Executive Director's Corner
Dear All, When India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Washington, D.C. last week and was given the red-carpet treatment by our political and corporate elites, I couldn’t help but shake my head and wonder why. Feted by President Biden, and socializing with Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella the CEO of Microsoft, and other CEOs of American and Indian companies, it was all quite a show. Unfortunately, in rolling out the red carpet for Modi and the other mainly technology company CEOs, I think President Biden got it all wrong. Why? Because the U.S. and India are not “teaming up to design and develop new technologies that are going to transform the lives of our people around the world.” Rather, the only thing coming from this teaming is the transformation of America’s highly productive middle class, and that transformation will result in it being kicked to the curb in favor of good paying professional jobs being outsourced and offshored to low-cost countries like India. In his remarks that evening, President Biden went on to state: “We’re going to see more technological change — you’ve heard me say this a number of times — in the next 10 years than we saw in the last 50 years. And we need your help — and I’m talking to the CEOs around this table, Indian and American. We need your help to seize the moment, to help manage the risk to our societies, our economies, and to our nations’ national security.” I hate to burst the President’s bubble, but the pace of innovation, if measured by actual disruptive technologies and U.S. based patents, has been slowing down and significantly since 1976. And the CEOs gathered around him last week are a big part of the reason why. Much of what gets labeled as innovation these days is merely creative ways of cramming strings of logic together and generally building upon prior discoveries. In the article Papers and Patents Are Becoming Less Disruptive Over Time and published in the January issue of Nature, its authors lamented, “We find that papers and patents are increasingly less likely to break with the past in ways that push science and technology in new directions. . . Overall, our results suggest that slowing rates of disruption may reflect a fundamental shift in the nature of science and technology.” India is not an innovative country, but America is and if you want to learn just how innovative and why, I strongly suggest you read Vaclav Smil’s book, Made In The U.S.A. In it, he makes a strong case that great innovation is driven by a robust manufacturing sector and that the manufacturing sector provides a feedback loop like no other. Or just read this passage from Mark Twain’s 1889 novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in which he waxes about his working in manufacturing and the resulting benefits. “I am an American. I was born and reared in Hartford, in the State of Connecticut . . . So I am a Yankee of the Yankees—and practical; yes, and nearly barren of sentiment . . . I went over to the great arms factory and learned my real trade; learned all there was to it; learned to make everything: guns, revolvers, cannon, boilers, engines, all sorts of labor-saving machinery. Why, I could make anything a body wanted—anything in the world, it didn’t make any difference what; and if there wasn’t any quick new-fangled way to make a thing, I could invent one—and do it as easy as rolling off a log.” Our U.S. Tech Workers organization has been doing yeoman’s work for the past five years pushing back against the outsourcing and offshoring of high paying, white collar jobs in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), and it’s here where we bump heads against the American and Indian CEOs schmoozing at the White House last week. For the past thirty years, corporations around the world, and for a plethora of reasons, have been following efficiency models in which the quaint notion of building a better mouse trap has been sidelined by the race to maximize profit and increase earnings per share. Nowhere has the impact of that choice been more evident than in the career trajectory of STEM jobs. Years ago, those who went to college, studied science, technology, engineering and math, and then worked in a STEM field, did well for themselves. But not anymore. Today, the Tim Cook CEOs of the world view those very workers as expensive, undeserving and expendable. And since the 1990’s they’ve moved at warp speed to offload them by outsourcing whole departments to H-1B visa dependent companies. Given that 73% of individuals in the U.S. on an H-1B visa hail from India, it’s little wonder the number of H-1B visa holders increases* when an Indian becomes CEO of a U.S, corporation. For example:
I did a deep dive on the above two years ago in a newsletter titled, Is The Future Indian CEOs. Offshoring and outsourcing do wonders for the bottom line, but they mask the backwardation on actual innovation and productivity with a bloated stock price. Plus the money laid out to buy back a company’s stock starves it from the funding it needs to acquire, upgrade and maintain its physical assets and invest in its workforce. So, what’s the problem? It’s not capitalism. Capitalism is the system that freed the peasants from the monarchists, and it gave us the ability to innovate and create industry leading technology companies like Intel, and before that Fairchild, and before that UNIVAC. The problem is globalization and the cult of neoliberalism, where everything is reduced to an exchange – even human beings. It’s why Disney thought nothing of replacing a database program manager who’d been with them twelve years and doing great work, with an Indian national on an H-1b visa who the database manager ultimately had to onboard and job train before being fired. Of the CEOs gathered at the White House last week, how many of them founded their companies? Not Pichai, nor Cook, nor Nadella. Currently, the lion’s share of their total compensation is based on how well the stock performs, so given the choice, they’ll choose earnings per share over investing in research and development, every time. In closing, we must ask ourselves, what’s in America’s best interests. Allowing hucksters like Narendra Modi to offer innovative ways to transfer technology and jobs to India and to Indians at the expense of American jobs, doesn’t benefit us. So, let’s stop the hosting and toasting! *Due to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, H-1B visa applications were down across the spectrum.
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H-1B Data Hub The data, much like the truth, “is out there.” But presenting it in a manner that makes it easily accessible is often difficult. With the help of our volunteers, we have found a way to make H-1B visa data easy to search and present. This feature will now reside permanently on our website. |
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