One the myths that refuses to to die is that there is a shortage of engineers, scientists and the like in this country. Various CEOS continually throw up their collective hands and bemoan this ‘fact’ in newspaper articles and television appearances. Accompanying the broken-record recitation of this technical ‘calamity’ is a plea for an increase in the number of foreign talents allowed to enter the United States to work in these ‘unfillable’ positions.
Of course, a very high percentage of the imported individuals who work in these technical jobs–working for companies headquartered in the United States–are paid far, far less than if a U.S. citizen was performing the duties. Pensions (especially) and long-term benefits are unheard of because they are unnecessary for these importees. Foreign workers have zero leverage.
The following is written by Christopher Moylan, someone who is more than capable AND willing to shatter this regurgitated corporate illusion. His living and working in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley only adds to his credibility.
Shortage of skilled workers is a convenient mirage
By Christopher R. Moylan
May. 07, 2006
San Jose Mercury News
Know any scientists or engineers who have been laid off in the last five years?
Most readers would be able to answer “yes” to that question, but you’d never know it from reading op-ed pieces by local academics and senior managers from industry. “Technology companies are starving for skilled employees,” wrote IBM’s Jeanette Horan (Mercury News, May 2). “The supply is low.” Her solution, like that of San Jose State’s engineering dean Belle Wei (April 27) and former Autodesk CEO Carol Bartz (March 24, 2005) is to close what Wei refers to as “this alarming gap” by pressuring more women to major in technical fields. Others, such as SpikeSource CEO Kim Polese (May 1), use the excuse of a shortage of high-tech workers to justify eliminating “excessive restrictions on immigration” and allowing businesses to import higher numbers of foreign workers. Whether the cry is for more H-1B visas or more female engineers, the goal is the same: a dramatic increase in the supply of high-tech workers. The problem with these proposed remedies is that they address an employee shortage that does not, in fact, exist.
Thousands of highly trained scientists and engineers still roam Silicon Valley looking for work after having been cut adrift by the same types of people who now claim that they can’t find anyone to hire. And thousands more are now working in different fields at substantially lower salaries, having given up searching for an equivalent to their previous positions. “No one I know who has looked at the data with an open mind has been able to find any sign of a current shortage,” said demographer Michael Teitelbaum in the Wall Street Journal’s Nov. 16 front-page story, “Behind `Shortage’ of Engineers: Employers Grow More Choosy.” In a column titled “A Phony Science Gap?” (Feb. 22), the Washington Post’s Robert J. Samuelson explained in detail why “it’s emphatically not true, as much of the alarmist commentary on America’s `competitiveness’ implies, that the United States now faces crippling shortages in its technological elites.”
Do these bogus claims of a scarcity of skilled technical workers constitute a campaign to avoid having to pay market price for white-collar labor? Yes, but there’s more to it than that. Corporations legitimately can anticipate a shortage of such workers in the future, because their own actions are setting the stage for one.
Since the early 1980s, employers have systematically eliminated most of the traditional incentives for high-tech careers. They pay the inventors and developers of their products a fraction of what their sales and marketing representatives make. They have eliminated pensions, individual offices and medical benefits. They charge vacation time for company shutdowns. And, most significantly, they have done away with job security — a critical blunder because product-development cycles are often longer than economic cycles.
Read the rest here: