Foreign Workers | Working Stiffed

American Workers are Less Productive: No Job Security, No Motivation

American workers are not feeling the love. A lack of job security, combined with increasing responsibilities (and fewer resources) has resulted in exhaustion, low morale, lack of motivation and (drum roll please)…lower productivity.

The U.S. Department of Labor said last Tuesday, that productivity fell 0.5 percent in the second quarter of 2016, while labor costs rose by 2 percent. U.S. worker productivity has been weak for the past five years and stands at 1.2 percent, less than half of what it was before the 2007 recession, when it was at 2.6 percent.

Many economists say Americans are working more to create less, because workers have outgrown existing technology. As a result, we can expect “restraining” of wage growth and more layoffs. And so the epidemic of myopic economics continues.

Don’t these geniuses realize that reducing financial incentives and increasing employee workloads as the result of layoffs will only drive productivity down further? These “experts” may know the price of everything, but they know the value of nothing.

U.S. workers today are routinely being pushed to their mental and physical breaking points. Workplaces are toxic work environments staffed by people either in the midst of a psychotic break or on the brink of one. The stench of fear and uncertainty lingers in every cubicle, assembly line, water cooler, coffeemaker and non-subsidized vending machine.

It doesn’t help that employers like Disney, Toys ‘R Us, Xerox, Pfizer, and Microsoft are turning to “insourcing” of H1-B visa workers in order to lower their payroll costs, despite posting record earnings…and then they force their poor displaced American employees to train their “guest” worker replacements or forfeit their severance.

Corporate Hunger Games?

As an unwilling participant of the gig economy, I’ve been flitting in and out of different corporate offices for the past four years. The mass psychosis and/or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) I see is alarming, but not surprising.

When you experience three or four (or more) reorgs a year and know that on any given day you could walk into work and be handed a severance package, even if you’ve been a rock star employee (damn those surprise mergers!), it’s bound to damage your psyche to some extent at some point. And at the end of the day, you become aware that there is no “i” in team, but there is one in “survive.”

This past year, I’ve had two assignments where the person responsible for training me held back information I needed to know in order to do my job. Both women were overworked and clearly needed my help, so I can only conclude that they felt that if I knew as much as they did, they wouldn’t survive the next reorg.

They obviously felt it was safer to be overworked to the point of mental and physical exhaustion than to have the well-trained help they desperately needed. How sick is that? Still, they survived round after round of layoffs and salary dumps, so I suppose it’s not an unrealistic fear to expect to be replaced by a contractor who probably made less than they did.

Needless to say, this epidemic of fear and loathing in workplace after workplace makes it hard to stick to a new employer, even when you do a good job under most challenging circumstances. It’s like an endless loop of different movies made with the same script. Sometimes, I feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day.

No rest for the corporate weary

This environment of perpetual job insecurity has scared workers into being on the job 24/7. According to a study by Project Time, more than half of U.S. workers left unused vacation time in 2015. In fact, over the past 15 years, American workers have been taking less and less vacation time.

These poor souls likely feel that if they take time off, their bosses might replace them with an intern or hourly contractor…or worse, that someone of importance may decide that their department functions just fine without anyone in their role.

These are the same people who make work calls after dinner and send emails at 11 p.m. on Saturdays in an endless quest for validation and job security. It’s madness! But this is exactly the frame of mind that bipolar CEOs value in their employees.

Rising labor costs? No shit!

Hiring people costs money, and when your business model involves having a revolving door of “talent,” even if you’re replacing 20 full-time employees with 10 gig contractors or H1-B visa guest workers, you’ll end up throwing a lot of good money after bad. Recruiters, equipment and training costs add up.

And then there is the learning curve. It takes a while (sometimes years) before most employees achieve optimal knowledge of their company and/or industry. Many employers learn the hard way that inexperience can be pretty costly, especially in industries that are heavily regulated.

And how many times have employers carelessly displaced long-time employees, only to find they also unwittingly displaced a lot of company knowledge that their low-cost millennial or H1-B visa colleagues didn’t have? Too many; but they repeat the process, anyway. Einstein said the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over and expect a different result. So, there you go.

And while we’re on the subject of insanity: If a company wants to treat employees like disposable widgets, then they should stop asking employees to participate in charitable drives in the company’s name. This is inconsiderate at best, and perverse (or even sociopathic) at worst.

Also, I’m not sure why this isn’t obvious, but it’s never a good idea to have leadership team members spew empty rhetoric about “teamwork” and “commitment” at employee or town hall meetings in the same breath that they announce layoffs. What is up with that? I can’t think of a better way to incite workplace violence or corporate espionage. Seriously.

When I worked at Philip Morris in the 90s, we were hit by lawsuits left and right while dodging regulatory challenges by the FDA. If our then CEO had followed today’s popular strategy of slashing headcount and hiring cheap labor, the company probably would have folded before the end of the millennium.

Instead, they doubled down on staffing up, paying above average salaries and they had the best benefits. They understood that if they were going to survive, they needed a knowledgeable and dedicated workforce. Not only did the company survive, but it thrived…the stock split multiple times during the 90s and they’re still around today.

If employees feel valued, enjoy support, and know that if they do a good job, they’ll not only stay employed but they can expect to be promoted and rewarded financially, well…there’s no end to the growth a company can experience. Until “leaders” rediscover the core fundamentals of entrepreneurial success, true growth and peak productivity will likely remain elusive.

A lot is written about the trendy, flexible perks of the gig economy. Sure, it can be “liberating,” if you have a husband or wife who is a high-powered lawyer or doctor and you can “gig” with abandon between sessions of binge-watching “Orange is the New Black,” but for those of us in single-income households, these new “alternative work arrangements” are nothing short of a nightmare that keeps us on the constant brink of financial disaster.

The gig economy is even harder on people over 50; we’re less likely to be able to slide into consecutive contract positions as effortlessly as workers who are in their 20s or 30s.

Last week, my latest “gig” ended prematurely, because the multi-billion dollar medical device company that had hired me just three months earlier decided to dump all the contractors in my business unit. This was the “first wave” of their third reorg in six months.

This was supposed to be a one year assignment…so much for honoring our contract. I didn’t see this one coming, because several managers had sent my manager unsolicited compliments about my work and I really liked it there.

I actually thought I had a shot of staying on and eventually becoming an FTE (full-time employee). My hiring manager even dangled that possibility during my interview. Huh…foolish mortal. At the end of the day, I was just another anonymous blip on some overcompensated executive’s spreadsheet.

Health care or wealth care?

This scenario was déjà vu all over again for me; the gig I had before this one — this time with a multi-million dollar health care system that is owned by a multi-billion dollar global chemical company (chew on that alliance for a while) — ended exactly the same way after only four months. Again, I was told this was a one year assignment, and again, I was caught under the wheels of a budget-cutting reorg.

It’s not just small- or medium-sized budget-conscious businesses that treat their workforce like the girlfriend they like to sleep with but will never marry, its billion dollar health care conglomerates, and equally flush Wall Street and Silicon Valley mega-employers.

If they can’t afford to hire people at a decent wage and provide benefits, who can? Of course they can; they just don’t. And they have our government’s blessing to treat us like disposable napkins…wipe and toss.

After a lifetime of steady, salaried middle-management employment, it’s hard to find yourself unprotected as an independent contractor. Gone are jobs that pay a living wage that increase with time for work well done, humane work hours, job security, health insurance, pensions and other traditional benefits.

We no longer have rights or unions to protect us and keep us steadily employed. In fact, the globalist-owned media has been waging a successful propaganda campaign to demonize unions for years, while our politicians (beginning with Ronald Reagan) have been simultaneously gutting the rights of unions and union members.

This is a tragedy, especially since gig workers can go weeks (or months) without work and we live in fear of getting sick or injured, because if we can’t work, we can’t earn money. Frankly, I could use a strong union right about now.

And when we do find work, it’s usually through temp agencies we’ve never heard of (some are offshore). They place us and pay us (while taking a piece of every hour we work). All we can do is hope that, since they have our social security number and all of our proprietary information, that they don’t sell our identity to some cyber criminal or exploit it themselves.

What’s to stop them? I’m not aware of any protections in place. Again, this is not a priority for our “representatives” in government.

The curse of NAFTA

The table was set for our growing transient workforce with the passage of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement). We have Bill, and yes, Hillary Clinton to thank for this travesty. NAFTA gave greedy corporate chieftains access to unlimited cheap, offshore labor and officially placed the middle class American worker on the extinction list.

The post-NAFTA war against the middle class began when companies started getting rid of our pensions; phase two involved outsourcing tech support and customer service to countries that provided cheap offshore labor for U.S.-based companies.

Eventually, with the assistance of bought-off members of Congress, greedy corporate titans started bringing in foreign workers through H1-B visas. The rationale was that there weren’t enough qualified people in this country to fill the many “jobs” they were creating.

This is a lie, as the recent Disney IT employee fiasco proves (they let go of their U.S. IT team, imported foreign workers to fill the positions at lower wages, and forced the displaced workers to train their replacements or forfeit their severance packages).

Other companies have, and continue, to follow Disney’s example. Mainstream media has (surprisingly) covered this issue, and still not a peep from Congress or Obama.

Elizabeth Warren did recently mention the need to address this issue, but to date, she hasn’t introduced any legislation to remedy the situation, so who cares what she thinks? She’s paid to fix these things. So, get to steppin’ Betty.

To make things worse, our taxes are used to provide these companies with subsidies. So, essentially, we’re paying for our own funeral.

More than half of all jobs created since 1995 were non-standard jobs, which include part-time workers, contract workers or self-employed people, according to a report published in May 2015 by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

While our politicians hammer us with wedge issues like gun control, whine endlessly about the “humanitarian” need to let in an an endless stream of unvetted refugees and pat themselves on the the back for enforcing the “Dreamer Act,” they ignore the plight of their constituents, the American worker.

The American middle class is dying, and while Congress and Obama administer the last rites, it’s becoming obvious that there won’t be anyone left to attend the funeral.

At my most recent “gig,” I worked with some people who had been employed for anywhere from six to 18 years. The only three people “hired” within the past year, including me, were contractors…not one FTE.

One of the “vested” employees often griped about the threat of her bonus being sub-par this year. She knew that I had a solid career as a salaried management employee until recently and that, despite being good at my job, I couldn’t find a similar role in this economy.

She sympathized with my circumstances, but I could tell she didn’t think she was at risk of experiencing a similar fate…after all, what happened to me only happened to “other” people, not her. I wish I could tell her that she’s right, but I know better. The reality is that if we all don’t push our representative to fix this now, my gig worker misery will have a whole lotta company soon.

It’s less than a week before Christmas, so it must be time for Congress to perform yet another hate crime against the American people…the people they were hired to represent (but rarely do). As always, they try to slip through the most revolting legislation in the dead of night, preferably on a holiday, when they hope most of us will be too drunk on eggnog to pay attention. I’m surprised they didn’t pull this latest legislative abomination on Christmas Eve, actually. Maybe they were counting on all of us to be blinded by light sabers after watching the latest Star Wars sequel.

At 2 a.m. Wednesday morning, Paul Ryan, unveiled a trillion dollar omnibus spending bill to his colleagues that included a number of jaw-dropping provisions; many of which further assaulted U.S. workers and our ability to find and retain meaningful employment. Basically, the bill:

Strips protections for low-wage American workers
Quadruples the number of foreign workers in the U.S. through the H2-B visa program

Meet the new boss…same as the old boss…

Paul Ryan, the overwhelming choice for House Speaker (by both democrats and republicans) after John Boehner was “smoked out” a few months ago, has now ably demonstrated that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

If they ever consider making another “Despicable Me” sequel, Paulie can throw on a gender-neutral, yellow minion costume and drag on Boehner’s nicotine- and alcohol-stained coattails, while obediently squeaking incoherently.

Wedged into the 2,000 page bill was a provision that allows employers to import up to 264,000 low-wage foreign workers under the H2-B “guest worker” program; this more than quadruples the 2015 maximum of 66,000. The program allows these low-skilled “seasonal” workers to stay for up to 10 months.

Apparently, Congress thinks that there are an awful lot of jobs that Americans won’t do. We know otherwise. Up to 200,000 blue collar hotel, construction and other service industry workers could find themselves out of work without re-employment options. The omnibus bill not only allows employers to set migrant worker wages, it also allows them to cut the hourly wages paid to American workers. How’s that for representation?

The bill was passed by the House (by a 2-1 margin) just days after the Pew Research Center reported that the American middle class is indeed shrinking, and just weeks after another recent Pew Research poll found that 83 percent of American voters want to see the level of immigration frozen or reduced.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), expressed his exasperation in a passionate speech on the House floor; he chided his colleagues for readily supporting the bill, despite the fact that the nation’s labor force participation rate is at just 62 percent.

“The people sent us here (Washington) to protect their interests,” Sessions said. “They did not send us here to bow down to the president’s lawless immigration policies or to line the pockets of special interests in big business.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBqrWL3h9-g

Sadly, Mr. Sessions…that’s just what they did. The hubris of this group is unbelievable. How long will we allow this to go on?

Anyone who is surprised by the recent Pew Research Center report that the American middle class is “losing ground” hasn’t been paying attention.

Even Helen Keller could have seen this coming. According to the report, the rich keep getting obscenely richer. You don’t say! Another shocker: more than a quarter of adult Americans 65 or older improved their bottom lines (26.7 percent), while many of the rest of us have been bleeding out financially.

Ah, yes, the postwar “me-me-me generation” of baby boomers; the generation that was in charge in the ‘90s. Some of their notable achievements:

Supporting job-busting “trade” agreements (NAFTA, CAFTA, GATT, et al.), which laid the groundwork for the even more suicidal TPP
They converted the personal-sounding term “personnel” into the more disposable-sounding “human resources”…morphed “hiring” into “onboarding” … and turned “firing” into the sterile “offboarding” or murderous “terminating”
And now, many won’t retire, even when they are comfortable financially, making an already tight labor market even less accessible to the rest of us

Me-me-me to the end.

The study also showed that from 1970-2015, adult blacks saw a larger increase in income than any other racial or ethnic group (up 11.2 percent), and blacks were also the only group not to experience a decline in their lower-income share. See? Sometimes black lives do matter!

Married people with or without children at home also fared much better than single people. That makes sense, since it now takes two salaries to equal half of what one salary was worth 10 years ago.

Pew defines middle class Americans as adults whose annual income is double to two-thirds of the national median wage. In 1971, 61 percent of adult Americans enjoyed middle class status; that rate has plunged to only 50 percent now. The number of high income American adults spiked from 14 percent to 21 percent, and the number of low income households also increased (from 25 percent to 29 percent).

All in all, the study further validates Ross Perot’s “giant sucking sound” prediction. In 1992, he warned that America’s labor market would be destroyed if NAFTA passed; how right he was. The report charts the decline of our middle class beginning in the early ‘90s and accelerating considerably in the ‘00s.

By then, NAFTA was really kicking into gear and virtually all of our manufacturing jobs were exported overseas. I just hope that Chinese factory workers can take a break from making our iPhones every once in a while to make enough respirators for the citizens of Beijing. Sure, let’s cry for the polar bears while our captains of industry suffocate the poor Chinese people with low-cost, unregulated manufacturing and limited breathable air.

With our manufacturing gone, our labor market now consists primarily of very high- or very low-skilled occupations.

But, wait, there’s more!

In recent years, our crooked Congressional “representatives” continued to beat the walking dead middle class by boosting the number of tech “guest” work visas granted to their corporate sponsors. U.S. workers in high-skilled positions are now routinely replaced by foreign “guests” who are paid much less.

Congress also has allowed an endless parade of illegal aliens to cross our open boarder and they are now calling for us to import Syrian refugees to fill the low-skilled jobs that Americans supposed won’t do. It’s clear that the psychopaths running our government are fast-tracking us to Third World status. And…we’re…letting…them. Why?

Each holiday season, retailers bemoan the fact that people aren’t spending as much as they used to. Well, if we don’t have jobs, or the jobs we have pay less they used to, or we are “gig” employees who don’t know if or when we’ll see another paycheck, then the odds are pretty good that we’re not going to have a lot of Benjamins…or bitcoins…or any type of digital currency…to slide across your registers or online shopping carts.

In my last post, I described how today’s U.S. worker is trapped in an environment of economic cannibalism; the Pew study proves it.

Pew. Something sure does stink around here.

This Thanksgiving, Obama and the mainstream media outlets that promote his agenda, were working overtime to convince Americans that we should accept thousands, and eventually hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees, because it is “who we are” as a nation.

I have to ask: who are we as a nation? And does it even matter, now that Obama and Congress are working to dissolve the U.S. into a North American Union through the Trans-Pacific “Partnership” (TPP)?

Forgive me; I know this post is a little long, but I feel compelled to make a few points in support of the working stiffed in this country. And it seems that whenever I express the opinions that follow on Huffington Post or Facebook, they get scrubbed, even though I don’t use profane language or indulge in troll-like behavior. Censorship. Is that “who we are” as a nation? It would seem so.

There’s no question that the refugee crisis is a terrible human tragedy. And there’s also no question that the crisis was created by the criminal neocons in our government who insist on invading and overthrowing governments in the Middle East and Africa on behalf of their transnational bankster benefactors and Saudi Arabia.

But bring these people here? I don’t think so. I think it makes more sense to have the wealthy Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia (the true architects of chaos in the region) resettle these poor people, as Ben Carson says. I don’t care for Carson, but his recommendation in this case makes the most sense.

Even if we can all agree that the majority of those seeking asylum are not ISIS terrorists, allowing hundreds of thousands of them to come here would be an act of economic terrorism against the millions of U.S. laborers and citizens who are struggling to survive in 21st century America.

Let me explain:

There are more than 94 million U.S. citizens out of the workforce; most don’t work because they can’t get jobs (people over 50 have it particularly rough)

A shocking number of our veterans (a number of whom were forced to do close to a dozen tours of duty), are homeless and/or have no access to health care

Our college students are saddled with an astounding amount of college loan debt that they can’t get rid of through bankruptcy—and to make matters worse, they have little hope of finding work to pay off their loans if or when they graduate

We are told that we “don’t have the money” to give Social Security recipients a cost of living increase next year (while commodity and food prices continue to soar)

We are facing the inevitability of more of our jobs being shipped overseas once our corrupt Congress passes the treasonous, sovereignty-destroying TPP

Obamacare penalizes poor people who can’t afford the program’s “affordable” health insurance by levying an unconstitutional tax/fine (taxation by citation)

No money is allocated to fix our crumbling infrastructure or to insulate our unprotected power grid (which means we will be knocked back into the Stone Age when, not if, we are hit by an EMP or solar flare)

I can go on. All things considered, should the refugees be our top priority? I don’t think so. Where is the public outrage over the issues I just outlined?

John Oliver recently went on a clever rant on his show about our “irrational fear” of allowing Syrian migrants into our country; he pointed out that they are thoroughly vetted. All I could think of while listening to him go on about the six or seven layers of scrutiny these people face is, why are we spending our money on this? When I think of the needs I list above, it’s downright criminal.

Not too long ago, Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration policy analyst at the (globalist-sponsored) Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, published a piece in the Washington Post that argued for allowing the migration; he said it would even help our country.

He sought to ease the concerns of U.S. taxpayers who don’t support bankrolling the welfare and government programs these migrants will undoubtedly require if they are allowed to come. Nowrasteh proposes that Americans and charities (like the Cato Institute?) sponsor them, and in return, the U.S. government should lift all quotas and restrictions on work permits “without complicating regulations.” Really? Can you guess whose jobs they’ll need to take once their sponsors get them situated?

Even our most socialist-leaning president to date, Franklyn Roosevelt, closed our country’s borders during the Depression. He was focused on restoring the economic health of the country and helping to create jobs for U.S. citizens. It would be nice if Obama dedicated his rhetoric and actions in support of the Americans he was elected to represent, like Roosevelt did. Instead, he lobbies for job-destroying initiatives like the TPP and cheap labor through migration.

We are also repeatedly told the lie that migrants only take manual labor jobs that Americans don’t want. When I was growing up, I could easily get one of “those jobs that Americans don’t want.” They helped me save money for college and taught me how to be a responsible young adult; the crappy work and low pay of these jobs also served as an incentive for me to pursue higher education, so I could get “better” jobs.

These days, kids can’t get so-called “crappy jobs” easily, so they continue to depend on their already financially stressed parents for spending money, or they turn to crime. And now that our government has privatized prisons, kids who get caught committing crimes often find that their lives are essentially over before they’ve even begun.

The lie about the “jobs that Americans don’t want” has a counterpart in “the jobs that Americans can’t do.” Silicon Valley ushered in the era of the H-1B visa under the pretense that there aren’t enough trained U.S. workers to handle the volume of tech jobs they create. This has become an egregious tool of domestic economic cannibalism.

Fortune 500 companies like Disney and AT&T took that loophole and drove a truck through it, by importing low wage foreign workers by the thousands to replace qualified U.S. workers. As I write this, 1,200 displaced U.S. Disney workers are in New York training their foreign replacements.

A bipartisan Senate bill banning the replacement of U.S. workers with H-1B visa holders was just introduced. Hopefully, it will pass.

Lastly, there is the “we are all children of immigrants” argument. While that’s true, let’s take a closer look at that. When my grandparents legally migrated to this country after World War II, it was long before the banksters took over our republic and made it a plutocracy; the U.S. was truly a land of growth and opportunity. They wanted to come here sooner, but Roosevelt had closed the doors during the Depression, as I mentioned earlier; too many Americans were out of work….like now.

My grandparents came here to assimilate: they learned English, they pledged allegiance to the American flag and they built their businesses without imposing on American taxpayers. Now, in these times of PC psychosis, we must accommodate every culture to the point that we have become the national equivalent of the tower of babble.

As for those who support leaving our borders wide open by using the example of the Pilgrims coming to America, has anyone asked the Native Americans how that migration worked out for them? I didn’t think so.

Opposition to Syrian refugee migration is not about racism or hatred; it’s about economic feasibility. And, yes, there is some fear involved. After all, we just witnessed a handful of ISIS terrorists kill or injure close to 500 Parisians in less than an hour. It doesn’t take an army of people to take a country hostage.

Our focus needs to be on fixing our country and restoring our middle class. We can no longer afford to turn our backs on struggling U.S. citizens or to overlook the fact that we no longer manufacture anything. We also can’t continue to allow transnational companies incorporated here to ship U.S. jobs overseas at will or to import “migrants” who will work for much less.

Trying to distract us from our very real problems by promoting cost-prohibitive, altruistic global outreach doesn’t help anyone. We are not the prosperous country we were 50 years ago; we are a nation in rapid decline. That, Mr. Obama, is unfortunately “who we are” now as a nation. Charity begins at home, Chief, so do us all a favor and re-prioritize and get busy before it’s too late.

Category: foreign workers

American Workers are Less Productive: No Job Security, No Motivation

A Casualty of the Gig Economy: My Life in the Brave New Workplace

American Workers Thrown Under the Omnibus Spending Bill

Pew! Something Stinks: the Disappearing American Middle Class