Marketplace Report was a Stinker

Date: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 1:44 PM

JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER

by Rob Sanchez
January 05, 2005 No. 1173

NPR's Marketplace aired their second radio show about the Y2K problem.
It was worse than I expected. To listen to it, follow these directions:

1) go to: http://marketplace.publicradio.org/pm.html
2) click on the link that says "listen to entire show"
3) The show is about 28 minutes long. Skip to 19:15
4) The previous days broadcast is in their archive if you want to
listen to it.

I sent NPR Marketplace an email and called their headquarters in Los
Angeles to complain about their biased show. I strongly recommend that
all of you call or email them to complain. Propaganda like this should
not go unchallenged. Their contact page is at:

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/about/contact.html

I sent them the following email and will be waiting for a response
which I will share with the readers of this newsletter. Several others
have forwarded me some very good emails that they have sent to
Marketplace, and I urge more of you to do the same.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Brett and Marketplace staff,

As the author of the "Job Destruction Newsletter" I would like to
explain to my readers why the Y2K story had such a lack of research.
The corporate bias in this report calls into question your credibility.

Yesterday's Marketplace report was nothing but an infomercial for
companies that are outsourcing high-tech jobs and importing H-1B visa
holders to take away our jobs. The thing that disappointed me most
about the report is that it showed a total lack of research and only
featured opinions from the corporate funded, pro-outsourcing shills.

Listed below are some of my major objections:

* You blamed Y2K for a shortage of programmers. There was NEVER, EVER a
shortage of programmers. Employers used Y2K as an excuse to declare
phony shortages so that they could import H-1B visa holders into the
USA. Even the BLS and DOL admit that there was never proof of a
shortage. Employers have been declaring shortages of programmers since
the 1980s and H-1B was put into law in 1990. Your facts and dates just
don't jive with each other.

* The first part of your report says that there was a shortage of
programmers, but the last part of the report said that improved
productivity allowed employers to operate with smaller staffs. Didn't
somebody at Marketplace recognize the contradictions here?

* Your assertion that high-tech companies needed Indians for Y2K
because they were the only ones who knew how to program old computers
in languages such as COBOL is absurd. The fact is that there were
plenty of older programmers that knew these technologies that were
shunned by employers. Most of these unemployed older programmers were
the ones that actually designed the languages for mainframe computers
and yet they couldn't get jobs fixing Y2K. Employers preferred H-1Bs
over older American workers because they could save on labor costs.
There is no other reason. It's that simple.

* Indian programmers are far from being better than the best. That
statement is an insult to those that built Silicon Valley and it
borders on racism. Refer to this webpage for more information:

http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/CMMHype.txt

* If your assertion was correct that Indians are desirable because they
have outdated skills then they are obviously not the best, they are the
worst!

Considering the fact that Dr. Matloff is in California I am stunned
that you didn't interview him. Someone with bare minimum computer
skills could find him in a few minutes by using Google.

* The people interviewed were industry shills that have a vested
interest in promoting offshoring and H-1B visas. To only interview
Saxenian and Dossani shows an appalling lack of research at best, and a
corporate bias at worst. Both of them are corporate funded shills that
promote the replacement of American workers with cheap Indian labor.
These two are as biased towards corporate interests as you can get.

Annalee Saxenian helped to author an unscientific study funded by
corporations that tried to prove that it helps the economy whenever
cheap labor replaces American programmers. She even had the gall to use
the term "brain circulation" to describe the replacement of American
workers with cheap Indian labor.

Rafiq Dossani is funded by the Sloan Foundation and India's Securities
and Exchange Board. His mission is to promote offshoring for the
economic benefit of India.

I would like a call from someone at Marketplace that can give me a
plausible explanation for how this show ever made it on the air. I
suspect that this show was a plant by organizations such as
CompeteAmerica or ITAA. I am a regular listener to Marketplace because
it's usually intelligent and well researched. What happened here? Are
your reporters the worst of the worst?

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