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Where's WashTech in Latest Debates Over Visas?

marcus courtney.jpg
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.

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