No story critical of banks is too dopey to run
There are plenty of legitimate newspaper articles that are critical of US banks. This amateurish effort, AP Investigation: Banks sought foreign workers, is not one of them:
The dozen banks receiving the biggest rescue packages, totaling more than $150 billion, requested visas for more than 21,800 foreign workers over the past six years for positions that included senior vice presidents, corporate lawyers, junior investment analysts and human resources specialists. The average annual salary for those jobs was $90,721, nearly twice the median income for all American households. The figures are significant because they show that the bailed-out banks, being kept afloat with U.S. taxpayer money, actively sought to hire foreign workers instead of American workers.
As the economic collapse worsened last year — with huge numbers of bank employees laid off — the numbers of visas sought by the dozen banks in AP’s analysis increased by nearly one-third, from 3,258 in fiscal 2007 to 4,163 in fiscal 2008…It is unclear how many foreign workers the banks actually hired…likely a fraction of the 21,800 foreign workers the banks sought to hire because the government limits the number of visas it grants to 85,000 each year among all U.S. employers…
Foreigners are attractive hires because companies have found ways to pay them less than American workers.
The “dozen banks” so thoroughly and haplessly investigated by the AP employ almost 2 million people. JP Morgan and Citigroup alone employ 500,000. Perhaps half a million of the employees of the international banks are not US citizens — yet somehow it is a big deal if 12 banks file visa applications for 4,163 employees and wind up bringing maybe 1000 of them into the country? (BTW, did these nefarious foreigners come into the US on fancy corporate jets that were “foreign-built“?)
Our favorite sentence is this: “Foreigners are attractive hires because companies have found ways to pay them less than American workers.” No examples. No substantiation. Just the sinister implication that the evil banks are depriving Americans of high paying jobs while simultaneously screwing the foreigners out of their wages too. Nice touch, AP.
February 3rd, 2009 at 3:50 am
As one who has seen friends and co-workers laid off and forced to leave the IT field while companies bring in foreign replacements, I’d say the AP got it right. In the 70s and 80s, companies actually spent money training their IT workers as new technologies came along. Along the way, they decided that it was cheaper to replace workers than to retrain them.
Workers aren’t owed jobs, and the owners of the company can do whatever is legal to contain costs. I can’t rationally object to that. I’ve managed to stay employed, partly because I retrained myself for new opportunities, and partly through luck.
But is it fair to tax Americans to hire foreign workers? We are the shareholders of this country, and I think we ought to have a say in what this bailout money buys. I certainly don’t want to be taxed to save Citi while it buys a French jet, nor do I want be taxed to to pay an Indian outsourcing firm. I’d rather see the opportunities remain for people like my son, who managed to graduate into the burst of the dot com bubble with his CS degree.
The dirty little secret is that many of these jobs “require” technical degrees to be hired, but not to actually do the job. Due to EEO lawsuits, employers are leery of testing job applicants, so requiring a BS degree is the easy way out.
Thus endeth my rant.
February 4th, 2009 at 11:38 am
I think you’re right on this this one Mark. The threat of penalties should be incorporated in any “transfer contracts” or whatever instrument the gov’t-recipient sign before the hand-over of taxpayer money. But this is just a drop in the bucket. What I find most troubling is the potential for abuse of the infrastructure construction stimulus. Too much money may go to experienced, white workers! OK, just kidding. Seriously, given the structural transformation of the construction industry, there is a high probability that taxpayer funding will be used to hire illegal aliens. That shouldn’t be part of the deal. However, Dinocrat is correct that AP couldn’t write a well argued, informative, unbiased news report if their lives depended on it.
February 11th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
Mark, you have it wrong! Banks seek workers with high skills, and there are not enough Americans with these skills, plain and simple. I wish there were. I am at a University and we would love to train more US citizens in quantitative skills. They don’t apply. Banks don’t pay an average salary of $90,721 for low skill or unskilled jobs. These jobs require a MS or higher degree. These are high skill jobs. The AP story is baiting for a fight that has no substance.