other skilled positions, such as engineers, and business/financial people in my state.
What I found when crunching the raw data is that the companies were paying these people between the 25th and median percentile wages, so they were not horribly lowballed.
The downside of H1B visas is a) they cost a company upwards of $5K apiece to get a worker over here, and b) around 10% of the aggregate gross wage the H1B people earn is remitted to their families back in their country of origin.
This means, of course, that the visa holders do not buy the same levels of local goods an services an American worker would purchase.
Be mindful, too, that the labor market is a market - it operates according to supply and demand. Workers skilled enough to be recruited for H1B work in software development, accounting, etc. know how great demand is for their skills. I'm thinking H1B wages won't drop that much. Though the middle-men that facilitate outreach and recruitment of H1B workers for client companies do gouge.
Now, there's a flip side, as well. I did an analysis of the top jobs that are outsourced overseas - American business 'offshores' around 300,000 jobs per year. What I found was that the top jobs outsourced include call center people, software developers, accountants and digital marketers. You can get a software developer in Ukraine or India for pennies on the dollar of what you'd pay here.
We must all be mindful that businesses experiencing the current massive shortage of key workers aren't simply 'sitting on their hands.' My cousin, who owns an auto parts store near Houston must be credited with that turn of phrase. That said, a company has five basic choices when faced with an inability to hire key labor:
1. They can offer signing bonuses, and bump the pay.
2. They can invest capital to leverage the labor they have with automation.
3. They can rethink their real estate strategy and recruit out of state or even country. For example, there is a financial firm in my region that has 200 openings and a pretty much empty office building. They are subleasing floors of the building as they can, and recruiting workers from anywhere in the US or UK.
4. They can offshore key business functions, such as IT, payroll and other administrative stuff.
5. They can move where there are more workers that have the skills they need.
Plus, it depends on the kind of business - some, such as restaurants, bars and hotels, have had to adopt to short staffing by cutting hours and services for customers (your hotel room will no longer be cleaned daily because they just can't find the housekeeping staff).
Right now, JC, we are experiencing a sea-change in what the labor force looks like and will look like in future. Not only is technology rapidly changing things, but workers have discovered, by and large, how toxic some corporate culture is, and are wanting more choice in when and where they do their work. And unions are starting to flex their muscles. Consider the impending Kaiser strike in CA - a number of different unions are striking in sympathy with each other! That is almost unheard of since Taft-Hartley passed in 1948.
Sigh. This is why I dislike capitalism, particularly our 'shareholder primacy' variety. If you are interested, a really good book about this, which to my mind is the root cause of many of our problems, is Lynn Stout's The Myth of Shareholder Value. Very good book.
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