009 @ 5:13PM
Original American says:
Except for orginal Americans like me who have been here for generations, all others have to be deported to their home countries. You have to be a third generation to call yourself a true american. Everybody else pls pick up your bags and leave please.
Posted On: Tuesday, Apr. 14 2009 @ 1:40AM