Wipro's Azim Premji - 'The man who wants to take your jobs'

[Gina Minks]

I went to hear Mr. Premji speak at MIT a few months ago. I asked him what IT pros in the US were supposed to do, since it is becoming harder to even have a chance to compete for our jobs, and he said that we should train into a better skill set. I told him I can program in 5 languages, am fluent with 5 OS's, what exactly was I supposed to train into? His reply is that no one can stop outsourcing, and that people are going to be hurt by it, and that it is just too bad.

His company, Wipro, employs primarily H1B and L1 workers in the US. So, Mr. Premji not only outsources jobs back to India, he displaces technical workers in the US with temporary workers. Go to this site:

http://www.flcdatacenter.com/casesearch.asp

and type in Wipro to see just how many temporary workers have been given visas for Wipro since 2000. In 2003 alone, they were awarded 61 H-1B visas that brought in 3262 temporary immigrants for jobs as Programmer Analysts and Business System Analysts (to name two). There are no requirments to disclose L-1 data, so no telling how many of those visas they were awarded.

The H-1B visa category was designed to  allow companies to bring people into the country that have specialized skills, to help companies get their work done when there were not enough Americans to do these specialized jobs. It is incredible to me to think that there is any need, with over one million US techies out of work, to bring in over 3,000 immigrants to do programming and business consulting work.

Make no mistake, this is about money. It is about a few greedy companies wanting the world to work for minimum wage. 

-Gina Minks
ww.ginaminks.com/blog


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Robert La Ferla" <robertlaferla at comcast.net>
To: <discuss at blu.org>
Sent: Monday, March 22, 2004 12:54 AM
Subject: Wipro's Azim Premji - 'The man who wants to take your jobs'


> Here's the message without the attachment:
> 
> "Although U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, in New Delhi last week, assured Indians that the Bush administration would not try to halt outsourcing of high tech jobs to their country, Premji isn't taking anything for granted."
> 
> "The point, he said, is that Americans are unduly worried. 'We are not dealing with cold reasoning here,' he said, 'but with emotions of Americans whose personalities changed after 9/11 and who feel threatened by anything that hurts their security, their wealth and their jobs.''"
> 
> 
> http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1079824207406&call_pageid=968350072197&col=969048863851
> 
> Everyone, just remember that we are all unduly worried!  How about if the $8 billion man were to pay our mortgage bills for us?  Maybe those nice banks will give everyone break since they reduced their costs.  And don't forget that good things hurt!
> 
> 
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