Trumpled (Alternative Leading)

[LP]

You all look like a bunch of Paulines to me! ;D

[mateinone]

Whilst they have not done enough still to curtail the exploitation of the overseas skilled workers visas, this first step by the government is indeed a fantastic one.

I won't do the same here, but I put a big rant on Facebook on why I think this and why I applaud the decision. No one doubts the need to cover genuine skill gaps (that can't be covered with on the job training) in specialised fields, but this has been overwhelmingly used to bring in workers from overseas who will happy accept less than the market rate in Australia.

I know of and have been directly involved in discussions/decisions where 457 workers have been chosen simply because executives would not pay to hire locals. That is NOT a skill shortage, that is companies wanting to take a bigger slice of the pie.

Like I also said on my FB post, I think this might be the first time I agree with a Liberal (well other than when Little Johnny took away most peoples guns)

[PaulP]

MIO, same here. I've never been a Liberal voter, but when Howard came in, one of the first things he did was, as you say, take lots of guns away. I thought "wow, maybe this guy isn't so bad." Then of course, it all went down hill from there.

[LP]

Whilst they have not done enough still to curtail the exploitation of the overseas skilled workers visas, this first step by the government is indeed a fantastic one.

I won't do the same here, but I put a big rant on Facebook on why I think this and why I applaud the decision. No one doubts the need to cover genuine skill gaps (that can't be covered with on the job training) in specialised fields, but this has been overwhelmingly used to bring in workers from overseas who will happy accept less than the market rate in Australia.

I know of and have been directly involved in discussions/decisions where 457 workers have been chosen simply because executives would not pay to hire locals. That is NOT a skill shortage, that is companies wanting to take a bigger slice of the pie.

Like I also said on my FB post, I think this might be the first time I agree with a Liberal (well other than when Little Johnny took away most peoples guns)

I think I have no problem with 457 visas as long as the skilled and shortage part of the policy is strictly enforced, but in most cases it isn't a valid claim.

Posting articles about career scientists who arrived on 457 visas is rubbish, for starters most of them do not even need to go through the 457 process if their positions are legitimate. It's just become the easy solution and a way for organisations like universities or CSIRO to avoid quotas!

It was laughable seeing the IT sector bleat about the loss of skilled foreign workers when universities are pouring out IT graduates of all types at unprecedented levels. Just last year there were criticisms that there were too many IT graduates and not enough places to offer them, there was a call to reduce graduate numbers! Of course Universities didn't comply because a good portion of those graduates come from the lucrative foreign student marketplace.

It seems what the IT sector's real complaint was, they won't be able to hire low cost foreign IT workers of equivalent skill to the locals if too many locals keep graduating! In effect they want local universities to cut the numbers of IT graduates so they can justify importing low cost workers under the 457 scheme. That is not the intent of that legislation, but it is how it is being applied in any number of industrial and commercial sectors.

A great example is Victorian regional abattoirs. I know that many local workers had been paid out in recent years, made redundant or encouraged to take early retirement, then immediately the qualifying term is passed those jobs are reinstated by foreign 457 workers. Not because they work better, harder, longer or smarter than locals, or that they were not involved with unions or have skills locals cannot deliver. It was done because of an approximate 33% reduction in wage costs, "To help make Australian companies more competitive", but the prices never dropped, yet profits and executive bonuses increased!

[mateinone]

Yeah you have nailed it with regards the point about the profits.
The thing is an abattoir can run and be financially viable in Australia, they may not make as much profit as a business wants, but they can be supported by locals. What companies want is it pay minimum (or close to minimum) wages and locals who have worked for years and like many others in all other industries seen their wages rise, will not just accept minimum wage. The company then says they advertise by can't find anyone and apply for a 457.

I could tell any number of stories from the positions I have held that just show without a doubt that this is a ruse. If an Australian company cannot get the profits they want using local (and actual offshore if need be) staff then in most cases they should move to another industry, because I can tell you for sure that someone will fill the gap they leave behind.

Take the abattoir example... Will Australia just stop eating meat? No, someone will take over the role and run the market in the space the incumbent was.

And this is me trying soooo hard to hold back  :-X :

[Baggers]

Sharp stuff, MIO and Spotted One. Good reading.

[mateinone]

The other big joke about the skill shortage is that there has ALWAYS been a skill shortage.
In that were most of us actually skilled to do our first jobs in our respective industries, or were we hired and learned the skills on the job.

In one particular instance I had been hired to in a new team to do a certain job, they realised there was a critical skill set missing in the team for a particular product. They asked me in my 2nd week would I be prepared to learn that product an become the SME (Subject Matter Expert) for that, rather than the Operating System (AIX Unix) that I was originally hired for. This was a product the entire organisation relied on for recovery and operability... I said yes and they spent  about 5,000-6,000 sending me on a course for a week and gave me some manuals to read.

I was given a basic overview of the environment, some topology maps and asked to take it over, guess what... I (and the company) survived, like many others before me had. This used to be normal practise, I have since sent my staff on training to cover skill gaps, but companies are now loathe to spend the money (in actual cash or in work hours) to train staff, be they new or current. Someone in a company somewhere decided that workers are transient and the training budget could be saved and others followed suit.

I am hoping one of the benefits of this will be that employers see it as a responsibility of the business leaders of today to train the next generation the same way most of us were trained on the job. Because this selfish generation of maximum profits at the cost of minimizing investment in local talent is doing nothing to help this country.

To compare the differences, when I got into IT, I worked in a department of about 40 employees with a wage budget of about 2.2 - 2.4 million and about $100,000  in training expenses (thousands of hours of paying wages whilst training). So about 4-6% of the wage budget for training (plus probably another 4% in time dedicated to training)

In one of my last roles, I had around 100-120 employees  in total under me with a wage budget of perhaps 15 million and a training budget of $0. We managed training, but only through leveraging our relationships with vendors to supply our staff with training. We could not spend at all.

It is an absolute joke that companies can claim a skill shortage that they created should mean they can employ outside of the country.

[LP]

Worse, a lot of those startups commence as a result of Federal or State Gov funding and innovation grants!

The Feds use our taxes to fund a company whose business model requires the employment of minimum wage foreign nationals to make a profit!

Then the bureaucracy reports we have a shortage of skilled workers, and use the innovative projects that need foreign workers as the example of our skill shortage!

Even worse still, Abbott basically forced the CSIRO into the low cost labor market by cutting budgets and installing managers who who refused to sign off on project funding until wage costs reduced. In many cases Principal Investigators had to replace local PhDs with minimum wage foreign graduate students just to get the money to continue! In one location alone 350 local PhDs and Engineers got the bullet, and this is not counting the Environmental Sciences Group which effectively had it's door closed for political reasons! What an utter a55hole of a bloke! Of course the inevitable happened, a bunch of these foreign 457 graduates turned out to be siphoning CSIRO's IP and sending it back home, including military/defense grade secrets! This event was then used as an example of CSIRO's ineptness to justify another budget cut! In effect he cut until it damaged the organisation, the damage organisation he created then failed, so he used it as reason to cut it again!

The scary thing, Trump is worse!

[DJC]

Trump has got through his first 100 days without achieving any of the objectives/promises he set/made ... and that's with a Republican majority in both houses  :

[Lods]

Trump has got through his first 100 days without achieving any of the objectives/promises he set/made ... and that's with a Republican majority in both houses  :

That's a 'positive' not a 'negative'