G
gerry
Guest
The Los Angeles Times article below, about Senator Clinton's working
with a giant Indian outsourcing company, makes you wonder if Senator
Clinton is in the wrong political party. Unsaid in the article is the
other effect of the H1-B program, the cost to educate the children and
provide emergency medical services to these "high tech" visa
employees, costs Buffalo can ill afford. Those H1-B employees take
away jobs, lower the wage rates for workers still havng jobs and
increase the local tax rates to cover the increased cost of services
to these new employees and their families. Some success, as many as
ten new jobs in Buffalo versus the loss of thousands of American jobs
to Tata Consultancy.
Senator Clinton still has not explained why she voted for the Senate
resolution letting Bush go to war in Iraq, going against the wishes of
the New York Democrats who voted for her. Her spokesmen have
instructions to change the subject and not answer questions about
Clinton's betrayal of the Democrats in New York who voted for her.
Now this article, Clinton in bed with one of the biggest outsourcers.
Just sickening.
She is no Bill Clinton, just another sleazy, lying politician selling
out her constituents for a few campaign dollars and the chance to
hobnob with superrich people who give her free rides on their
corporate jets (as long as they are Gulfstream G550s, Hillary needs
her legroom).
----
Clinton Woos The Outsourcers That Workers Fear
The senator's efforts to bring an Indian firm to Buffalo, which
yielded 'about 10' jobs, illustrates the bind she faces.
By Peter Wallsten
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-na-buffalo30jul30,0,1319957,print.story?coll=la-tot-topstories
July 30, 2007
BUFFALO, N.Y. - To many labor unions and high-tech workers, the Indian
giant Tata Consultancy Services is a serious threat - a company that
has helped move U.S. jobs to India while sending thousands of foreign
workers on temporary visas to the United States.
So when Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) came to this struggling
city to announce some good news, her choice of partners was something
of a surprise.
Joining Tata Consultancy's chief executive at a downtown hotel,
Clinton announced that the company would open a software development
office in Buffalo and form a research partnership with a local
university. Tata told a newspaper that it might hire as many as 200
people.
The 2003 announcement had clear benefits for the senator and the
company: Tata received good press, and Clinton burnished her
credentials as a champion for New York's depressed upstate region.
But less noticed was how the event signaled that Clinton, who portrays
herself as a fighter for American workers, had aligned herself with
Indian American business leaders and Indian companies feared by the
labor movement.
Now, as Clinton runs for president, that signal is echoing loudly.
Clinton is successfully wooing wealthy Indian Americans, many of them
business leaders with close ties to their native country and an
interest in protecting outsourcing laws and expanding access to worker
visas. Her campaign has held three fundraisers in the Indian American
community recently, one of which raised close to $3 million, its
sponsor told an Indian news organization.
But in Buffalo, the fruits of the Tata deal have been hard to find.
The company, which called the arrangement Clinton's "brainchild," says
"about 10" employees work here. Tata says most of the new employees
were hired from around Buffalo. It declines to say whether any of the
new jobs are held by foreigners, who make up 90% of Tata's 10,000-
employee workforce in the United States.
As for the research deal with the state university that Clinton
announced, school administrators say that three attempts to win
government grants with Tata for health-oriented research were
unsuccessful and that no projects are imminent.
The Tata deal underscores Clinton's bind as she attempts to lead a
Democratic Party that is turning away from the free-trade policies of
her husband's administration in the 1990s and is becoming more
skeptical of trade deals and temporary-worker visas.
Like many businesses and economists, Clinton says that the United
States benefits by admitting high-tech workers from abroad. She backs
proposals to increase the number of temporary visas for skilled
foreigners.
The Tata deal shows the difficulty of proving concrete benefits to
U.S. workers from the visa system. Since 2003, the year its Buffalo
office opened, Tata and its affiliates have sought permission to bring
more than 1,600 foreign high-tech workers to the state, including at
least 495 to the upstate region and 45 to Buffalo, according to
government data. Tata has brought additional workers into the country
under a second visa program whose numbers have not been disclosed.
Some U.S. worker organizations say Clinton cannot claim to support
American workers if she is also helping Indian outsourcing companies
and proposing more worker visas.
"It's just two-faced," said John Miano, founder of the Programmers
Guild, one of several high-tech worker organizations that have sprung
up as outsourcing has expanded. "We see her undermining U.S. workers
and helping the offshoring business, and then she comes back to the
U.S. and says, 'I'm concerned about your pain.' "
Among Indian American activists, Clinton's work with Tata has been
seen as a sign of her independence from outsourcing skeptics within
her party - and a break from the Democrats' 2004 presidential nominee,
Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, who lambasted "Benedict Arnold CEOs"
for shipping jobs overseas.
The main lobbying organization for the Indian-American community,
USINPAC, cites the Tata deal as one of Clinton's top three
achievements as a senator - and evidence of a turnabout, in its view,
from her past criticism of outsourcing. "Even though she was against
outsourcing at the beginning of her political career," the USINPAC
website says, "she has since changed her position and now maintains
that offshoring brings as much economic value to the United States as
to the country where services are outsourced, especially India."
Clinton regularly reinforces that view. When CNN anchorman Lou Dobbs,
an outsourcing critic, pressed her on the Tata deal in 2004, Clinton
responded: "Well, of course I know that they outsource jobs, that
they've actually brought jobs to Buffalo. They've created 10 jobs in
Buffalo and have told me and the Buffalo community that they intend to
be a source of new jobs in the area, because, you know, outsourcing
does work both ways."
This month, she made a similar case to a conference of Indian workers
in Silicon Valley, saying she supported an expansion of visas.
"Foreign skilled workers contribute greatly to our U.S. technological
development," she told the group via satellite.
Clinton acknowledged the strains on American workers and called for
more job-training programs. But her words seemed to distance her from
those who would end outsourcing. Increased U.S. job losses, she said,
could cause Americans to "seek more protection against what they view
as unfair competition."
The Tata deal, she said in a 2005 stop in India, exemplified the
cooperation that will "help to prevent the kind of negative feelings
that could be stirred up" by critics of the global marketplace. She
called those critics "short-sighted."
Today, on the campaign trail, Clinton often strikes a different tone.
Addressing union audiences and Democratic crowds, she does not
highlight her support for expanding foreign-worker visas. Instead,
Clinton often laments a system that, as she told a government workers
union last month, rewards companies for "moving our jobs overseas."
"Outsourcing is a problem, and it's one that I've dealt with as a
senator from New York," Clinton said during a Democratic candidates
debate in June. She said she had tried "to stand against the tide of
outsourcing."
Clinton aides say the Tata deal is just one example of her broader
efforts to help upstate New York. Whatever the results, said spokesman
Philippe Reines, the effort showed Clinton helping to build a high-
tech future for a region long focused on manufacturing.
Buffalo's population has fallen by half over 50 years, as automotive
and other manufacturing jobs moved overseas. Resentment is so high
that voters last year nearly dumped a longtime Republican congressman
for an anti-trade Democrat, who had made outsourcing his biggest
issue.
For Clinton, a newcomer to New York when she ran for the Senate in
2000, the upstate region was considered a challenge - a traditionally
conservative area that did not participate in the economic prosperity
during her husband's presidency. So, as a candidate, she pledged to
use tax credits and other incentives to create 200,000 jobs in the
region.
In 2002, Clinton took a group of Indian business executives on a tour
of the region and to a meeting with administrators from the state
university in Buffalo. The group included Tata Consultancy Services,
an information technology consulting firm that is part of Tata Group,
a conglomerate with interests in electricity, steel, aviation, cars
and hotels.
At the time, Tata Consultancy had two offices in the state - both in
New York City to service Wall Street clients.
But a year after the tour, the company flew Clinton to join its chief
executive, S. Ramadorai, in Buffalo for an announcement: It would open
an office there.
Tata also signed a memorandum of understanding with a university
research center to pursue discoveries in genetics, drugs and other
areas. In a news release, Tata said that deal "will eventually lead to
opportunities for training, recruitment and job creation in Buffalo."
"There was a sense of excitement on the part of the community," said
Anthony M. Masiello, Buffalo's mayor at the time, "to have a company
like Tata that would not traditionally look at coming to western New
York."
But soon the company faded from public view, said Andrew J. Rudnick,
president and CEO of the Buffalo-Niagara Partnership, an economic
development group in which Tata was initially active. "They told us
their business strategy had changed," he said. "The reality is that
the number of people that Tata is employing here now doesn't seem to
be significant."
At the University at Buffalo, Bruce A. Holm, director of a research
center pursuing projects with Tata, conceded that the partnership had
not played out as hoped. But he said that progress was still possible.
Tata officials say the company has hired 50 people from the Buffalo
area in the last four years but most have left or have been
transferred to other locations. They say the Buffalo operations remain
important to the company and a part of the civic life of the city.
But critics say that Tata has done more to undercut workers in upstate
New York than it has helped - and that Clinton is wrong to argue that
exposing U.S. workers to competition from foreign workers is helping
both groups.
Since Tata arrived in Buffalo, "the reality is that it probably
created many more jobs for workers overseas and displaced lots of
American workers," said Ronil Hira, a public policy professor at the
Rochester Institute of Technology and a prominent critic of
outsourcing.
A report released by two senators said that Tata was one of the
biggest users of foreign-worker visas in the United States, employing
more than 7,900 visa recipients last year. The large number of visas
suggests that companies are circumventing laws designed to protect
American workers, Sens. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Charles E.
Grassley (R-Iowa) said in their report.
Clinton and many other lawmakers have called for cracking down on visa
abuse. At the same time, she has backed an increase in the number of
foreigners admitted to the U.S. each year under the main type of visa
for high-tech workers. The cap is 65,000 each year; companies are
seeking 115,000.
And her campaign continues to telegraph - sometimes in front of Indian
American audiences - that she sees benefits to a globalized world.
Three weeks ago, her husband drew applause at a conference of 14,000
Indian Americans in Washington as he extolled the benefits of "open
borders, easy travel, easy immigration." He said the outsourcing
debate bothered him because it failed to acknowledge the contributions
of Indians who settled in the U.S. The same day, he headlined a
fundraiser at the conference for his wife's campaign.
Labor union leaders, who haven't decided whom to endorse for
president, say they have watched the Tata deal and Clinton's
statements on outsourcing.
"People do want to see from her some recognition that the outsourcing
of these service jobs isn't a good thing for the U.S. economy," said
Thea M. Lee, policy director of the AFL-CIO. "It's a little bit of an
open question where Sen. Clinton's going to end up on outsourcing."
peter.wallsten@latimes.com
--
(INFOBOX BELOW)
Visa activity
--
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton announced in March 2003 that the high-tech
firm Tata Consultancy Services of India was opening an office in
Buffalo, N.Y., and would bring jobs to the area. Clinton later said
the deal showed that outsourcing firms could create jobs both in their
home countries and in the United States. Tata says it has created
about 10 jobs in Buffalo and, since 2003, hired 50 local workers. But
over that same period, Tata sought H-1B visa certifications to import
nearly 500 foreign computer programmers and other specialists to
upstate New York.
City H-1B visas sought
Schenectady... 101
Webster... 94
Albany... 87
Rochester... 83
Buffalo... 45
Waterford... 40
Olean... 31
Syracuse... 10
Pittsford ... 3
Orchard Park... 1
Total ... 495
--
H-1B visas allow U.S. employers to hire high-skilled international
workers for up to six years. Obtaining certification from the
Department of Labor does not necessarily mean the company secured
visas, but that is the only public indicator of where a company
intends to deploy foreign workers. Whereas H-1B certification data is
public, similar information is not available for L-1 visas, which
accounted for more of Tata's workers in 2006, according to a U.S.
Senate report.
Source: Times analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Labor,
Division of Foreign Labor Certification
with a giant Indian outsourcing company, makes you wonder if Senator
Clinton is in the wrong political party. Unsaid in the article is the
other effect of the H1-B program, the cost to educate the children and
provide emergency medical services to these "high tech" visa
employees, costs Buffalo can ill afford. Those H1-B employees take
away jobs, lower the wage rates for workers still havng jobs and
increase the local tax rates to cover the increased cost of services
to these new employees and their families. Some success, as many as
ten new jobs in Buffalo versus the loss of thousands of American jobs
to Tata Consultancy.
Senator Clinton still has not explained why she voted for the Senate
resolution letting Bush go to war in Iraq, going against the wishes of
the New York Democrats who voted for her. Her spokesmen have
instructions to change the subject and not answer questions about
Clinton's betrayal of the Democrats in New York who voted for her.
Now this article, Clinton in bed with one of the biggest outsourcers.
Just sickening.
She is no Bill Clinton, just another sleazy, lying politician selling
out her constituents for a few campaign dollars and the chance to
hobnob with superrich people who give her free rides on their
corporate jets (as long as they are Gulfstream G550s, Hillary needs
her legroom).
----
Clinton Woos The Outsourcers That Workers Fear
The senator's efforts to bring an Indian firm to Buffalo, which
yielded 'about 10' jobs, illustrates the bind she faces.
By Peter Wallsten
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-na-buffalo30jul30,0,1319957,print.story?coll=la-tot-topstories
July 30, 2007
BUFFALO, N.Y. - To many labor unions and high-tech workers, the Indian
giant Tata Consultancy Services is a serious threat - a company that
has helped move U.S. jobs to India while sending thousands of foreign
workers on temporary visas to the United States.
So when Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) came to this struggling
city to announce some good news, her choice of partners was something
of a surprise.
Joining Tata Consultancy's chief executive at a downtown hotel,
Clinton announced that the company would open a software development
office in Buffalo and form a research partnership with a local
university. Tata told a newspaper that it might hire as many as 200
people.
The 2003 announcement had clear benefits for the senator and the
company: Tata received good press, and Clinton burnished her
credentials as a champion for New York's depressed upstate region.
But less noticed was how the event signaled that Clinton, who portrays
herself as a fighter for American workers, had aligned herself with
Indian American business leaders and Indian companies feared by the
labor movement.
Now, as Clinton runs for president, that signal is echoing loudly.
Clinton is successfully wooing wealthy Indian Americans, many of them
business leaders with close ties to their native country and an
interest in protecting outsourcing laws and expanding access to worker
visas. Her campaign has held three fundraisers in the Indian American
community recently, one of which raised close to $3 million, its
sponsor told an Indian news organization.
But in Buffalo, the fruits of the Tata deal have been hard to find.
The company, which called the arrangement Clinton's "brainchild," says
"about 10" employees work here. Tata says most of the new employees
were hired from around Buffalo. It declines to say whether any of the
new jobs are held by foreigners, who make up 90% of Tata's 10,000-
employee workforce in the United States.
As for the research deal with the state university that Clinton
announced, school administrators say that three attempts to win
government grants with Tata for health-oriented research were
unsuccessful and that no projects are imminent.
The Tata deal underscores Clinton's bind as she attempts to lead a
Democratic Party that is turning away from the free-trade policies of
her husband's administration in the 1990s and is becoming more
skeptical of trade deals and temporary-worker visas.
Like many businesses and economists, Clinton says that the United
States benefits by admitting high-tech workers from abroad. She backs
proposals to increase the number of temporary visas for skilled
foreigners.
The Tata deal shows the difficulty of proving concrete benefits to
U.S. workers from the visa system. Since 2003, the year its Buffalo
office opened, Tata and its affiliates have sought permission to bring
more than 1,600 foreign high-tech workers to the state, including at
least 495 to the upstate region and 45 to Buffalo, according to
government data. Tata has brought additional workers into the country
under a second visa program whose numbers have not been disclosed.
Some U.S. worker organizations say Clinton cannot claim to support
American workers if she is also helping Indian outsourcing companies
and proposing more worker visas.
"It's just two-faced," said John Miano, founder of the Programmers
Guild, one of several high-tech worker organizations that have sprung
up as outsourcing has expanded. "We see her undermining U.S. workers
and helping the offshoring business, and then she comes back to the
U.S. and says, 'I'm concerned about your pain.' "
Among Indian American activists, Clinton's work with Tata has been
seen as a sign of her independence from outsourcing skeptics within
her party - and a break from the Democrats' 2004 presidential nominee,
Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, who lambasted "Benedict Arnold CEOs"
for shipping jobs overseas.
The main lobbying organization for the Indian-American community,
USINPAC, cites the Tata deal as one of Clinton's top three
achievements as a senator - and evidence of a turnabout, in its view,
from her past criticism of outsourcing. "Even though she was against
outsourcing at the beginning of her political career," the USINPAC
website says, "she has since changed her position and now maintains
that offshoring brings as much economic value to the United States as
to the country where services are outsourced, especially India."
Clinton regularly reinforces that view. When CNN anchorman Lou Dobbs,
an outsourcing critic, pressed her on the Tata deal in 2004, Clinton
responded: "Well, of course I know that they outsource jobs, that
they've actually brought jobs to Buffalo. They've created 10 jobs in
Buffalo and have told me and the Buffalo community that they intend to
be a source of new jobs in the area, because, you know, outsourcing
does work both ways."
This month, she made a similar case to a conference of Indian workers
in Silicon Valley, saying she supported an expansion of visas.
"Foreign skilled workers contribute greatly to our U.S. technological
development," she told the group via satellite.
Clinton acknowledged the strains on American workers and called for
more job-training programs. But her words seemed to distance her from
those who would end outsourcing. Increased U.S. job losses, she said,
could cause Americans to "seek more protection against what they view
as unfair competition."
The Tata deal, she said in a 2005 stop in India, exemplified the
cooperation that will "help to prevent the kind of negative feelings
that could be stirred up" by critics of the global marketplace. She
called those critics "short-sighted."
Today, on the campaign trail, Clinton often strikes a different tone.
Addressing union audiences and Democratic crowds, she does not
highlight her support for expanding foreign-worker visas. Instead,
Clinton often laments a system that, as she told a government workers
union last month, rewards companies for "moving our jobs overseas."
"Outsourcing is a problem, and it's one that I've dealt with as a
senator from New York," Clinton said during a Democratic candidates
debate in June. She said she had tried "to stand against the tide of
outsourcing."
Clinton aides say the Tata deal is just one example of her broader
efforts to help upstate New York. Whatever the results, said spokesman
Philippe Reines, the effort showed Clinton helping to build a high-
tech future for a region long focused on manufacturing.
Buffalo's population has fallen by half over 50 years, as automotive
and other manufacturing jobs moved overseas. Resentment is so high
that voters last year nearly dumped a longtime Republican congressman
for an anti-trade Democrat, who had made outsourcing his biggest
issue.
For Clinton, a newcomer to New York when she ran for the Senate in
2000, the upstate region was considered a challenge - a traditionally
conservative area that did not participate in the economic prosperity
during her husband's presidency. So, as a candidate, she pledged to
use tax credits and other incentives to create 200,000 jobs in the
region.
In 2002, Clinton took a group of Indian business executives on a tour
of the region and to a meeting with administrators from the state
university in Buffalo. The group included Tata Consultancy Services,
an information technology consulting firm that is part of Tata Group,
a conglomerate with interests in electricity, steel, aviation, cars
and hotels.
At the time, Tata Consultancy had two offices in the state - both in
New York City to service Wall Street clients.
But a year after the tour, the company flew Clinton to join its chief
executive, S. Ramadorai, in Buffalo for an announcement: It would open
an office there.
Tata also signed a memorandum of understanding with a university
research center to pursue discoveries in genetics, drugs and other
areas. In a news release, Tata said that deal "will eventually lead to
opportunities for training, recruitment and job creation in Buffalo."
"There was a sense of excitement on the part of the community," said
Anthony M. Masiello, Buffalo's mayor at the time, "to have a company
like Tata that would not traditionally look at coming to western New
York."
But soon the company faded from public view, said Andrew J. Rudnick,
president and CEO of the Buffalo-Niagara Partnership, an economic
development group in which Tata was initially active. "They told us
their business strategy had changed," he said. "The reality is that
the number of people that Tata is employing here now doesn't seem to
be significant."
At the University at Buffalo, Bruce A. Holm, director of a research
center pursuing projects with Tata, conceded that the partnership had
not played out as hoped. But he said that progress was still possible.
Tata officials say the company has hired 50 people from the Buffalo
area in the last four years but most have left or have been
transferred to other locations. They say the Buffalo operations remain
important to the company and a part of the civic life of the city.
But critics say that Tata has done more to undercut workers in upstate
New York than it has helped - and that Clinton is wrong to argue that
exposing U.S. workers to competition from foreign workers is helping
both groups.
Since Tata arrived in Buffalo, "the reality is that it probably
created many more jobs for workers overseas and displaced lots of
American workers," said Ronil Hira, a public policy professor at the
Rochester Institute of Technology and a prominent critic of
outsourcing.
A report released by two senators said that Tata was one of the
biggest users of foreign-worker visas in the United States, employing
more than 7,900 visa recipients last year. The large number of visas
suggests that companies are circumventing laws designed to protect
American workers, Sens. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Charles E.
Grassley (R-Iowa) said in their report.
Clinton and many other lawmakers have called for cracking down on visa
abuse. At the same time, she has backed an increase in the number of
foreigners admitted to the U.S. each year under the main type of visa
for high-tech workers. The cap is 65,000 each year; companies are
seeking 115,000.
And her campaign continues to telegraph - sometimes in front of Indian
American audiences - that she sees benefits to a globalized world.
Three weeks ago, her husband drew applause at a conference of 14,000
Indian Americans in Washington as he extolled the benefits of "open
borders, easy travel, easy immigration." He said the outsourcing
debate bothered him because it failed to acknowledge the contributions
of Indians who settled in the U.S. The same day, he headlined a
fundraiser at the conference for his wife's campaign.
Labor union leaders, who haven't decided whom to endorse for
president, say they have watched the Tata deal and Clinton's
statements on outsourcing.
"People do want to see from her some recognition that the outsourcing
of these service jobs isn't a good thing for the U.S. economy," said
Thea M. Lee, policy director of the AFL-CIO. "It's a little bit of an
open question where Sen. Clinton's going to end up on outsourcing."
peter.wallsten@latimes.com
--
(INFOBOX BELOW)
Visa activity
--
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton announced in March 2003 that the high-tech
firm Tata Consultancy Services of India was opening an office in
Buffalo, N.Y., and would bring jobs to the area. Clinton later said
the deal showed that outsourcing firms could create jobs both in their
home countries and in the United States. Tata says it has created
about 10 jobs in Buffalo and, since 2003, hired 50 local workers. But
over that same period, Tata sought H-1B visa certifications to import
nearly 500 foreign computer programmers and other specialists to
upstate New York.
City H-1B visas sought
Schenectady... 101
Webster... 94
Albany... 87
Rochester... 83
Buffalo... 45
Waterford... 40
Olean... 31
Syracuse... 10
Pittsford ... 3
Orchard Park... 1
Total ... 495
--
H-1B visas allow U.S. employers to hire high-skilled international
workers for up to six years. Obtaining certification from the
Department of Labor does not necessarily mean the company secured
visas, but that is the only public indicator of where a company
intends to deploy foreign workers. Whereas H-1B certification data is
public, similar information is not available for L-1 visas, which
accounted for more of Tata's workers in 2006, according to a U.S.
Senate report.
Source: Times analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Labor,
Division of Foreign Labor Certification