Zuckerberg's FWD.us To Laid-Off Southern California Edison Workers: Boo-Hoo

[Newsjock]

http://politics.slashdot.org/story/15/05/10/0459241/fwdus-to-laid-off-southern-california-edison-workers-boo-hoo

Speaking at a National Journal LIVE event that was sponsored by Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us and Laurene Powell Jobs' Emerson Collective, FWD.us "Major Contributor" Lars Dalgaard was asked about the fate of 500 laid-off Southern California Edison IT workers, whose forced training of their H-1B worker replacements from offshore outsourcing companies sparked a bipartisan Senate investigation.

"If you want the job, make yourself able to get the job," quipped an unsympathetic Dalgaard. "Nobody's going to hold you up and carry you around...If you're not going to work hard enough to be qualified to get the job...well then, you don't deserve the job."

"That might be harsh," remarked interviewer Niharika Acharya. Turning to co-interviewee Pierre-Jean Cobut, FWD.us's poster child for increasing the H-1B visa cap, Acharya asked, "Do you agree with him?" "Actually, I do," replied PJ, drawing laughs from the crowd.

Video at 26:11:

[ChisolmTrailDem]

1. I went to FWD.us (didn't know about it before this post)... Why do these people care about...

...immigration reform so much?

Is this an altruistic effort or a profit motive?

This is a serious question...

[msongs]

2. the people promoting the TPP are all in favor of this sort of thing. h1B visas for everyone....

in India that is

[Dragonfli]

3. Odd conclusion, they wewre qualified to train their replacemens yet, not qualified to get the jobs

they trained others to do (apparently because they didn't work hard enough to learn what they already knew better than the replacements) Was this a comedy skit or something?

[BrotherIvan]

4. Assholes Gone Wild

Smugness always deserves scorn. Fuck these guys.

[SoapBox]

6. Ditto

These arrogant twits make me sick.

[cui bono]

5. +1

[JDPriestly]

7. Struck me too. I wonder whether the H1-B workers are getting overtime for over 8 hours

per day, 40 hours per week. I'm wonder whether in California, people who do computer tech work may be exempt from some of the wage and hour laws. Does anyone who works in California in such a field know how this applies in the workplace? What wage and hour laws (40 hour week, 8 hour day, overtime, etc.) in tech fields? Does "working hard" mean going back to 18th or 19th century sweatshop work standards?

The US has had an eight-hour week for about a century. It took a long time and lots of sacrifice to get it:

In the United States, Philadelphia carpenters went on strike in 1791 for the ten-hour day. By the 1830s, this had become a general demand. In 1835, workers in Philadelphia organized the first general strike in North America, led by Irish coal heavers. Their banners read, From 6 to 6, ten hours work and two hours for meals.[8] Labor movement publications called for an eight-hour day as early as 1836. Boston ship carpenters, although not unionized, achieved an eight-hour day in 1842.

In 1864, the eight-hour day quickly became a central demand of the Chicago labor movement. The Illinois legislature passed a law in early 1867 granting an eight-hour day but had so many loopholes that it was largely ineffective. A city-wide strike that began on May 1, 1867 shut down the city's economy for a week before collapsing. On June 25, 1868, Congress passed an eight-hour law for federal employees[9][10] which was also of limited effectiveness. (On May 19, 1869, Grant signed a National Eight Hour Law Proclamation).[11]
. . . .
The United States Adamson Act in 1916 established an eight-hour day, with additional pay for overtime, for railroad workers. This was the first federal law that regulated the hours of workers in private companies. The United States Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Act in Wilson v. New, 243 U.S. 332 (1917).

The eight-hour day might have been realized for many working people in the U.S. in 1937, when what became the Fair Labor Standards Act (29 U.S. Code Chapter 8) was first proposed under the New Deal. As enacted, the act applied to industries whose combined employment represented about twenty percent of the U.S. labor force. In those industries, it set the maximum workweek at 40 hours,[17] but provided that employees working beyond 40 hours a week would receive additional overtime bonus salaries.[18

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day

Unions insure the 8-hour day and the 40-hour week. Should there be an effort to unionize H1-B workers?

[Thav]

9. The main qualification

is being willing to work for minimum wage while still being highly skilled. If you're not willing to take the shaft, then you're not qualified to work!

[Scuba]

8. "If you're not going to work hard enough to be qualified ..." Then you couldn't train your ...

... replacement, which tells the lie. It's not that we're not working hard enough, it's that we're unwilling to work for slave wages.

[greatlaurel]

10. kicked and recommended nt

[Stand and Fight]

11. Smug jerks.

I can't say what I think would solve this infectious smug attitude.