Executive Director's Corner
Dear All:
Last week, as luck and circumstances would have it, an Amtrak engine failure led to a chance encounter and spawned the inspiration for this week’s newsletter.
On a train that fingers crossed I hoped would eventually get me home, I sat next to a gentleman I will refer to as “Mr. P”, a software engineer for a very large insurance company.
Now, before I dive into the details of my journey, some of you may know of our activist group U.S. Tech Workers and that we have reported on the displacement of IT and back-office employees at our country’s largest companies for the past several years. In fact, about three years ago, we interviewed a 21-year veteran of healthcare insurer Anthem who told us about her layoff and how it was part of a systematic process her employer used to slowly displace or make American workers obsolete by outsourcing their positions and projects to an H-1B visa dependent Indian consulting firm.
With that in mind, I eagerly asked Mr. P if he’d heard of U.S. Tech Workers and if he’d observed similar outsourcing schemes at his insurance job. He answered “no”, he hadn’t heard of us but said “yes”, they had lost “seven hundred” American workers to outsourcing and offshoring.
Indignantly I inquired, in light of his situation – job potentially being outsourced and/or his being “re-badged” (doing the same job at the same company but now employed by a consulting firm), if he or his peers had ever reached out to organizations like ours to fight back. He sheepishly replied “no”, which is deeply concerning.
This is someone who graduated fifteen years ago from a prestigious university with a degree in computer science, who possesses a natural inclination and aptitude for software development and has lots of work experience. Yet, notwithstanding all that Mr. P is worried about being fired, replaced by someone from a consulting firm, or forced to transfer to one of the consulting firms his company employs.
Remember the early 1990s when the powers that be and their minions told us to “learn to code.” A lot of good that’s done and is doing Mr. P and STEM majors from two decades ago!
While we continued to engage in small talk for the rest of the train ride, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Oswald Spengler’s 1931 book, “Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life” and his description of a “Faustian Man” and his fate.
Spengler wrote “anybody can learn to use industrial technology, but it is irresistible to the Faustian man” and he warned the beginning of the end of the Faustian Man is not the export and sale of products and services, but the export of “know-how.”
Here in the U.S, we’ve wittingly and unwittingly exported our know-how for decades. We’ve happily offshored hundreds of thousands of good paying manufacturing jobs to low rent countries; turned a blind eye to China’s Ministry of State Security and their tech transfer schemes (paywall) that involve our universities and research parks; and created the H-1B employment and optional practical training (OPT) programs that have enabled companies to transfer knowledge from U.S. workers they deem too expensive, undeserving and expendable, to cheaper, more compliant foreign workers.
And the motivations behind this have changed little. In fact, ninety-two years later, they are hauntingly familiar. Consider Spengler’s prescience from 1931.
“The famous ‘dissemination of industry’ set in, motivated by the idea of getting bigger profits by bringing production into the marketing area. And so, in place of the export of finished products exclusively, they began an export of secrets, processes, methods, engineers, and managers.”
“Their agendas are indifferent to creed and country and their loyalty is only to their shareholders, who they are obligated to please by constantly increasing not only their profits but the rate at which profit increases.”
Globalization is what our elites continue to shove down our throats and the notion that somehow, we will all be better off with a frictionless movement of goods, people and capital across any and all international borders. It’s enriched a new crop of plutocrats and beggared working men and women around the world.
What’s more, globalization is not only bad for workers like Mr. P, who feel like a target is on their back; it’s bad for the country and our competitive posture.
Two years ago, I had breakfast with a senior leader at Hewlett Packard who told me that decades of chasing after an efficiency model have hurt their innovation and actual productivity. Admittedly, offshoring their operations has enabled them to maximize profits, but as good as those tactics are at replicating existing processes, they’re bad for nurturing a culture of problem solving and inventive thinking.
Mr. P and individuals like him are as Spengler opined, inheritors of a tradition “which represents a victory of pure technical thought over big problems.” But sadly, and here we go again, our elites have made the decision to throw highly productive people like Mr. P overboard.
In the long run, shunning these skilled workers hurts the competitiveness of U.S. industry and consequently, our country.
For Spengler the “Faustian Man” was symbolized by the ashen remains of a Roman soldier, one who died “while on duty, in front of a house in Pompeii on the day of its volcanic eruption, simply because his superiors had not relieved him of duty.”
Metaphorically speaking, Mr. P is that Faustian Man facing his own Pompeii. Only it’s not a volcano he needs fear, it’s globalization. So, should he, as did the Roman soldier, remain at his post until he is properly relieved or fired? Or should he fight back?
We believe it’s not too late for Mr. P to fight back!
In closing, I want to thank you for your generous support and encourage you to listen to my podcasts. I recently spoke with Michael North and Mark Krikorian from the Center for Immigration Studies and had a conversation with John Michael Greer in which I dared discuss the importance of social cohesion in the early 21st century.
In Solidarity.
H-1B Visa Program: Myths and Needed Reforms
On this week’s episode of Parsing Immigration Policy, host of the podcast and Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies Mark Krikorian is joined by Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers, and David North, a Center fellow. They discuss the historical changes of the H-1B program, the impact on wages, working conditions, and offshoring, and the fact it is rarely temporary and the workers are rarely “the best and brightest”. |
Latest Posts
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 UC Considering Hiring Foreign-Born Students without Valid Work Permits The regents must evaluate where U.S.-born citizen students whose families have funded UC for generations should fit into the equation. Read More |
John Michael Greer Discusses Enchantment and Social Cohesion in America In The Early 21st Century
It was great to sit down with John Michael Greer for an hour and listen to his thoughts on topic of social cohesion against the backdrop of an empire that is clearly in decline. A widely respected author and blogger in fields ranging from nature spirituality to the future of industrial society, John Michael Greer is the author of more than seventy books, including sixteen novels, and blogs weekly at ecosophia.net. He lives in Rhode Island with his wife Sara. |
Media Coverage
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 May 24, 2023 – New Amnesty Bill Seeks to Flood American White-Collar Labor Market The draft bill supercharges flow of foreign workers into white-collar U.S. jobs. Read More |
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Does the Government Care if Citizens Are Excluded from a Firm’s Hires? Read more
90% of laid-off H-1B visa holders were able to find new work against all odds. Here’s what the data tells us about America’s complicated relationship with foreign-born talent Read more
Which “Refugees” Are We Welcoming? Read more
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