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Subject:Re: US professional issues From:Elna Tymes <etymes -at- LTS -dot- COM> Date:Thu, 15 Oct 1998 10:14:26 -0700
Nancy:
> For those of you watching the US Congress, HR3736 was revived (after
> being dead, of course) in the US congress to allow 142,500 more visas
> for foreign workers per year. This may be of particular concern to those
> of you in areas that have seen many layoffs recently.
>
> At issue with the president of the IEEE, is that companies are not
> making a good faith effort to hire local talent or to redeploy older
> workers. Likewise, there is little evidence of enforcement of work
> protections that are in place to require businesses that use the visas
> to pay prevailing wages and have prevailing protections of local
> workers.
The other side of that coin is that there really IS a lack of qualified
technical workers in many parts of the U.S. Here in Silicon Valley, if you
have an engineering background, or can program, or can write clearly about
technical products, you can have your choice of jobs - there are plenty of
openings and employers really can't find the people to fill them. The instance
you cited may be actually an example of an exception, rather than the rule.
As an employer, I can speak to the fact that there aren't enough qualified
technical writers around. When we have openings, the resumes that come in are
amazing. For mid-level technical writer positions, we frequently get resumes
from people with no experience and maybe some background in theater or retail
or some other unrelated area, whose writing samples are full of grammatical
and/or spelling errors, and who expect that they should be making around
$50,000/year for their 'qualifications.' For our internships, we can deal with
a lack of experience and a lack of credentials, but many of the applicants
can't even string together intelligible sentences.
I urge readers of this board, rather than to support restrictive labor
policies, to let their Congressional representatives know that we need MORE,
not LESS qualified applicants for technical jobs in this country.
