Economic News 2000 July

updated: 2019-03-03

2000-07-01

2000-07-01
_DoL ETA_
unemployment insurance weekly claims

• 280,979 initial claims
• 1,862,788 continuing claims
• 1.5% insured unemployment rate

2000-07-01
R' Yaakov Kleiman _Aish_
Jewish genes
"Jewish men from communities which developed in the Near East –- Iran, Iraq, Kurdistan, Yemen -- and European Jews have very similar, almost identical genetic profiles."
 

2000-07-02

2000-07-02
Bart Johnson _abc News_/_AP_
Congress Wrangles Over H-1B Visa Increase
"in some of the key disciplines, half of the master's and doctoral students are foreign nationals.   With unemployment less than 2% in Santa Clara County and high-tech companies hiring at breath-taking rates, Silicon Valley is exerting its growing lobbying might to expand a special visa program called H-1B that allows foreign college graduates to stay in the country and work...   He cited a 1996 inspector general's report that found the program was easily manipulated by workers and employers who broke the rules.   In January, federal officials charged a Berkeley, CA, land-lord with using the program to smuggle Indian girls into the United States for prostitution...   There were about 1M jobs in computer-related fields nationwide in 1998..."

2000-07-02
James Lardner _US News & World Report_
Give us your cheap!: International bodyshopping heats up as USA economy continues to crumble
"In the Spring of 1997, Vivek Wadhwa was trying to launch a software company [body shop] and running into resistance.   Based on the reaction in his adopted home of North Carolina, he concluded that the local investment community wasn't quite ready for the idea of a bearded young engineer from India as a CEO.   'Rinky-dink venture capital firms wouldn't return my calls.', he says.   To make matters even more suspiciously multi-cultural, 2 of Wadhwa's co-founders -- one from Romania, the other from Ukraine -- had accents just as funny as his.   And most of his programmers were Russians who had honed their skills in a KGB-directed attempt to copy 1970s-vintage U.S. military software.   So the investments were not exactly rolling in, and Wadhwa was sorely tempted by a job offer at M$.   His two sons, Vineet and Tarun, ages 14 and 9, certainly couldn't see a down-side to that deal -- not after a trip to Seattle in which the family was put up in adjoining hotel suites and showered with games and gizmos.   'They schmoozed my wife and children like you wouldn't believe.', Wadhwa says.   Global village.   Three years later, his sons have long forgotten the trinkets from their visit to M$ country.
 
Widening his search, Wadhwa got the backing he needed; his company went on to sign major contracts with Charles Schwab, PaineWebber, and the U.S. Air Force, among other clients, and expects to generate $10M in revenues this year, up from $5.6M in 1999...
 
A third of the valley's scientists and engineers in 1990 were foreign born, according to the census of that year...   Of the 4,063 tech start-ups launched in the valley between 1995 and 1998, about 20% had CEOs with Chinese surnames, while 9% had CEOs with Indian surnames, according to data collected by Dun & Bradstreet...
 
Since 1950, roughly 250K ethnic Chinese have come to America as college or graduate students.   The great majority -- 85% of those from Taiwan, for example -- have remained stateside, according to L. Ling-chi Wang, who teaches Chinese-American studies at the University of California-Berkeley.   He considers them, along with the Jews who fled Europe during the time of Hitler, one of 'two great waves of intellectual immigrants'...
 
Last year, Indians claimed about 20% of the 115K temporary work (or H-1B) visas granted here...   Sabeer Bhatia, who has achieved rock-star status for selling [slow, clunky, poorly-organized] Hotmail to M$ for a reported $400M...   One of Wadhwa's early mentors was Vinod Khosla, who co-founded Sun Microsystems before yielding the CEO's job to the former house-mate he had recruited into the company, Scott McNealy.   Khosla, now a partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (where, thanks largely to him, some 40% of the portfolio consists of Indian-led or -founded businesses), gave Wadhwa a crash course in the start-up process...   Pradeep Singh, who left M$ in 1993 to found a software and tech support company with operations in Seattle and Bangalore, India [i.e. uses H-1B visas to facilitate off-shoring]...
 
[Despite the economic depression] Congress is moving swiftly toward raising the annual cap on H-1B visas from 115K to 200K, and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan speaks matter-of-factly about immigration as an anti-inflation device, to be ratcheted up and down along with interest rates...   Wadhwa's company, Relativity Technologies, is an experiment in Indo-Russo-American collaboration.   Erlikh, the chief technology officer, spoke next to no English when he arrived in New York.   He got through his first semester at Baruch College [B-school] by translating the text-books word for word with a Russian-English dictionary.   To his great relief, there turned out to be only about 600 words in the standard business-text-book vocabulary.   While working for Wadhwa at First Boston in the late 1980s, Erlikh sold him on the idea of a trip to Russia in search of under-utilized computer talent."
---30---
 
 

2000-07-03

2000-07-03
_Augusta, GA, Business Chronicle_
Employees allegedly lack basics
"US corporations that tested job applicants in 1999 for basic skills found 38% lacked 'the ability to read instructions, write reports and/or do arithmetic at a level adequate to perform common work-place tasks', according to the American Management Association.   In 1997, the figure stood at 23%...   Employers filling vacancies left by managers and executives are spending 40% more time doing so than they did 2 years ago, according to data collected by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a Chicago-based employment consulting firm.   In the first quarter of 2000, the median length of time it took to recruit a new employee was 3.58 months.   During the same quarter in 1998, the median length of time was 2.55 months.   Common sense might suggest the tight labor market is to blame for the lengthy job-search times.   Challenger CEO John Challenger offers another explanation: pickiness."

2000-07-03
Denise Murray _iT news_
Tech salaries inch up in Australia
"IT salaries rose 5.1% during the 12 months to 2000 April, continuing to out-strip the average weekly earnings of other sectors of the Australian economy, which only rose 3.6% in the same period.   An Australian Computer Society (ACS) remuneration survey report shows the growth in IT salaries also exceeded the consumer price index (CPI), which only rose 2.8%."
 

2000-07-04

2000-07-05

2000-07-06

2000-07-06
K.K. Campbell _Toronto Star_
Dot-Com Pendulum Swings Toward Gloom
"However, after the March down-turn in over-inflated dot-com stock prices, investment money is now overly cautious...   It doesn't help to see sites actually collapse.   APBNews.com -- a quality crime news site -- closed its doors recently, putting 140 people out of work.   It was trying to get its next round of investment, when the market dried up...   About 5,400 jobs have been axed in the US dot-com sector since December -- according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an out-placement company.   Almost 60 dot-com companies cut -- with over 30% of them shutting down altogether...   Barron's has updated the research.   In the 3 months since the first study, those 200-plus dot-coms measured by Pegasus collectively reduced losses by almost 25% (from $1.52G lost to $1.15G)."
 

2000-07-07

2000-07-07
Marjorie Valbrun _Wall Street Journal_
Coalition of Black Professionals Seeks to Block Increase in H-1B Cheap Foreign Labor Visas
alternate link

2000-07-08

2000-07-09

2000-07-10

2000-07-10
James Lardner _Talisma_/_US News & World Report_
New Wave of Immigrants Launch High-Tech Start-Ups
"A third of the valley's scientists and engineers in 1990 were foreign born, according to the census of that year; the figure is believed to be substantially higher today.   And like Wadhwa, a remarkable number of immigrants -- Indians and Chinese, especially -- have made the leap into the ranks of company founders and CEOs.   Of the 4,063 tech start-ups launched in the valley between 1995 and 1998, about 20% had CEOs with Chinese surnames, while 9% had CEOs with Indian surnames, according to data collected by Dun & Bradstreet.   Even before the computer revolution, the Asian immigrant population was unusually well educated.   Since 1950, roughly 250K ethnic Chinese have come to America as college or graduate students.   The great majority -- 85% of those from Taiwan, for exampleñhave remained stateside, according to L. Ling-chi Wang, who teaches Chinese-American studies at the University of California-Berkeley.   He considers them, along with the Jews who fled Europe during the time of Hitler, one of '2 great waves of intellectual immigrants'.   Indians, bidding to become the third wave, did not arrive in significant numbers until the late 1960s"
 

2000-07-11

2000-07-12

2000-07-13

2000-07-13
"Cristine"
Running out of Lives: Lay-Off
"Anyone who has had an in-depth conversation with me over the past two weeks knows that I have been suspecting lay-offs at Sendmail, Inc. for some time.   Having been in staffing for the last 5 years, I know the patterns and signals...and with the hiring freezes and worry about cost reduction, comes the real possibility of lay-offs.   (Plus, like the fact that lay-offs were NEVER addressed [was] kind of a flag!)"

2000-07-13
Patrick Thibodeau _ComputerWorld_/_IDG_
Report calls for greater diversity in hiring for high-tech jobs
alternate link

2000-07-13
_Business & Legal Reports_
Starting Salaries for New Grads NACE

Management	$35,991
Accounting	$36,919
Marketing	$33,141
MIS	$43,657
ChemE	$49,000
CS	$48,740
IS	$43,402
ComputerE	$49,505
EE Engineering	$48,492
Industrial Engineering	$45,612
Mechanical Engineering	$45,617
Literature	$29,845
Government	$32,748
History	$31,359
Pharmacy	$65,747

 

2000-07-14

2000-07-15

2000-07-16

2000-07-16
Richard Salsman _Capitalism Magazine_
The 3 Myths of Anti-Trust part4

2000-07-17

2000-07-17
David Lewis _Internet Week_
Tech firms still cry "shortage" while laying off thousands and over 100K remain unemployed
"While no hard data was available on the number of unfilled positions, all of the nation's 5 fastest-growing occupations are computer-related, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.   The fastest, computer engineering, will grow 108% between 1998 and 2008, from 299K to 622K, the bureau said.   Dot-com job losses -- totaling 5,400 between 1999 December and June -- have been 'heavy almost everywhere except in b-to-b companies', said John Challenger, CEO of out-placement agency Challenger, Gray & Christmas."
 

2000-07-18

2000-07-19

2000-07-20

2000-07-21

2000-07-22

2000-07-23

2000-07-24

2000-07-24
Edward Iwata _USA Today_
Race issues shake tech world: What looks like meritocracy to the naive can brim with bias

2000-07-25

2000-07-26

2000-07-27

2000-07-28

2000-07-29

2000-07-29
_Detroit News_
Help-wanted index falls further, fewer job seekers willing to move
"The volume of help-wanted advertising in major U.S. news-papers fell in June to the lowest level in more than 3 years, the Conference Board said today.   The help-wanted index declined to 81 for the month from 82 in May, according to the New York-based business research group.   The index was 85 in 1999 June.   That's the second straight monthly drop and the lowest reading since 85 in 1996 September...   In the first half of 2000, only 21% of jobless managers and executives moved to take a new job.   That is down 17% from an already low 25% of job-seekers who relocated in the first 6 months of 1999.   By contrast, 43% of job-seekers in the first half of 1993 chose to move for a new position."
related data
 

2000-07-30

2000-07-30
James E. Challenger _Chicago Sun-Times_
Productivity is key to avoid down-sizing
"After a decade of down-sizing, companies are leaner...   For example, skilled workers at the lower end of the pay scale once were safe-guarded because of the difficulty in replacing them, but suddenly find their jobs increasingly at risk.   The index found the percentage of discharged employees earning less than $30K in their former position grew to 11% in the first quarter, up from 6% in the fourth quarter.   Just 8 quarters ago the percentage was at a record low of 2.2%."

 

2000-07-31
 

2000 July
Ann P. Bartel _Industrial Relations vol39 #3_/_NBER_/_Columbia U_/_U of crazy California_
measuring the employer's return on investments (ROI) in training: evidence from the literature (pdf)
"...the effect of an hour of company training on productivity growth is about 5 times...its effect on wage growth (Barron et al. 1989, 1993; Bishop 1991), i.e. that employers reap almost all the returns to company training...   cost of training...training intensity...estimates of productivity...   Businesses that implemented formal training programs after 1983 experienced an 18% increase in productivity between 1983 and 1986 (i.e. a 6% annual increase) compared with businesses that did not.   Implementation of other 'human resource policies' (e.g. job design, performance appraisal, employee involvement) during the same time period didnot have a productivity-enhancing effect, rejecting a Hawthorne effect explanation...   the number of workers trained in 1990 and 1993 had no impact on productivity, but the percentage of formal training off the job was positive and significant for the manufacturing sector, and computer training was positive and significant in the non-manufacturing sector... "

External links may expire at any time.
Neither this page, nor the opinions expressed or implied in it are endorsed by Michael Badnarik, Ron Paul, Bob Barr, Wayne Allyn Root, Warner Brothers, Gary Johnson, president Donald Trump, nor by my hosts, Kermit and Rateliff.

---

jgo Resume	Reading Room
jgo Econ Data & Graphs	jgo Econ News Bits
Economic News Analysis Summary
Kermit's home page	jgo Links
jgo's Work in Progress
Page Top