Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2010 00:00:09 -0700 From: Norm Matloff To: Norm Matloff Subject: 60 Minutes piece To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter Last night 60 Minutes ran a piece on extended unemployment, with the unusual twist that the story focused on Silicon Valley. The gloomy status that reporter Scott Pelley found there would be no surprise to many readers of this e-newsletter, but Pelley himself seemed to be genuinely shocked. The interviewees included a former fiber optics engineering manager who is just about to start a job at Target for $9.25/hr--and even then, only part-time. A former head of HR who made $200K per year in the good old days now has spent most of his savings, and in desperation bought an air duct cleaning franchise--only to find that in the depressed economy, not many can afford his service. Pelley seemed to be particularly taken aback by the high level of education of the group of unemployed he interviewed. He called for a show of hands, and I think about half had a master's degree, and several were PhDs. The people in the press, like those in the government, just don't seem to get it. The government continues to cite education as the way out of our economic doldrums, an attitude that must infuriate those well-educated people Pelley talked to. Just last week, Tim Geithner gave a talk in Palo Alto, right in the interviewees' back yard, saying that solution is "educate more engineers." Clueless, sadly, just clueless. The 60 Minutes report did acknowledge half of the globalization equation, citing "high-tech engineering that went overseas." But no mention at all about H-1B, though, which is sadly consistent with 60 Minutes' attitude in recent years. Though 60 Minutes ran one of the earliest expose's of the H-1B scam, they turned around later on. The irony in last night's segment, of course, involves that former head of HR, Doug Francone. A quick Web search reveals that he worked at Chevron, ADP, CSAA and so on. He probably oversaw the processing of H-1B cases, in which those working for him found in the myriad H-1B and green card rules loopholes to legally pay bottom dollar to the visa workers, and for the green cards, finding legal ways to claim that no qualified Americans were available for the jobs in question. The 60 Minutes video is at http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6987699n Sorry I haven't had much time to post here lately. I do want to critique the latest paper by Tambe and Hitt; some here may recall their earlier paper on H-1B, which I analyzed in http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/WithdrawnStudy.txt I hope to post something on their latest paper in a few days. Norm