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Technology Stocks : IFMX - Investment Discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: seth thomas who wrote (10336)	4/21/1998 5:35:00 AM
From: Charles Hughes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14631

>>>Not all jobs are listed there, either. For example, one of my companies is looking for 15 - 20 people, and there's not an ad for them. So, maybe there are 10,000 - 20,000 open positions in the Valley?<<< The paper I agree is an unreliable indicator of what is going on. For instance, the jobs in the paper are often not the best jobs, and sometimes reflect an effort to collect lots of applications, or to lowball a wage. Often a contract job will be advertised by multiple contract houses that have gotten the same lead. Often the contract houses will advertise nonexistent jobs just to add callers to their databases. How about this ballpark estimate? There are several million employed persons in this general area. Call it 3 million even. Lets say there are 30,000 genuine open positions at the moment. That's 1% of the total positions out there. (Just trying to stick to even numbers here, for clarity.) But nominal unemployment is 5%. That would require 150,000 positions to employ everyone. Then there are the long-term unemployed and the part-timers, workfare, et cetera who are not counted. Say you need maybe another 150,000 positions. That's 300,000. Now, that 110 thousand foreign contractors they want is about a third of that. If you only count technical positions it becomes very significant. Now, I realize that's figure is for the whole country, but probably half of those are slated for the Valley. Now I'm just throwing numbers around here, but I think you can see how this would have an real effect on marginal unemployment for Valley technical people if they push through the bill. It should increase by pretty close to the number of new visas, 30 to 50 thousand, until those technical people go off to new lives in sales, farming, button manufacturing, or whatever. Now why exactly is it that we are encouraging American workers to get these new skills? Wasn't that to replace their old skills that were obsoleted before? Aren't we telling them that their unemployment is due to their lack of skills? On the other hand, if we leave the quota right where it is, even the (especialy the) h1b's (foreign workers) that are already here will benefit. They also will be in better demand, and just might get close to what the average pay is. And above all other things involved here, I would like for my own selfish reasons to have my foreign teammates make just as much as my American teammates. And of course, they would like that too. Chaz