Kansas City H1-B Project

[Jonathan Hutchins]

Great.  You're going to pump the local economy with newly trained people
with no experience and drive the already un-findable entry-level IT
positions completely out of existence.

Your literature cites "2500 unfilled positions".  You misleadingly imply
that your training will help fill open positions, instead of increasing
competition and driving down wages for scarce positions.

Most of the positions went unfilled not because there were no recently
untrained, inexperienced workers available.  They went unfilled for the
following reasons:

* Wages for some positions have fallen by as much as 75% since the Y2K boom.
* Employers expect work weeks of 50 - 70 hours, and work days of up to 36
hours with no overtime compensation.
* Work is often on night shifts.
* Very few local job openings in any field, but especially in IT, are entry
level positions.
* Employers ask for unreasonable levels of experience - occasionally
requiring more years of experience with a system than the system has been
available.
* Employers expect "exact fit" experience, performing the exact tasks of the
open position with the exact tools, restricting the "hiring pool" to people
who already have the job advertised.
* Employers are unwilling to accept related experience, or even experience
that is directly applicable but was acquired in the course of other job
duties.

There is very little new technology being developed in the Kansas City area.
Most IT positions consist of production and maintenance in very conservative
industries such as Banking and Investment or Insurance.  These industries
tend to reduce their positions over time rather than increase them.  The
Telecommunications employers in the area are mostly middle-management
centers, not technology centers, and in any case have a large pool of
recently idled employees and contractors.

I strongly expect that the drive behind this project is those "get rich
quick" schools that have been offering IT training as a way to start a new
career, and are facing flagging attendance in the face of the local glut of
experienced workers and absence of entry level positions.

Hopefully, your "Demonstration Project" will show just how true these
statements are, and will make the Department of Labor understand that this
project will only make entry level positions impossible to find and wages
for other positions lower as the market is flooded.

Perhaps, in the future, you can do some research _before_ implementing the
program.