Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2011 19:46:32 -0700 From: Norm Matloff To: Norm Matloff Subject: industry credibility To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter A reader sent me the enclosure, which she said ran on the CBS Evening News tonight. Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris said in the piece, The starting salary of a chemical engineer is $85,000. And I can't get chemical engineers. Yet NACE, the most relied-upon source for starting salaries, found that the average offer this Spring was $66,866. See http://www.naceweb.org/Press/Releases/Top-Paid_Majors_for_the_Class_of_2011.aspx Some of you will recall that a couple of years ago Bill Gates told Washington Post columnist David Broder that Microsoft pays its H-1Bs starting salaries of $100,000. As I show in an upcoming article, only 11% of Microsoft H-1Bs make that much (and only 6% of its software engineers). Microsoft's credibility track record is especially poor. See for example http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/MicrosoftClaimBelied.txt http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/MicrosoftClaimBeliedMore.txt You will see more and more of planted articles such as the one below. Rep. Lofgren has now released her H-1B/green card reform bill, so the industry lobbyists will be working hard to get their message out. The Lofgren bill is definitely a big step backward. It's filled with provisions that sound like positive reform, but which will mislead those who wish to see worker-oriented reform of H-1B/green card policy. I'll be posting an analysis either later this evening or tomorrow. Norm http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/06/14/eveningnews/main20071167.shtml?tag=cbsnewsTwoColUpperPromoArea (CBS News) NEW YORK - With unemployment so high-- here's something you don't hear often: there are plenty of jobs out there for workers with the right skills - engineers, for example. Yesterday, President Obama called on the country to train 10,000 new engineers every year. One of America's top executives tells CBS News senior business correspondent Anthony Mason it'll take a lot more than that to make America competitive. At Dow Chemical's sprawling headquarters in Midland, Michigan, CEO Andrew Liveris's company is working on innovative technologies like solar shingles But Liveris, whose company employs 24,000 people in the U.S. alone, says he can't get enough good workers here. Laid-off auto workers find solar-powered jobs "The starting salary of a chemical engineer is $85,000," he said. "And I can't get chemical engineers." It's a problem all of American industry is facing: "We have one million science, technology, engineering and math jobs available in this country right now. And only 200,000 graduates qualified to fill them," Liveris said. "That's scary." Scary, because this is what we're up against: India's high tech giant, Infosys built a $120 million campus to train an army of 14,000 engineers every year for just that one company. Inside the world's largest corporate training center Infosys CEO Kris Gopalakrishnan said, "Manpower training is extremely important for this industry, because technology is constantly changing." To compete in this global market, Dow's CEO says he has to go where the talent is. "I'm opening up R&D labs in China, in Brazil, in eastern Europe in India, to get those jobs," Liveris said. "At the end of the day, my only source of competitive advantage is human capital." All this is important because scientists and engineers lead innovation. And it's innovation that, in turn, creates jobs. Liveris and others argue that we need a national education standard that promotes math, science and engineering. That, in effect, we need to find a way to make those careers seem glamorous again to young people.