Who in their right mind would major in computer science now?

It wasn't that long ago that tech skills were touted as the key to landing a job in the "new service economy" or the "new information economy" or whatever it was called in any given year by Thomas Friedman, whose own job is about dead trees. And yes, for a while, anyone with the right degree, or even a willingness to learn, could get into IT.

But the days when someone like me, who was able to get an entry-level programming job simply by transferring my secretarial skills into the IT department working for the department heads, expressing a desire to get into programming, and starting a couple of graduate courses, are over. I was extraordinarily lucky, even by the standards of 1988. I had a basic knowledge of programming concepts from struggling through an Introduction to Pascal course, but I required training in the 4GL that was being used, and the VAX operating system on which it ran. I learned as I went. I stopped grad school because I had to learn how to do my job. Two years later I saw that PC programming was the way to go, taught myself C out of a book, and got a job with a smalll investment consulting company writing C programs, working with the database application Paradox, and doing some Novell Netware administration -- all learned on the fly, on the job. Three years later I took a job that in short order I grew to hate, working on voice response systems. But it was walking distance from home, there was no commuting time, and I was able to go back to school and have it paid for. I stuck it out for a year and moved to another small software VAR, where I wrote Visual Basic programs after teaching myself THAT out of a book before even starting the job, and where I got into basic HTML web sites in 1996 -- again, teaching myself out of a book.

IT was like that in those days. The ability to learn quickly, a willingness to just jump in, initiative, some smarts -- that was all you needed.

Not today. Today, you can teach yourself out of a book till the cows come home. You can have skills in fourteen different programming languages, and if you are missing the fifteenth, you are out of luck. Ads for IT people contain a laundry list of skills that no one person can possibly have, because they involve completely different kinds of left brain/right brain dominance. You'll see ads for someone who has experience in a dozen programming languages, who's an experienced network administrator, a computer security expert, a graphic designer, a technical writer, and a trainer. And that's an ad for one job.

None of these jobs exist, of course. They are designed to have nobody qualify for them so that companies can wail that there just aren't enough qualified people and they simiply HAVE to outsource the wrok to countries that pay a dollar an hour at most.

And so, while politicians of both parties are continuing to laud education and "retraining" as a panacea for the unemployment situation, as they continue with the old chestnut that it's simply a question of workers gaining new tech skills, those who have lost their tech jobs, especially if they are over 40, might as well be auto workers:

“We are talking about people with very particular, advanced skills out there who are at this point just not needed anymore,” says Bart van Ark, chief economist at the Conference Board, a business and economic research organization. “Even in this sector, there is tremendous insecurity.”

Government labor reports released this year, including the most recent one, present a tableau of shrinking opportunities in high-skill fields.

Job growth in fields like computer systems design and Internet publishing has been slow in the last year. Employment in areas like data processing and software publishing has actually fallen. Additionally, computer scientists, systems analysts and computer programmers all had unemployment rates of around 6 percent in the second quarter of this year.

While that might sound like a blessing compared with the rampant joblessness in manufacturing, it is still significantly higher than the unemployment rates in other white-collar professions.

The chief hurdles to more robust technology hiring appear to be increasing automation and the addition of highly skilled labor overseas. The result is a mismatch of skill levels here at home: not enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms, and too many people with abilities that can be duplicated offshore at lower cost.

That’s a familiar situation to many out-of-work software engineers, whose skills start depreciating almost as soon as they are laid off, given the dynamism of the industry.

“I’m sending out lots and lots and lots of applications, to everywhere within a 50-mile radius,” says Rosamaria Carbonell Mann, 49, a software engineer who was terminated in June when her employer closed its branch in Corvallis, Ore., and sent the work to China.

Corvallis was once a hotbed for tech start-ups. But Ms. Mann said that with layoffs from other tech companies in the area, including Hewlett-Packard, the city now has a glut of people like herself: unemployed engineers with multiple degrees. “I apply for everything I can find, but there are just not that many jobs out there,” she said.

Nevertheless, many high-tech companies large and small say they are struggling to find highly skilled engineering talent in the United States.

“We are firing up our college recruiting program, enduring all manner of humiliation to try to fill these jobs,” said Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, an online brokerage agency for buying and selling homes that is based in Seattle and San Francisco. “I do think we’re still chasing them, not the other way around.”

Perhaps companies are still chasing workers because they have absolutely no idea what to look for. You are not going to get a graphic designer and a guy who can bang out thousands of lines of bug-free code in a day in the same person. Network administrators usually don't have experience with technical writing. A C# programmer isn't going to be able to design your logos or write your marketing copy. However, a 49-year-old C++ programmer can get up to speed with C# in a matter of weeks simply by just starting to do the job.

But of course companies don't think like this. The hiring process tends to be run by human resources departments the staffs of which have no idea what the difference is between a programmer and a network administrator, between a web designer and software engineer. Resumes are culled out by keywords, and if yours doesn't have every keyword they're looking for, you are out of luck.

I contrast the plight of IT workers with my own situation over the last two years. Looking back, I'm astonished at how spectacularly unqualified I was at the time I was hired for the job I currently have. Oh, I had some passing familiarity with the process of the job from my previous one, but for the last three years on my previous job, most of what I did was build web sites, not the kind of medical applications for which I interviewed. I remember interviewing for this job, and answering questions with "No....no....I don't have experience with that....no, we had a guy who built that...no...no, but I did do...." I walked out of there thinking "Well, that was a waste of two hours", and two weeks later I had an offer.

As it turns out, the department was building a staff largely from scratch. Some people who couldn't handle the move to data capture systems left, others were hired, and I am after a mere two years the #3 person in seniority. The learning curve has been at times like climbing Mount Everest. I'm largely balanced between left brain and right brain, with slight right brain dominance. I gravitate towards writing and words and emotion rather than numbers and logic. Science programs on television make me glaze over, but I'll watch intently a program on how to build a kitchen cabinet. This balance allows me to do more quantitative work than a purely right-brained person would be able to do, but it does not come naturally. But I was fifty-three when I took the job, I am fifty-five now, and I've not only been able to learn almost from scratch new tools, new concepts, and also how to lead groups of people, but I've also won two employee awards for doing so. My experience makes every single argument that companies make for not hiring in the US ring completely hollow.

For better or worse, our society is organized around work, much of it around working for someone else. If we are evolving into a race to the bottom, in which the companies that used to employ us are chasing ever-cheaper, ever-more-exploitable workers, then this notion of work is going to have to change. I'm not sure what it should or will become, but simply demonizing those that corporations have left behind, or believing the claims of "We can't find qualified people", is not the answer.

That didn't take long

You just KNEW this was going to happen:

U.S. reality TV show maker Stone and Company Entertainment wants Slater to host a show in which 'various disgruntled workers quit their jobs in extravagant ways', according to celebrity website TMZ.

His lawyer is said to have already received the offer and is discussing it with his client.

Stone Entertainment has produced past reality shows such as The Mole, NYC Prep, Top Design, and Tim Gunn's Guide to Style.

Slater, who was spotted relaxing by the beach following his resignation, has said he is taking time to think about his next move.

This weekend he said: 'There's a lot of things in the works.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1303625/Hero-ex-flight-attendant-Steven-Slater-offered-reality-TV-show.html?ito=feeds-newsxml#ixzz0wrA514eU

So TRAIN them, dammit!!

For the last thirty years, we've watched corporations shed jobs and smug job-secure talking heads in the media talk about how the unemployed need to seek "retraining". There's not an economic plan we've seen in the last three decades that didn't give lip service to "gaining new skills." The problem with gaining such skills is that often they have to be done right on the job, because of the specific nature of equipment or of systems used.

In my last three jobs, I did not have pre-existing skills in the programming languages or tools used. Yes, when it was just about writing code I could buy a book for forty bucks and Barnes and Noble and be ahead of the curve when I arrived on the job. But when it's a specific application-building took, let's say, that doesn't involve the direct writing of code, or as is the case in my current job, having to know something about how clinical trials are done for oncology, it's all on-the-job training. Some of it has been accomplished through company-paid training, but a good chunk of it has been just learning as I go. Mine is a job that requires a master's degree and some experience or a bachelor's degree and more experience. But what about manufacturing workers?

Now it seems that the manufacturing sector has a new excuse for not hiring: They can't find people with the right skills:

Factory owners have been adding jobs slowly but steadily since the beginning of the year, giving a lift to the fragile economic recovery. And because they laid off so many workers — more than two million since the end of 2007 — manufacturers now have a vast pool of people to choose from.

Yet some of these employers complain that they cannot fill their openings.

Plenty of people are applying for the jobs. The problem, the companies say, is a mismatch between the kind of skilled workers needed and the ranks of the unemployed.

[snip]

As unlikely as it would seem against this backdrop, manufacturers who want to expand find that hiring is not always easy. During the recession, domestic manufacturers appear to have accelerated the long-term move toward greater automation, laying off more of their lowest-skilled workers and replacing them with cheaper labor abroad.

Now they are looking to hire people who can operate sophisticated computerized machinery, follow complex blueprints and demonstrate higher math proficiency than was previously required of the typical assembly line worker.

Makers of innovative products like advanced medical devices and wind turbines are among those growing quickly and looking to hire, and they too need higher skills.

“That’s where you’re seeing the pain point,” said Baiju R. Shah, chief executive of BioEnterprise, a nonprofit group in Cleveland trying to turn the region into a center for medical innovation. “The people that are out of work just don’t match the types of jobs that are here, open and growing.”

The increasing emphasis on more advanced skills raises policy questions about how to help low-skilled job seekers who are being turned away at the factory door and increasingly becoming the long-term unemployed. This week, the Senate reconsidered but declined to extend unemployment benefits, after earlier extensions raised the maximum to 99 weeks.

The Obama administration has advocated further stimulus measures, which the Senate rejected, and has allocated more money for training. Still, officials say more robust job creation is the real solution.

But a number of manufacturers say that even if demand surges, they will never bring back many of the lower-skilled jobs, and that training is not yet delivering the skilled employees they need.

[snip]

All candidates at Ben Venue must pass a basic skills test showing they can read and understand math at a ninth-grade level. A significant portion of recent applicants failed, and the company has been disappointed by the quality of graduates from local training programs. It is now struggling to fill 100 positions.

If schools are not graduating studients who can read and understand math, that's a problem that has to be addressed first -- and not just by testing. What's going on in the homes? Are there changes in the way we need to teach? Second of all, if "local training programs" -- places like so-called tech schools that charge tens of thousands of dollars for skills courses for skills that are not used by employers, then perhaps companies need to set up training programs for the skills they need. If they don't want to commit to permanance for employees-in-training, then do some aptitude testing, create short-term apprenticeships followed by permanent employment for those who pass. I don't doubt for one minute that at least a good part of the workforce applying for these jobs CAN learn what they need to do. But these companies have to start returning to the days when they invested in their employees, rather than treating them as just so much expendable chaff.

OK, wingnuts, just what are these people supposed to do.

I've been lucky.

For years I did secretarial and administrative work. I managed to get a job as an entry level programmer because I'd shown that I know my way around a Mac and wasn't intimidated by computers. I'd already taken a couple of grad school courses, and he gave me a break. Without that, I would have been stuck in secretarial work in perpetuity, like most other sociology majors.

I have a master's degree in Management Information Systems, obtained almost entirely on the dollar of employers. It took me five years to do it, one class at a time, but it didn't break the bank for me to get it. That one of said employers nearly drove me to consider suicide and the other ended up not having anything to do is not the point. The point is that when recruiters were telling me that I was "light on the tech", the degree gave me a sort of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval to later potential employers.

At the end of August, 2008, I was laid off after eight years in the same job. For the first five years, the work I was doing gave me some passing familiarity with the area in which I work now. After that, it was mostly make-work web and marketing projects until the grant funding dried up. I had six weeks notice of when my last day would be, and I'd been hoarding vacation time (when your job is at a nonprofit associated with a state agency, you can do that). So all told, by the time I walked out the door for the last time, I'd had six weeks to find a job, I had six weeks of full pay coming, and then another six months of unemployment. I was at least hopeful I'd find something.

I was 53 years old.

This is not an age where you want to be laid off, not when your skills are primarily web development using tools that are not what most of the industry wants. But I was intrepid. I knew the kinds of things I could do, what I wanted to do, and I tailored resumes for each. I think I sent out over a hundred resumes in the first two weeks after I got the word. I got lucky, in that a co-worker contacted a friend who checked her employer's job postings and found one in one of the areas at which I was looking. I applied for the job, got a response that the job had been filled, but that there was another one in the group. That was the one I got.

It wasn't that I was so wonderful. I recall answering many questions on the interview as "No, haven't done that....No, we had a guy who did that....No, I wasn't involved in that." But apparently what I do is this screwy little niche in which there aren't many people. There were a number of openings, and I got one of them. I think some of it was that I interview well and I have a pulse.

The learning curve has been unbelievable. I've spent a year and a half cramming information into my head as fast as I can; medical terminology and practices, preposterous deadlines, dragging international teams kicking and screaming through the development process. It's been 80-hour weeks, bouts of frustration that make me want to jump out a window.

But at least I have a job and I was lucky enough to get laid off literally right before the U.S. economy and job market went completely into the toilet.

I was lucky. I could have ended up like this:

The tough environment has been especially disorienting for older and more experienced workers like Cynthia Norton, 52, an unemployed administrative assistant in Jacksonville.

“I know I’m good at this,” says Ms. Norton. “So how the hell did I end up here?”

Administrative work has always been Ms. Norton’s “calling,” she says, ever since she started work as an assistant for her aunt at 16, back when the uniform was a light blue polyester suit and a neckerchief. In the ensuing decades she has filed, typed and answered phones for just about every breed of business, from a law firm to a strip club. As a secretary at the RAND Corporation, she once even had the honor of escorting Henry Kissinger around the building.

But since she was laid off from an insurance company two years ago, no one seems to need her well-honed office know-how.

[snip]

Ms. Norton has sent out hundreds of résumés without luck. Twice, the openings she interviewed for were eliminated by employers who decided, upon further reflection, that redistributing administrative tasks among existing employees made more sense than replacing the outgoing secretary.

One employer decided this shortly after Ms. Norton had already started showing up for work.

Ms. Norton is reluctant to believe that her three decades of experience and her typing talents, up to 120 words a minute, are now obsolete. So she looks for other explanations.

Employers, she thinks, fear she will be disloyal and jump ship for a higher-paying job as soon as one comes along.

Sometimes she blames the bad economy in Jacksonville. Sometimes she sees age discrimination. Sometimes she thinks the problem is that she has not been able to afford a haircut in a while. Or perhaps the paper her résumé is printed on is not nice enough.

The problem cannot be that the occupation she has devoted her life to has been largely computerized, she says.

“You can’t replace the human thought process,” she says. “I can anticipate people’s needs. Usually, I give them what they want before they even know they need it. There will never be a machine that can do that.”

[snip]

Ms. Norton has spent most of the last two years working part time at Wal-Mart as a cashier, bringing home about a third of what she had earned as an administrative assistant. Besides the hit to her pocketbook, she grew frustrated that the work has not tapped her full potential.

“A monkey could do what I do,” she says of her work as a cashier. “Actually, a monkey would get bored.”

Ms. Norton says she cannot find any government programs to help her strengthen the “thin bootstraps” she intends to pull herself up by. Because of the Wal-Mart job, she has been ineligible for unemployment benefits, and she says she made too much money to qualify for food stamps or Medicaid last year.

“If you’re not a minority, or not handicapped, or not a young parent, or not a veteran, or not in some other certain category, your hope of finding help and any hope of finding work out there is basically nil,” Ms. Norton says. “I know. I’ve looked.”

[snip]

Ms. Norton, for her part, may be reluctant to acknowledge that many of her traditional administrative assistant skills are obsolete, but she has tried to retrain — or as she puts it, adapt her existing skills — to a new career in the expanding health care industry.

Even that has proved difficult.

She attended an eight-month course last year, on a $17,000 student loan, to obtain certification as a medical assistant. She was trained to do front-office work, like billing, as well as back-office work, like giving injections and drawing blood.

The school that trained her, though, neglected to inform her that local employers require at least a year’s worth of experience — generally done through volunteering at a clinic — before hiring someone for a paid job in the field.

She says she cannot afford to spend a year volunteering, especially with her student loan coming due soon. She has one prospect for part-time administrative work in Los Angeles — where she once had her own administrative support and secretarial services business, SilverKeys — but she does not have the money to relocate.

“If I had $3,000 in my pocket right now, I would pack up my S.U.V., grab my dog and go straight back,” she says. “That’s my only answer.”

With so few local job prospects and most of her possessions of value already liquidated she has considered selling her blood to help pay for the move. But she says she cannot find a market for that, either; blood collection agencies, she said, told her they do not buy her blood type.

“Sometimes I think I’d be better off in jail,” she says, only half joking. “I’d have three meals a day and structure in my life. I’d be able to go to school. I’d have more opportunities if I were an inmate than I do here trying to be a contributing member of society.”

The author of this article is a condescending asshole who equates the many tasks an administrative assistant does with "filing." Where I work now, our administrative assistants plan meetings (many of them out of town, requiring elaborate international travel arrangements). They take care of food service for meetings, they make sure the supply cabinet is full and the printers have toner. When the e-mail menu item is missing from the copier/scanner and you think you're going crazy, she assures you that you're not. They coordinate office moves, something of which there's been a lot lately. When you need something, they always have the answer. I know what these women do because I've been one of them. But because they're always still thought of as "file clerks", they're regarded as expendable.

The woman profiled in the article may not want to admit that some of her skills are obsolete, but administrative work isn't just about typing and filing and answering phones. And she isn't just sitting and whining about her job category no longer existing. She's tried to get "retrained" only to find that having a certificate from a tech school doesn't get you in the door. It's the old "You can't get a job without experience and you can't get expeience without a job Catch-22. Add the fact that she's over fifty to the equation, and she is pretty much up a creek without a paddle.

What are people like this supposed to do? What happens when you do everything right and your job is outsourced or eliminated and you go into hock getting "retrained" and STILL can't find anything because you don't have practical experience, or you're not pretty anymore, or they think you're going to cost too much in health care? Are we as a society going to just throw all of this life and work experience in the garbage? And it isn't just older workers, it's young workers too who find that their conventional education is worthless.

When are we going to wake up and instead of blaming immigrants and black people and screaming about Obama and socialism, realize that for the last thirty years there has been a systematic effort, now largely successful, by corporate interests, to eliminate the middle class and push those who used to be in it down into poverty?

It's a drop in the bucket, but it's a start

It's a very small start that hopefully will continue:

Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania recorded sizable gains in employment in March and were among 33 states posting increases.

In its monthly look at state job trends, the Labor Department said Friday that Maryland led the country with a gain of 35,800 payroll jobs last month. Virginia and Pennsylvania also posted increases that topped 20,000 in the month.

By contrast, Michigan continued to have the nation’s highest unemployment rate and also led the country in job losses in March with a decline of 9,500. Nevada and Florida also posted sizable job losses and were among 17 states recording job losses in the month.

Nationally, the unemployment remained unchanged at 9.7 percent in March while payrolls grew by 162,000, the biggest gain in three years.

The department’s report Friday showed how the job gains and losses were distributed among the states.

The increases in nonfarm payroll employment occurred in 33 states and the District of Colombia. In February, only 23 states had seen job gains while 27 states and the District of Columbia had recorded job losses.

Of course none of this will matter to the teabaggers, who are still going to be out there longing for the good old days when a white man was in the White House, TARP was instituted, and the economy was in a free-fall.

A few weeks ago, Rachel Maddow graphically depicted the job creation record since Barack Obama took office vs. the Bush years:

But the teabaggers don't let something as simple as facts and numbers get in the way; after all, as Stephen Colbert said, facts have a well-known liberal bias.

It doesn't matter to the teabaggers that Barack Obama has said NOTHING about guns, gun laws, or gun control.

It doesn't matter to the teabaggers that their Federal taxes have gone DOWN since Barack Obama took office (their state taxes may differ, but perhaps they might want to talk to their Republican governors about that one).

It doesn't even seem to matter that Obama is continuing many of the surveillance activities that were an outrage during the Bush years and still are; and it sure as hell didn't bother them then.

So what is this "freedom" they think they've lost? No one is trying to take their guns. Their Federal taxes are lower. So what is it? Is it just that someone they don't like is in the White House, and they think this is a Constitutional crisis?

This kind of cluelessness and cynicism is almost impossible to fathom

When I started my new job at the end of last September, one of the first things I had to do was to get ready for a big divisional meeting in a fabulous European city. I remember thinking at the time, "How can a company afford to do something like this right now?" So when the trip was cancelled, I not only wasn't surprised, I wasn't disappointed either. I would much rather be employed by a company that doesn't lay people off and is willing to make small, sensible cost cuts than one that continues to run expensive get-togethers after accepting piles of taxpayer cash. I've come to realize that when you work with congenial people, team-building exercises can be fun, not the kind of trauma that such things were when I was in college in my provincial little college in eastern Pennsylvania where half the kids had never met a Jew before.

But our European meeting was cancelled, and no one pitched a fit. For we all know that we're fortunate to have jobs and to work for a company that doesn't seem to succumb to the kind of short-term thinking that far too many American companies do these days.

But at Wells Fargo, they don't have the confidence that their employees will do a good job without being treated to the dog biscuit of free trips. This is from their full-page ad in the New York Times yesterday, in which the company blames the media for everything from disgruntled employees to putting the jobs of hotel housekeepers in jeopardy:

The proglem is many media stories on this subject have been deliberately misleading. These one-sided stories lead you to believe every employee recognition event is a junket, a boondoggle, a waste, or that it's for highly-paid executives. Because of the misperceptions these stories have created, Wells Fargo has decided to cancel all its major annual recognition events for its team members for the rest of this year.

So who gets hurt when this happens? The Wells Fargo team members across America who are most deserving of recognition and our gratitude. Tellers. Personal bankers. Phone bankers. financial advisors. Mortgage sales people and processors. Operations clerks. Technology specialists. Credit analysts....

Do you believe that the tellers at your local Wells Fargo branch get to go to these things? I don't.

It goes on:

Annualy, for the past 20 years, we'verecognized our top team members from various businesses at several special four-day events, like the one we had planned for our terrific mortgage team wh helped us originate $230 billion in mortgages in the last year. For many, it's the only time in their lives that they're publicly recognized and thanked for a job well done. This recognition energizes them. It inspires them and their team members to want to create an even better experience for our customers. Another annual event -- which our top performers in community banking had all looked forward to -- was to have been held in May. But not this year. Who loses besides our team members? The workers who depend on our business. The hospitality industry. Hotel housekeepers. Restaurant servers. The airlines.

Yes, really,. We're supposed to believe that Wells Fargo employees won't do their jobs unless they're rewarded with a fancy trip. What does it say about how they're treated on a daily basis? I can tell you from personal experience where I work now that when you treat employees with respect, pay them well, and recognize exceptional achievement on an ongoing basis, you don't have to send them on expensive trips to resorts to make them want to do their jobs.

If Wells Fargo doesn't want this kind of scrutiny of their practices, perhaps they shouldn't take the government money.

Tell me about it.

Heck of a job, Bushie. Is this your way of getting women out of the workplace and back to the kitchen where they belong? (All except Sarah Palin, of course, because it's OK to be a career woman if you're a Republican.)

The unemployment rate jumped to 6.1 percent in August, the highest level since September of 2003. The establishment survey showed the economy losing another 84,000 jobs in August. With downward revisions to data for the prior two months, the economy has lost an average of 81,000 jobs over the last three months.

Virtually all the data in the household survey indicates that the labor market is weakening at a rapid pace. The 6.1 percent unemployment rate is only 0.2 percentage points below the 6.3 percent peak reached in June of 2003. The employment to population ratio (EPOP) ratio fell to 62.1 percent, only slightly above the 62.0 percent low hit in September of 2003.

Unemployment rose among almost all demographic groups, but women were hit hardest, with a rise of 0.7 pp to 5.3 percent.

[snip]

The only sectors that continue to show healthy job gains are health care, which added another 26,900 jobs, and state and local governments, which added 18,000 jobs. Job growth in both of these sectors is likely to fade as state and local budget shortfalls force cutbacks.

Now that's funny, my job was in both state and (arguably) health care, and here I am. Ha ha ha.

The hidden unemployment

There's more than one way to push people out of the workforce and out of the mainstream. One of the most cost-effective ways is to move people from full-time to part-time work. These people don't inflate and enlarge the unemployment figures because they are at least marginally employed, and they tend not to cost employers too much money, because in many companies, part-time employees are ineligible for health insurance.

But as reported in the New York Times today, part-time employees aren't reliable consumers, and part-time work is often the first step down the slide into poverty:

The number of Americans who have seen their full-time jobs chopped to part time because of weak business has swelled to more than 3.7 million — the largest figure since the government began tracking such data more than half a century ago.

The loss of pay has become a primary source of pain for millions of American families, reinforcing the downturn gripping the economy. Paychecks are shrinking just as home prices plunge and gas prices soar, furthering the austerity across the nation.

“I either stop eating, or stop using anything I can,” said Marvin L. Zinn, a clerk at a Walgreens drugstore in St. Joseph, Mich., who has seen his take-home pay drop to about $550 every two weeks from about $650, as his weekly hours have dropped to 37.5 from 44 in recent months.

Mr. Zinn has run up nearly $2,000 in credit card debt to buy food. He has put off dental work. He no longer attends church, he said, “because I can’t afford to drive.”

On the surface, the job market is weak but hardly desperate. Layoffs remain less frequent than in many economic downturns, and the unemployment rate is a relatively modest 5.5 percent. But that figure masks the strains of those who are losing hours or working part time because they cannot find full-time work — a stealth force that is eroding American spending power.

All told, people the government classifies as working part time involuntarily — predominantly those who have lost hours or cannot find full-time work — swelled to 5.3 million last month, a jump of greater than 1 million over the last year.

Workers who see their pay cut in half and their benefits terminated are more likely to accumulate debt just to make ends meet. They're more likely to put off medical and dental checkups and procedures. They're more likely to enter foreclosure. And this benefits overall American society -- how? Yes, reduced payroll costs can help companies get through the quarter without causing Jim Cramer to jump up and down and screech about them on his television show. But is this the best solution for reduced profits? Or are companies just killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

Yesterday I went for a dental cleaning and to have a crown started on a tooth my dentist has been monitoring for two years. I go for cleanings four times a year, and my dental coverage has helped out with two of them. By the time they were my age, both my parents were well into bridgework and other dental problems. My dental heredity is so bad that my baby teeth sprouted with cavities already in them. But I still have all of my own teeth. The back teeth are all crowned, but they're all mine. Preventive dental medicine and the gradual crowning of all of the teeth that contained more amalgam than tooth has kept me from being toothless in addition to being middle-aged and laid off. Last year I had a colonoscopy, which offers some protection against colon cancer by literally nipping potentially problematic polyps in the bud.

I'm relatively fortunate in that when my insurance lapses at the end of September, and I haven't been lucky enough to find another job by then, Mr. Brilliant can enroll us both on his employer's plan. Of course, this could have the effect of making him more expensive and therefore more expendable, but it's a risk we have to take. Othes aren't so lucky. Others like one of our own, Susie Madrak:

Here’s the deal, kids: I’m out of work now and I need three different surgeries. (I’m just the tiniest bit suspicious that this had something to do with the timing of my layoff.)

I’m having one surgery (an eye operation - I’m seeing double) in two weeks, but I need to schedule the other two and I just can’t fit them all into the next month, which is when my insurance runs out.

I figure three months’ COBRA coverage will do the trick. That’s $447.91 per month, for a grand total of $1343.73.

I plan to pick up some of that slack with blatant advertising (expect to see a lot more ads and text links - please click on them, it helps) but I also need to ask you for donations.

Is this what we've come to? That people have to beg for donations? We see it everywhere. Here in northern NJ, a foundation has been set up to help local families dealing with family members who are injured or ill. Coin collection cans and pancake breakfasts abound. Here in Blogtopia (™ Skippy), those needing help ask for it, and the community responds. This is the Republican dream society, in which individuals are reliant on the kindness of strangers, and the ability of strangers to help out. But is this the country we want to live in; one in which employees with health insurance are in danger of being fired because they are too expensive, in which private health insurance is prohibitively expensive, and where people in need of surgery are reliant on the five dollar donations of other people in similarly threatened straits?

Cutting staff is an easy way to make the balance sheet look better to the financial analysts in the short run. But after you get through the quarter, then what? Who buys your products? Who pays the taxes to perpetuate the Iraq War in perpetuity? And what happens to the sick people who have been let go?

Maybe it's all just a way to free up jobs for men

At one point a number of years ago, when Mr. Brilliant was between jobs, he would refer to himself as an "unemployed bum." I asked him the other day what an unemployed woman was, and he said "an unemployed bumette." That didn't ring quite right, and after a moment I realized that an unemployed woman was essentially a housewife, or if she has kids, a "stay-at-home-mom."

I'm beginning to have some hope that it just might be unnecessary to even file for unemployment, but if it does take longer to find a new job than I hope it does, my days after August 29 are hardly going to be filled with household chores, given the amount of time job-hunting takes up. But without HAVING to be someplace for X hours a day, I'm reasonably confident that the house will be far cleaner and tidier than it is when we're both working.

The layoffs in my department consist of three women and two men, which in our case means that MEN are disproportionately represented, given that the new configuration will consist of exactly ONE man at a lower-than-director level and another who works from home -- and the rest are women. But that's not the case in the national employment picture:

This week, Congress issued a report, titled “Equality in Job Loss: Women are Increasingly Vulnerable to Layoffs During Recessions,” that may — if read in its entirety — finally, officially and definitively sound a death knell for the story of the Opt-Out Revolution. The report, commissioned by Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney of New York, states categorically that mothers are not leaving the workforce to stay home with their kids. They’re being forced out.

Women — all women, mothers or not — were hit “especially hard” hard by the recession of 2001 and the recovery-that-never-really-was, the report states. “Unlike in the recessions of the early 1980s and 1990s, during the 2001 recession, the percent of jobs lost by women often exceeded that of men in the industries hardest hit by the downturn. The lackluster recovery of the 2000s made it difficult for women to regain their jobs — women’s employment rates never returned to their pre-recession peak.”

While prior recessions tended to spare women’s jobs relative to men’s, that trend has been reversed in the current downturn, thanks in part to women’s progress in entering formerly male industries and occupations, and in part to the fact that job sectors like service and retail, which still employ disproportionate numbers of women, have suffered disproportionate losses. And this — not a calling to motherhood — accounts for the fall, starting in 2000, of women’s labor force participation rates.

“Women may be more susceptible to the impact of the business cycle than they were when they were more highly concentrated in a smaller number of non-cyclical occupations, like teaching and nursing,” the report states. “There is no evidence, however, that mothers are increasingly ‘opting out’ of employment, in favor of full-time motherhood. For this story to be true, the employment rate of non-mothers would have had to diverge sharply from that of mothers, which has not been the case.”

In fact, Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, which released the report, proved in earlier research that there was no evidence at all for the belief that having children was causing women to drop out of work. On the contrary: the likelihood that a woman with children at home would leave the labor force decreased dramatically from 1984 to 2000, and continued to fall significantly right up to 2004. This downward trend held for women of all age groups and educational levels — except for women in their thirties with advanced degrees, for whom the numbers remained stable over time. “The data stand in opposition to the media frenzy on this topic,” Boushey wrote for the Center for Economic and Policy Research in 2005. “The main reasons for declining labor force participation rates among women over the last four years appears to be the weakness of the labor market.”

Men, of course, were hit hard by the recession and weak recovery, too; in fact, as Louis Uchitelle of the Times reported earlier this week, the workforce participation rates of men aged 25 through 54 have dropped from 96 percent in 1953 to 86.4 percent today.

But when men in their prime working years drop out of the workforce we don’t say they’ve gone home to be with their kids.

We say they’re unemployed.

It may very well be that when women were concentrated in service industries, those jobs were less susceptible to the vagaries of the business cycle. But with more women holding jobs traditionally held by men, it should not be a surprise to anyone that when the axe falls, it falls on women as well.

Where women have at least a psychological advantage, as compared to men, when we lose our jobs, is what was revealed during my discussion with Mr. Brilliant. A woman can claim to have "opted out" of the workforce (something I am not able financially to do even if I wanted to), but when a man does that, he faces a stigma among his peers and the world at large. Even though I have no children, I could stay home and clean, finish refacing the kitchen cabinets, set down a new kitchen floor, garden, blog, work on my novel, and no one would think of me as a bum. I could show my face at the Shop-Rite at eleven o'clock in the morning and no one would think anything of it. Men don't have that luxury -- unless they have a level of intrinsic self-confidence that few men have.

The aforementioned male co-worker who works from home is philosophical about the prospect of additional layoffs, even though he has now survived two of them. "If they lay me off, I'll just let the nanny go and I'll take care of the kids." The nanny is female. And if he has to let her go, that will be another woman, this time in a traditionally female job, who will be a casualty of the current recession.

The quoted article's purpose is to debunk the notion that some kind of social sea-change has led women to opt out of the workforce, such as this 2003 New York Times Magazine article about women who attended Ivy League schools and then chose to stay home with children. The whole notion was horsepuckey, of course, as any number of sources revealed later on, including a paper that is hardly a bastion of feminism, the Wall Street Journal.

In theory, at least, we will at some point scramble and climb out of this (though the massive debt this country has rung up in the past eight years makes me even skeptical of that). It will be interesting to see if women's jobs return, or if this is just the beginning of not an opting-out, but a push of women out of a workplace in which there will be fewer opportunities to go around -- with women and minorities the first casualties.

The mindset of the jettisoned employee

Well, I think the crash came and went yesterday. I certainly hope so, anyway, because if it did, it wasn't so bad as crashes go. Some massive fatigue, a short weep session, but not the curled-up-in-a-fetal-position-in-the corner crash I'd feared.

The job search has ramped up pretty quickly, thanks to the intartoobz. I can remember when a Really Serious Job Hunt took the form of laying in a supply of fine stationery, a box of carbon paper, and a notebook. The Sunday want ads were about the only source of open job listings if you didn't have a large personal network. The other option was mass-mailings to companies; the appropriate staff found through poring through Standard& Poor's Register at the public library. As recently as last year I was tossing out old job search letters done on a typewriter with the newspaper clipping stapled to my carbon copy.

So job searching has become easier, despite the prevalence of online job application software, much of which is quirky at best and nonfunctional at worst. But at least today you don't need to practically hire a secretary just to organize the paper from a job search.

It hasn't quite hit me yet, and indeed, I don't think it's really hit anyone yet. It feels strange to have all these e-mails about job opportunities flying around among not just the casualties, but also the survivors, as the combination of impending loss of friends and survivors' guilt sets in among those who will remain. In my more optimistic moments, I think that perhaps this is a case of ultimately the living (those keeping their jobs) may very well envy the dead (those of us being jettisoned).

I am, however, compiling a picture of what kinds of behaviors are constructive when dealing with friends, relatives and co-workers who are losing their jobs, and what aren't.

DON'T look at the person with what I call the Basset Hound Face. I mean no disrespect to Tbogg's dogs, but what is cute on a basset hound is really annoying when presented to the one who has been sacked. Your friend/relative/co-worker is being laid off, s/he has not been diagnosed with terminal cancer and s/he is not dead. So don't look at him/her like this:



We know you feel badly about it. What that face does is make us feel that we somehow have to comfort you, and frankly, we are having enough trouble keeping ourselves together. And besides, while that face is utterly adorable on a basset hound, on a person? Not so much.

If you don't know what to say, DO say "I don't know what to say." It's a no-win situation for you, so don't try. If we're envisioning our futures as having to scavenge the remains of McGriddles out of trash cans and keep warm on a subway grate, "You'll find something soon" just sounds hollow. Commiserating, as in saying, "Yeah, the job market really sucks these days," isn't what we want to hear either. The best thing to say, if you are in a position to actually follow up, is "I am going to help you find a job." If you genuinely don't have the resources to do that, "I don't know what to say" is fine.


We found out in the middle of the afternoon. I had figured that this was coming, so I had come up with plans for who I was going to e-mail first, and who in my workplace I had to see that might know of available positions either in-house or outside. So I didn't even talk to my fellow programmer/project manager, who is surviving this layoff. The next day I came in and there were five e-mails from her. One was the "I don't know what to say but I am going to help you find a job" e-mail, and the others were links to job listings she'd already found and notification that she'd already contacted people who were jettisoned in our LAST layoff. In this case, the person is a bit of a control freak and helping people find jobs is her way of trying to make some kind of order out of this chaos, but her approach was really constructive and helpful.

DON'T ask if the person needs money, and DON'T ask the person to "not hesitate to call" if s/he needs anything. Of course the person needs money. If the person didn't need money, the prospect of six months of unemployment followed by retirement or other slack time would have us dancing for joy. But trust me, we are not going to ask you for money even if we do need it, because we have pride. What we want is a job, not a handout. If you're in regular contact with the person, you'll know if/when the financial position becomes dire, and when/if that happens (and hopefully it won't), if you're in a position to share your network of contacts who might be in a position to hire, or if you can offer compensated work, or a reference letter, then just do it.

DON'T ask the person to call if s/he needs to talk. Check in every now and then to see how the person is doing. If the person needs to talk, s/he will. Trust me. But don't use the tonal equivalent of the basset hound face. If you do, we'll take it as "I really don't want to know how you're doing because it's really depressing...but if I sound REALLY, REALLY CONCERNED, maybe that will suffice." And for God's sake, don't ask how the job hunt is going. It makes us feel stressed and pressured to find something soon, if only to take the burden off of YOUR worrying. Believe me, when we find something, we'll tell you.

DO tell the friend about friends of yours who were in a similar predicament and who came out on top. Especially if the unemployed person is over 50, DO tell him/her about middle-aged friends of yours who may have taken the better part of a year to find a job, but who found one before the year was out and are now blissfully happy and making money hand over fist. Your middle-aged friend who lost his job and then hung himself in the bathroom after the unemployment ran out? DON'T tell us about him. We don't want to know.

DON'T belittle the loss. It may be "just a job", but for most of us, the job is 1/3 of our day. We spend more time with our co-workers than we do with our spouses and families. In addition to the financial issues, there's the interpersonal impact of job loss. We tend to rank relative degrees of trauma associated with loss, but when it's you, "It's just a job" is as meaningless as telling a couple whose baby was stillborn, "You can always have another one." It may very well be true, but it's not constructive at that moment in time.

I'm actually lucky in that our layoff is in a small, self-contained group, and those of us who have been cut know that this was not at all related to job performance, and it wasn't even necessarily related to our value to the department. Everyone being cut is a senior-level person where cutting is gives the most cost-cutting bang for the buck. I'm not sitting here thinking that if I'd only done this or that I wouldn't have been cut, because in no way is that true, and I've been told as much. That helps prevent the Runaway Train of Self-Doubt from pulling in temporarily at this particular station.

Today I take the day off, and tomorrow it's back to job board land.

Today I am a Whiner

And damn proud of it, too.

You see, I was supposed to be an a plane this morning, on my way to the Annual Conclave of Le Grand Orange. But fate stood in the way, in the form of an e-mail last Thursday from the head of my department, announcing a full staff meeting for Tuesday the 15th, attendance is mandatory.

Now, I've been pretty much waiting for the other shoe to drop for the last three years, ever since the LAST bloodbath in my department. So I knew immediately that the Titanic had hit the iceberg and that there were nowhere near enough lifeboats for everyone. Through some rather oblique e-mail exchanges with the Powers that Be, trying to ascertain whether anything was going to be said at this meeting that might, say, cause one to think twice about spending $768 plus meals on a blogger conference, I received little enough of an answer that I knew the writing was on the wall. And so, when the meeting actually took place yesterday, I was well-prepared.

Many years ago, when I was still doing secretarial/administrative work, a headhunter told me that you should always update your resume three months into a new job, and every six months thereafter -- just so you're ready, and also because it's easy to forget what you've accomplished over a long period of time.

And 7-1/2 years is a long period of time.

So my resume has been more-or-less ready for the last three years, and my Spidey-sense served me in good stead yesterday, enabling me to deal with the news without falling completely apart.

I'm actually kind of surprised at how relatively calm I am. I think it must be the yoga.

There really isn't anyone at whom to lash out, either. When you work on research grants, and the grants aren't there, there's that much less money to pay people. If I'm angry at anything, it's the relentless cost-of-living increases that we've received almost every year -- two of them this year alone. Each time they announced one, I've been more scared, because every raise makes me more expensive to keep on in a time of limited funds. In a six-person system development group, three of us got the axe, one of whom has been with the place about a decade longer than I have. But aside from that person, the cuts in my group were clearly made on seniority -- and despite the fact that 7-1/2 years is a long time in IT, it's a mere blip in my department.

And so, as of August 30, I will be a middle-aged unemployed person in George W. Bush's America.

And that's where YOU come in, fair readers.

Because I need work.

What kind of work? Well, there's the dilemma. Because I'm not strictly a web programmer, not strictly a designer, not strictly a copywriter, not strictly a technical writer, not strictly a desktop support rep, not strictly a trainer -- and yet I've done all of these and more. What I need to find is a company that needs a nimble IT generalist who can handle just about anything thrown at me. You use a programming language in which I don't have experience? Let me run over to Barnes and Noble and pick up a book -- I'll at least have a passing familiarity between the time I give notice and the time I start with you. I have never had experience in the languages used at any of the IT jobs I've had, including my first one, into which I moved from being the department's administrative assistant.

I'd rather not post my resume for public consumption, but if you are in the New York metropolitan area (or if you have a position in which I could telecommute), and you are looking for a -- dare I say it? -- Jill of all trades; or if you know of such a position, and you want to discuss it further, my e-mail address is shown in the right-hand sidebar.

I'm not one of those people who believes that things happen for a reason. I don't believe in some giant Boris Spassky in the sky, moving chess pieces because he has nothing better to do than to just mess with people's lives. But while I had hoped to stay put where I am till I retire, it's not going to happen. So I have to adapt or be crushed.

And I refuse to do the latter.

In other words, we just have to find what we're looking for somewhere in this mess

Too bad we can't find a way to have a kind of Clean House purge for the brain -- you know, a way to get rid of all that stuff that clutters up your head after a certain number of years. I know that the details of C syntax are still in my brain, but they're at the bottom of a dusty pile somewhere, back there behind the memories of the cloud over Negril that looked like a kitten playing, and the layers of the OSI model, and the lyrics to It Sucks to be Me from Avenue Q, and where we've seen Richard Alpert before on Lost, and the other effluvia that gets stuffed into our brains during the course of day-to-day life.

One of the knocks on older workers is that we aren't as quick on our intellectual feet as we used to be and we don't learn as quickly and easily as we used to. But it turns out that having to find storage space in the hard disk of the brain for all that new information doesn't mean we can't do it. It just means that in our quest for organization, we want to find the file cabinet that C is in so that we can store the PHP code in there right next to it. It means that when we're designing a user interface, we want to reach back to that awful client meeting when they pointed out everything we did that didn't work for their users and use that information to design it better now.

We may not access prior information as quickly, nor store new information as quickly, but we seem better able than younger people to utilize what we have in there:

Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit.

The studies are analyzed in a new edition of a neurology book, “Progress in Brain Research.”

Some brains do deteriorate with age. Alzheimer’s disease, for example, strikes 13 percent of Americans 65 and older. But for most aging adults, the authors say, much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact, like a name or a telephone number. Although that can be frustrating, it is often useful.

“It may be that distractibility is not, in fact, a bad thing,” said Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book. “It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind.”

For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it.

When both groups were later asked questions for which the out-of-place words might be answers, the older adults responded much better than the students.

“For the young people, it’s as if the distraction never happened,” said an author of the review, Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. “But for older adults, because they’ve retained all this extra data, they’re now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they’ve soaked up from one situation to another.”

Such tendencies can yield big advantages in the real world, where it is not always clear what information is important, or will become important. A seemingly irrelevant point or suggestion in a memo can take on new meaning if the original plan changes. Or extra details that stole your attention, like others’ yawning and fidgeting, may help you assess the speaker’s real impact.

“A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and the indirect message of what’s going on than their younger peers,” Dr. Hasher said. “We believe that this characteristic may play a significant role in why we think of older people as wiser.”

Hiring managers, take note.

So THAT'S Why Pay Raises are So Few and Far Between

I found this curious paragraph in Joel West's Engineering Entrepreneurship blog post "Japan's Engineering Shortage" (in response to a similar "crisis" in the US):

But I have to remind myself there are still engineers (or CS types) that just want a job. These are people paid not in founder’s shares, or qualified options, but in salary. The problem is that (as with nurses and teachers), the economy needs a lot of engineers, so raising salaries across the board is a lot more expensive than paying high wages to a handful of NYSE traders or MLB players.

It's amazing how Silicon Valley loves the free market when it comes to allowing their beloved entrepreneurial startups to do all of their wheelin' and dealin', but hates the free market when it comes to paying high enough salaries to attract desired workers.

I know! How about if we just get rid of wages and salaries altogether in our country and replace them with stock options? That way we'll be begging for the next bubble industry to emerge instead of demanding that Bernanke do something to stop the bubbles before they start.

(Cross-posted at Carrie's Nation)

Do they think no one will notice?

I'd like to believe that all those who have smugly been raking in the cash in their Wall Street jobs for the last decade and now find themselves either unemployed or in danger of being unemployed learn that they are just so much flotsam and jetsam to their employers:

Thousands are losing their jobs as hard-pressed banks cut deep. But while layoffs are nothing new in the financial industry (they come with almost every downturn), this round seems different: it is eerily quiet.

So quiet, in fact, that people refer to these cuts as stealth layoffs. Some bosses hardly say a word after people are fired. At Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, for example, the first clue that someone is gone can be e-mail messages that are returned to senders from a former colleague’s inactivated corporate address.

[snip]

The idea that banks will slowly wield the knife again and again unnerves many employees. People know the cuts are coming — they just don’t know when or where.

“Nobody knows who is coming in; nobody knows who is going out,” said JoAnne Kennedy, who was laid off by JPMorgan Chase this year. “They want to keep it all as quiet as possible.”

To some bank workers, one round of layoffs seems to blur into the next. At Goldman Sachs, low performers were dismissed from January through March. A few weeks later, the bank quietly began letting more people go. All told, Goldman is axing about 8 percent of its work force, although incoming employees this summer will make up for some of that loss.

At Merrill Lynch, 1,100 people were laid off early this year, mostly in mortgage-related businesses. But in April, the firm announced 2,900 more cuts.

JPMorgan Chase said last fall that it would lay off 100 people in its fixed-income division and then followed up with several smaller rounds of cuts in other parts of the bank. The casualties will keep mounting as JPMorgan melds with Bear Stearns, the troubled investment bank it is buying.

Starting at the top, JPMorgan executives are eliminating jobs at their own bank, redeploying some people to other divisions and replacing others with Bear Stearns workers. As many as 5,500 Bear Stearns employees and 4,000 JPMorgan workers could lose their jobs before it is over.

The steady drumbeat of bad news on Wall Street is sapping morale. Wendi S. Lazar, a partner at the employment law firm of Outten & Golden, said companies are usually better off being open about cutting jobs.

“You’re seeing a very, very inconsistent message to employees,” Ms. Lazar said. “It’s, ‘I don’t know when it’s going to happen, it may be tomorrow, it may be next month; we may be able to keep you, we may not.’ ”

Layoffs are always difficult, but some of the recent cutbacks have been messier than usual. Some JPMorgan employees learned that people from Bear Stearns would get their jobs before the bosses said anything. JPMorgan clients told them first.

Some Lehman Brothers investment bankers found out their jobs were in peril when they saw cardboard boxes and dumpster bins in the hallways in March.

And when Bank of America dismissed some bankers recently, it told them that their annual bonuses had been almost wiped out and that their personal belongings would arrive in the mail. The bank announced many of the layoffs on Feb. 13, two days before many employees would be able to start cashing out stock options.

In January, when Ms. Kennedy was temporarily out of the office at JPMorgan because of surgery, her boss called to say her job had been eliminated. She did not return to her office and ended up asking the bank to send her the photos of her son that she kept on her desk.

I'd like to believe that our society won't be tempted again by the siren song of McMansions and luxury SUVs, but I remember the other times Wall Street headed down this road, and as soon as things get better, people go flocking.

Still, I don't think you can underestimate the damage that layoffs, even stealth layoffs like this, cause to employees. Corporate executives seem to think fear is a motivator, but there's only so long you can work with a sword over your head before you start wanting it to just drop already and put you out of your misery.

Best. Web. Job. Ever.*

I Can Has Cheezburger is hiring.

*Either it's the best web job ever, or by the end of the week you'll be as revolted by LOL kittehs as a Baskin-Robbins employee is at the thought of ice cream by the end of Fourth of July weekend.

The Never-Ending Post, or, Government and Business Leaders Work 24/7 To Keep Americans Away From High Tech Jobs

I'm the first to admit that this post is ridiculous! Do you think I enjoyed sitting in front of my PC off and on for almost a full week doing this update? Can I help it if our political and business leaders have been working non-stop during the course of just one month to make sure Americans are completely shut out of high tech jobs? Every time I thought I was just about ready to start proofing my work, I'd find out that some other group had just published a press release announcing yet one more creative way to pound more nails into our cubicle-coffins.

So, without further stalling, here is the Month That Was.

As reported earlier, Microsoft's Bill Gates testified in front of Congress on March 12, 2008 by reading off his list of demands for the high tech industry. The crux of his speech is that he claims that we are not graduating enough students with STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) skills, and businesses are forced to hire workers from overseas to fill all of the job openings. (And, oh, by the way, the tech industry can pay these foreign workers less money.)

On March 13, 2008, Gabrielle Giffords (D-Arizona) dutifully introduced the Innovation Employment Act which would double the number of H-1B visas issued per year from 65,000 to 130,000.

Also on March 13, 2008, Patrick Kennedy (D-Rhode Island) and Michael McCaul (R-Texas) held hands across the aisle and introduced the New American Innovators Act that would exempt foreign guest workers holding Ph.D.'s from any annual numerical caps, provided the person received the Ph.D. within three years prior to applying for immigrant status.

On March 14, 2008, Lamar Smith (R-Texas) introduced the Strengthening United States Technology And Innovation Now (or Sustain) Act, which would triple the number of H-1B visas issued per year from 65,000 to 195,000.

(Please note. Technically, the Gifford and Smith bills would not double or triple the number of H-1B visas being issued. As it stands right now, there is a base number of 65,000 H-1B visas that are issued per year, plus an additional 20,000 visas for workers with advanced degrees. Finally, an unlimited number of H-1B visas can be issued to workers who are employed by non-profit entities, e.g., local schools, colleges and universities. Sound confusing? It's meant to be confusing, in order to discourage bloggers from spending an adequate amount of time writing comprehensive stories about the H-1B visa limits.)

On March 19, 2008, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) issued interim rules that ".....prohibits employers from filing multiple H-1B petitions for the same employee. These changes will ensure that companies filing H-1B petitions subject to congressionally mandated numerical limits have an equal chance to employ an H-1B worker."

The rules also clarified that "....once USCIS receives 20,000 petitions for aliens with a U.S. master’s degree or higher, all other cases requesting the educational exemption are counted toward the 65,000 cap. Once the 65,000 cap is reached for a fiscal year, USCIS will announce that the cap has been filled and reject further petitions subject to the cap."

Finally, the USCIS stated that, "This rule also stipulates that if USCIS determines the number of H-1B petitions received meets the cap within the first five business days of accepting applications for the coming fiscal year, USCIS will apply a random selection process among all H-1B petitions received during this time period."

On April 1, 2008, the USCIS started accepting applications from companies for H-1B visas for Fiscal Year 2009, with a starting date of October 1, 2008.

Also on April 1, 2008, Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania) and his cohorts from the Republican High Tech Task Force (HTTF) sent a shamefully unpublicized letter to the Department of Homeland Security urging the DHS to extend the Optional Practical Training period for F-1 student visa holders enrolled in STEM programs (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) from 12 months to 29 months. Specter, along with way too many of our Congressmen, have fallen for the line of the "high tech skills shortage" myth hook, line, and sinker, and wanted to give employers an unlimited supply of lower-paid foreign tech workers while giving the STEM graduates an additional 17 months to remain in the US. What a nice way to make sure the students get an extra shot at obtaining their much coveted H-1B visas.

Why would the Department of Homeland Security be involved in this program? This would be the quickest way to give employers additional foreign workers without having to deal with the dreadful time-consuming tasks of debating a bill in Congress and allowing the American public a chance to comment on the proposed changes.

(Thanks to Rob Sanchez' Newsletters and Bob Oak's No Slaves site for providing much of the information regarding the OPT extension period.)

Google added their voice on April 1, 2008 stating that they are perfectly entitled to as many H-1B visas as they want. (By the way, I wonder who is ultimately more entitled to the world's "best and brightest"? Google or Microsoft?)

Finally, on April 1, 2008 (what a busy day!), Senators Richard Durbin (D-Illinois) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) sent a letter to the top 25 companies who received approvals for H-1B (specialty workers) and L-1 (intra-company) visas for 2007, asking for detailed information on how the visas are being used. The purpose of the letter is to determine if "....these programs, as currently structured, are facilitating the outsourcing of American jobs."

The letter is five pages long and asks 11 questions, with each question subdivided into multiple parts. Here are sample questions (#7, page 3):

• For each of the last five fiscal years, how many employees have you terminated outside of the United States?
  
• For each of the last five fiscal years, how many employees have you terminated inside of the United States?
  
• How many of these employees were U.S. citizens?
  
• Did H-1B visa holders replace or take over the job responsibilities of any of these terminated employees?
  
• Would you support legislation prohibiting all employers from displacing an American worker with a H-1B visa holder? Please explain.

Why would Senators Durbin and Grassley feel the need to send out these letters?

I'll break my timeline a bit and mention the April 4, 2008 article written by intrepid reporter Jennifer Bjorhus from the TwinCities Pioneer Press. (As of today, I could find the article by typing in "H-1B" in the online paper's internal search engine, but I couldn't find a permanent link. Norman Matloff reprinted the entire article in his H-1B/L-1 Offshoring e-Newsletter #113.) Bjorhus, one of the few newspaper reporters I'm aware of that is doing any real digging into this topic, has been following H-1B/L-1 visa issues since her days at the San Jose Mercury News (the official mouthpiece for Corporate Silicon Valley).

Outside of Ron Hira's 2005 book, Outsourcing America, this is one of the better write-ups I've seen on the difficulties of obtaining the necessary facts, figures and statistics in order to get a true picture of what is going on with the H-1B/L-1 visa programs.

Industry has long argued that the temporary work visas are necessary to stay competitive by attracting the world's best and brightest workers. Many employers, most recently Bill Gates, argue there's a critical shortage of skilled U.S. workers.

snip

Critics charge there's no shortage but too many over-specific job descriptions and overly picky employers. The guest worker program cheats U.S. workers by importing younger workers who are often less well paid, they charge. Laid-off U.S. tech workers have testified on Capitol Hill of being forced to train their H-1B replacements. What's missing from the decade-old debate is solid information about how the program actually functions. Exactly which white-collar jobs go begging for lack of qualified U.S. workers? What are specific workers being paid? How are specific employers in various parts of the country using the program? Are there patterns to their particular hiring?

snip

Companies won't discuss specifics. [Note from Carrie. Vague notices like the recent Chrysler announcement to outsource their Information Technology functions to Indian bodyshop Tata Consulting Services are the norm.] U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services will not release detailed information it keeps on the thousands of worker-specific visas it approves each year to be issued by the State Department.

"It's a huge hole," said Ron Hira, assistant professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology and co-author of "Outsourcing America." "Why would you expand a program without knowing what its impacts are? [Emphasis mine.] It's very bizarre to me."

Hira has company. Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, on Tuesday [April 1, 2008] mailed 25 letters to the country's top H-1B employers asking for detailed information on how they use the program.

The Pioneer Press in 2004 filed a Freedom of Information Act request to immigration services for basic information on each H-1B and related L-1 visa it approved for employers since 2000. L-1 visas, which have no cap, are increasingly used by employers to bring their own foreign employees to the U.S. to work.

The newspaper's request remains unfilled. In January, immigration officials mailed a disk that doesn't contain records of any H-1B visas, and with tens of thousands of blank fields where job codes should be, and more than 400,000 blank fields where the worker's education level should be recorded. [Emphasis mine.]

The Pioneer Press filed an appeal with immigration services, which recently informed the newspaper that the appeal is No. 2,771 in a backlog of 2,845 appeals. Chris Rhatigan, an immigration services spokeswoman, said her agency considers the newspaper's request filled, noting the "appeal is still pending a final decision."

snip

As for immigration services, it does publish a yearly report,"Characteristics of Specialty Occupation Workers," showing aggregate totals at the national level — such as that 50 percent of the H-1B visas in fiscal year 2005 were for people from India, half were issued to people in their 20s, 5 percent of the workers held doctorate degrees and about half the jobs were computer-related.The report doesn't provide employer-specific or job-specific information.The agency is also two years behind on its reports.

On April 2, 2008, Michael Chertoff from the Department of Homeland Security signed an interim final rule with a request for comments (that was nice of him) to extend the Optional Practical Training program for F-1 STEM visa holders from 12 months to 29 months. Chertoff's document claims that:

The inability of U.S. employers, in particular in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, to obtain H-1B status for highly skilled foreign students and foreign nonimmigrant workers has adversely affected the ability of U.S. employers to remit and retain skilled workers and creates a competitive disadvantage for U.S. companies.

Again, this was shamefully unpublicized in an obvious ploy to sneak through a de facto increase in the number of foreign worker visa holders without input from the American public.

The rule further stipulates that students must be enrolled in Optional Practical Training programs that relate to their college majors, and that employers must be enrolled in the USCIS E-Verify Employment Verification Progam.

How does the Department of Homeland Security feel they are able to shove through a ruling without prior public comment? Per page 23 of the .pdf file:

To avoid a loss of skilled students through the next round of H-1B filings in April 2008, DHS is implementing this initiative as an interim final rule without first providing notice and the opportunity for public comment under the "good cause" exception found under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) at 5 U.S.C. 553(b)). The APA provides that an agency may dispense with notice and comment rulemaking procedures when an agency, for "good cause," finds that those procedures are "impracticable, unnecessary, or contrary to the public interest." See 5 U.S.C. 553(b)(B). The exception excuses notice and comment, however, in emergency situations, or where "the delay created by the notice and comment requirements would result in serious damage to important interests. [Emphasis mine.]

In other words, if Bill Gates says this is a national emergency, then this is a national emergency!

One thing that held me up on this blog post was the fact that I really had no idea what was meant by "Optional Practical Training." I had read discussions that the training could occur while the student was in school, after graduation, or a combination of the two. It wasn't until I heard Rob Sanchez' podcast on the George Putnam show that I found out what was really going on.

DOH! (Carrie slaps hand to forehead.)

The Optional Practical Training program means internships! Unlimited numbers of foreign STEM graduates can now take up internships and effectively shut out American-born STEM graduates from future technical careers! Despite the rhetoric from the likes of Microsoft and Oracle, competition for job openings in the tech industry is fierce. Having a high quality internship on your resume is crucial to landing that important first real job. The ability to land an internship means the difference between either starting a career in your chosen technical field or ending up in law school after spending two years of sending out resumes while working at Burger King.

I wrote a post last month about how graduates of the University of Michigan School of Engineering are having a difficult time landing jobs within their career fields, both inside and outside of the state of Michigan. As Bob Oak points out in his No Slaves blog, "Students graduating in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics majors are about three times the total number of new jobs created in the United States for these majors." Studies by Vivek Wadhwa et al from Harvard University, the RAND Corporation, Michael Teitelbaum on behalf of the Sloan Corporation (per his testimony before the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation on November 6, 2007), the Urban Institute, and Norman Matloff from UC-Davis, all confirm in varying degrees the myth of the high tech skills shortage.

On April 4, 2008, the world finally found out about the extension of the Optional Practical Training program from 12 months to 29 months from this announcement from the Department of Homeland Security. The interim final rule was entered into the Federal Register on April 8, 2008, which marked the start of the 60-day limit for public comments on this policy.

The No Slaves blog lists a few ways you can officially voice your outrage at this stealth change in policy. Pages 2 and 3 of the DHS interim rules .pdf file also gives details on how you can submit public comments.

Also, on April 4, 2008, Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania) and the Republican High Tech Task Force (HTTF) finally admitted that they were the force behind the Department of Homeland Security's decision to extend the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program for F-1 non-immigrant students.

On April 8, 2008, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced ".... that it has received enough H-1B petitions to meet the congressionally mandated cap for fiscal year 2009. "

On April 9, 2008, the Daily Princetonian reported that some foreign students are not happy that the Department of Homeland Security's ruling for the expanded OPT program does not apply to non-STEM majors.

Many current international students are upset with the academic restrictions.

“I don’t think it’s fair that not everyone is eligible for the extension, because we all face the same problems in obtaining work visas upon graduation,” Megan Chiao ’09, former president of the International Students Association, said in an e-mail. Chiao, an ORFE [Operations Research and Financial Engineering] concentrator, is from Singapore.

snip

[Assistant Dean of Undergraduate Students Rachel] Baldwin fears that the selectively granted extension — instituted because of the demand for foreign students in technical fields — will drive international students away from non-STEM majors because of the relative post-graduation disadvantage.

“Some international students may stray away from the Woodrow Wilson School, Romance Languages and other fields that do not qualify for the extension,” Baldwin explained.

“I think it will be frustrating for non-STEM majors, and it is unfair that the decision was not made to support all F-1 students, despite their chosen major,” Baldwin said.

Economics major Cee-Kay Ying ’08, who is from Australia, disagreed with the STEM requirement, noting that humanities concentrators are no less skilled than students in other majors.

“Some majors between engineering and humanities have lots of overlap, such as ORFE and Econ,” she said in an e-mail. ORFE but not economics concentrators qualify for extension.

“Depending on what track you take, you could pretty much have the same coursework [except for] the independent work,” Ying explained. “Does this mean ORFE [concentrators are] more qualified to work in the US than econ majors? This perhaps could be a deciding factor among internationals wanting to maximize their opportunities to work in the US after graduation.”

Earth to Ying! Do you really believe that our economists are going to allow an unlimited number of foreign students to take away their jobs?

Americans are told every day by economists, business leaders and politicians that we need to lose our sense of entitlement to education, health care, job security, Social Security and old age pensions. I would find it quite refreshing if someone would stand up and tell these foreign students that they need to give up their sense of entitlement to college educations funded by American taxpayers and guaranteed job offers from American companies upon graduation!

On April 10, 2008, per an update to an April 8, 2008 article written by Patrick Thibodeau at ComputerWorld, the USCIS announced they received 163,000 requests for H-1B visas, along with 31,200 applications for foreign nationals holding advanced degrees.

Also on April 10, 2008, Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) introduced the "Global Competitiveness Act of 2008". Among other things, the bill (S. 2839) would:

• Recapture 150,000 supposedly unused visas and dole them out over a 3-year period.
• Raise the main numerical cap on visas from 65,000 to 115,000 per fiscal year
• Raise the numerical cap on advanced degree holders (masters degrees and above) from 20,000 to 30,000 per fiscal year.

Rob Sanchez noted in his Job Destruction Newsletter:

Have any of you noticed that so many of the proposed visa increases lately are now being called national emergencies? First, we had the massive defacto H-1B increase that the DHS approved to extend the Optional Practical Training time period. Now we have a bill introduced by Sen. Cornyn that he says is "emergency relief" for employers. Why doesn't Cornyn feel that his constituents need emergency job creation?

As of this writing, the complete text of the bill has yet to be released. However, according to the outline in the press release, the wording includes the obligatory "we'll outlaw all visa abuses" language. Rob Sanchez further pointed out:

The Cornyn bill contains what may appear to be a restriction on how bodyshops use H-1B visas. Don't be fooled -- bodyshops aren't the most important issue -- the number of visas available is far more important. Cornyn was very clever to insert this provision into the bill in order to split the opposition. It won't stop bodyshops from operating in the U.S. but it might inconvenience them a little since they will have to change how they bill their work.

Cornyn's bill also has some verbiage to enforce the law against fraud. As I have explained before, fraud isn't a major problem in the H-1B visa program, so the provisions he is offering will do nothing to help American workers against the huge onslaught of foreigners he wants to import.

USCIS conducted their random selection process on April 14, 2008 for their H-1B lottery, per this update.

April 15, 2008. I'm sure I've missed something. Please feel free to comment if you noticed any glaring omissions.

April 16, 2008. [Fill in the blank. I'm sure something momentous will happen that will make my article obsolete as soon as I hit the "Publish Post" button.]

Anyone can tell that the High and the Mighty are hell-bent on getting their visa limit increases. There seems to be growing consensus that at least one of these measures will be passed this year despite the fact unemployment rates are so high even the figures provided by the Bush administration are showing that the jobless rate is increasing.

I've been learning about these issues for a little over a year now. I've seen the same unoriginal arguments over and over and over again that we need a limitless supply of foreign tech workers because we are not producing enough of the best and brightest to fill all of these mysterious job openings that are supposedly open to everyone. Every once in a while the high tech lobby does something that jolts me awake again. This year, so far, it's the possibly unconstitutional fiat from the Department of Homeland Security to deal with this "national crisis" by increasing the Optional Practical Training program time limit for F-1 STEM student visa holders.

I wonder what the next surprise will be?

(Cross-posted at Carrie's Nation.)

Like Clockwork

On Wednesday, March 12, 2008, the Committee of One, Bill Gates, testified in front of Congress that the H-1B visa limit of 65,000 for "highly skilled" guest workers (plus 20,000 for advanced degree holders) needed to be raised. His speech, which I've provided in the link above, is absolutely breathtaking as he talks about science and computing and networking and how many computers we have and how computers and its [Microsoft] software affects just about every aspect of our lives.

(For the uninitiated, letting in foreign skilled workers seems like a good way to address critical shortages that may crop up in the scientific, engineering and computer science fields. What I, and many other people object to, is the fact that employment opportunities and salaries for American technical workers have plummeted since the beginning of the H-1B program in 1990. We are repeatedly told that the United States needs more high tech workers. Oddly enough, both recent college graduates and experienced technical workers have difficulty finding employment in their career fields, despite the fact that high tech companies are supposedly begging for qualified workers. Most companies have impossible-to-meet standards for American workers, yet those standards seem to disappear altogether for lower-paid foreign workers. Even more amazing, American workers are forced to train their foreign replacements in order to receive severance packages. At the end of the cycle, the foreign workers head back overseas, taking their jobs with them. Predictably, enrollment in computer science programs and other technical fields are declining at fast rates.)

Back to Bill Gates' testimony. Skim through the pages where he talks about how the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, through its largesse, will make everything that is already good in this world even better. You'll find it didn't take long for him to get to what's really eating him.

• We're a nation of dunces.
• We need more foreign guest workers.
• Taxpayers need to foot the bill for basic research and training more high tech workers.
• High tech companies need more tax breaks.

Despite what Gates said in the rest of the pages of his speech, it all boiled down to, We Need More Foreign Guest Workers. If You Don't Give Us More Foreign Guest Workers, We'll Show You Who's Boss By Sending These Jobs Overseas.

Several members of Congress practically tripped over each other as they lined up to profess their fawning admiration for Bill Gates. Why shouldn't they, when so much money for potential campaign contributions and from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is at stake? Representative Bart Gordon, (D-Tennessee), said, "Bill Gates embodies both the American spirit of innovation and the theological virtue of charity. … I can think of no other witness better suited to share his insights with this committee."

A few Representatives had the guts to ask some tough questions. Dana Rohrbacher (R-California), asked if:

..........H-1B workers were driving down U.S. wages or replacing "B and C students" from the United States. Gates said no, citing a study released Monday by the pro-immigration think tank the National Foundation for American Policy, saying that for every H-1B position applied for, companies create an additional five jobs.

[Note from Carrie: How convenient that report came out just a few days before Gates' testimony.]

"The top people are going to be [paid] higher," Gates said. "It's just a question of what country they're working in."

For more good discussions on the National Foundation for American Policy report, you can read Rob Sanchez' and Norman Matloff's newsletters. Please also see Patrick Thibodeau's article at Computerworld for another good recap. (For some reason, I'm having a devil of a time trying to link to his article. If motivated, look for his article "Gates: U.S. Puts Tech Jobs at Risk by Capping Foreign Workers" dated March 12, 2008 under the "Government" section.)

Another member of Congress spoke up:

Rep. Laura Richardson, a California Democrat, challenged Microsoft and other tech companies to fund scholarships for science and engineering students with the money they use to recruit workers and apply for visas.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provides scholarships for 14,000 minority students, Gates noted. But more scholarships won't solve the problem of a lack of U.S. science and engineering students, he said.

"Scholarships can be helpful, but I'm not sure that alone would drive the shift we need," Gates said.

Predictably, by late Thursday afternoon, Gabrielle Giffords, (D-Arizona) introduced the Innovation Employment Act that would double the number of H-1B's being issued from 65,000 to 130,000 per year. A number of safeguards are supposed to be included in this bill, such as:

• increasing the penalties for H-1B fraud
• rejecting applications for "clear indicators of fraud"
• prohibiting companies from hiring H-1B workers and then immediately outsourcing them to other companies
• prohibiting companies "with more than 50 employees that have more than half of their staff as H-1B workers from hiring more H-1Bs"
• prohibiting employers from advertising their jobs as being exclusively for H-1B workers

I say these "safeguards" are little more than window dressing. However, that will be another post for another day.

Many pundits admit that Congress will have a tough time passing legislation for higher numbers of H-1B workers during an election year, when people are finally reaching a consensus that unemployment rates are going higher while the economy is going sour. However, just for extra insurance, Lamar Smith (R-Texas) introduced the catchy-sounding Strengthening United States Technology And Innovation Now (or Sustain) Act, which would triple the number of H-1B visas being issued for 2008 and 2009.

(Cross-posted at Carrie's Nation.)