Minorities, Money and Miller

With these events resurfacing at this rather late stage in the primary race, it also becomes clear why Miller felt that he needed to target black legislators early on with a behind-the-scenes smear campaign against his opponent.

Background

In April, 2000, along with many city business journals, the Houston Business Journal carried an article by Kent Hoover, "Black Caucus wants more respect from high-tech industry".  The article is  here.

Among the issues at stake for the high-tech industry in the 2000 election year were permanent normal trading relations with China and expansion of H-1B visas for foreign professionals. The tech industry had ignored issues put forth by the Congressional Black Caucus to the point that a dozen members of the Caucus visited a CapNet sponsored meeting in order to address tech executives assembled at America Online's Dulles headquarters. 
The caucus members encouraged tech executives to recruit more minorities, support teacher training at black colleges and retrain American workers for tech jobs instead of relying on foreigners. 

While the tech executives agreed that education and retraining were long-term solutions to their labor needs, they claimed that they need help immediately.

Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, D-Miss. noted that most black members of Congress had a strong pro-tech voting record, yet were receiving very little attention or political support from the tech industry.

Here are some comments from the Black Caucus members in Hoover's article:

Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, D-Miss.: "Don't take us for granted... Your industry for the most part bypasses members of the Black Caucus... You can't just show up one time and expect us to go to the dance."

Rep. Julia Carson, D-Ind.: "Don't presume we just know about welfare matters."

As we'll see, the Black Caucus was disinvited to the dance.

The visit by the Black Caucus had little impact, and several organizations, including the National Urban League and the Coalition for Fair Employment in Silicon Valley, began a campaign to raise awareness on the H-1B visa bill.

Joined by organizations representing other minorities and older IT professionals, a grassroots protest began against the high-tech industry's efforts to recruit foreign workers instead of hiring more American workers.

Quoting from Darryl K. Taft's article in the July 17, 2000, Computer Reseller News, "Minorities Unite Against Hiring Practices"

The National Urban League and other minority groups, including the Coalition for Fair Employment in Silicon Valley, which is largely African-American, say the industry's hiring practices approach the equivalent of a high-tech Jim Crow system. The coalition recently ran ads saying there are "far more" qualified Americans-many among the ranks of minorities-to fill existing IT jobs.

In a letter to Congress, National Urban League President Hugh Price called the H-1B visa plan "premature" and said the government should wait for the results of a National Academy of Science study on the long-term employment needs of the high-tech sector. The report is due out in October.

In Taft's article, Price pointed to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics showing that the hiring of African-Americans in the high-tech sector has improved only slightly during the past decade.  He noted that African-Americans were particularly affected by discriminatory hiring practices in the IT field.

Price cited a 1999 report which noted that at the time roughly 80 percent of Silicon Valley's high-tech companies did not file Equal Employment Opportunity Commission forms or affirmative action reports with the Joint Reporting Committee representing civil rights enforcement agencies.

In the opinion of one of the few African-American CEOs at a high-tech corporation, John Thompson of Symantec, the high-tech industry needed to redouble its efforts to bolster minority representation within its workforce.

By the summer of 2000 with increasing publicity and pressure being brought to bear on the industry, a public response was forthcoming from Harris Miller who gave lip service to the public concerns, and outlined the industry position on the matter in a letter to the National Urban League dated July 7, 2000.

Recall that from A Short but Tragic History of E-voting Public Relations Miller's self-proclaimed public relations role in several highly controversial scenarios including electronic voting has been to "take the heat" so that individual companies need not respond.

"Frequently . . . in a trade association, you don't want to talk about the issues as individual companies. We have that issue right now with the Buy America Act, for example, in Congress. No company wants to act like it's against Buy America - even though they're all against it - so I take all the heat for them."

Kent Hoover wrote a second article to city business journals in July 2000, published in the Sacramento Business Journal, July 14, 2000 as "The Information Technology Association of America has urged the National Urban League to reconsider its opposition to raising the cap on H-1B visas, issued to foreign professionals. Political fight continues over tech visas. "

 
The league wants Congress to postpone action on the H-1B visa bill -- a top priority for the high-tech industry -- until the National Academy of Science completes a study of the industry's work force needs. Another organization, the Coalition for Fair Employment in Silicon Valley, also opposes the legislation, contending. "there are already more qualified Americans to fill existing high-tech jobs than we need, many of them African-American and other minorities."

Back in the summer of 2000 several black professional and civil rights groups formed an alliance in opposition to the increase in visas for tech workers.  An article by Jube Shiver, Jr. outlines the efforts on the part of The Urban League and the Coalition for Fair Employment in Silicon Valley along with representatives of historically black colleges to make the case that computer programming and network engineering jobs should be going to Americans. They also claimed that the industry was not making enough of an effort to reach out to technically trained graduates of black colleges or older technical professionals.

From Shiver's article:

After a string of legislative victories that made it the envy of Washington, the powerful high-tech industry is facing its first significant opposition on Capitol Hill.

Black professional and civil rights groups are campaigning this summer against an industry measure that until now has seemed politically unassailable: visas for more foreign workers to fill the mushrooming number of U.S. high-tech jobs being created by the booming Internet economy.

The Business Journal (Serving Greater Tampa Bay) Oct 20, 2000, edition carried an article by Kent Hoover: "Technology industry kicks up contributions to campaigns."

Versions of the article appeared in at least a dozen city business journals under various titles.  The title carried in the Houston Business Journal was "High-tech firms flex financial muscle to influence key issues." (Congressional Black Caucus opposition).

The article with post-election updates appeared in the Pittsburgh Business Times Nov 17, 2000, with the title "House vote to increase the number of H-1B visas irks members of black caucus."

According to Hoover's article, members of the Congressional Black Caucus were told that no more votes were scheduled on a night that the House held a voice vote to raise the number of H-1B visas.

The caucus members had planned to propose amendments that would have required the high-tech companies to hire and train more U.S. minority workers, but apparently they were shut out of the process.

According to the article Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, blamed the "mean-spiritedness of the majority" for the unscheduled vote, which was held shortly after the Senate approval of raising the cap on H-1B visas to 195,000 a year.

From the article

Republicans were "clearly trying to get in front of the line as to how much of a friend to the high-tech industry they are," Ms. Jackson Lee says.

Also

These victories came as high-tech companies flexed their new-economy muscle in Washington, by dramatically increasing lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill and by opening up their checkbooks.

Noted in the Pittsburgh version was Harris Miller's approval of the high-tech community's bipartisan approach to political contributions and lobbying. 

However, the pre-election Business Journal also carried this

U.S. Sen. Spencer Abraham, R-Mich., one of the sponsors of the legislation to raise the cap on H-1B visas, has received more than $216,000 in contributions from the computer industry.

"I'm doing everything I can to get him re-elected," said Harris Miller, a lifelong Democrat who heads the Information Technology Association of America.

The Pittsburgh version only carries the first paragraph and points out that Abraham lost his bid for reelection to Democrat Debbie Stabenow.

Figures accompanying the Business Journal piece show the increasing contributions made by the industry.

Computer Industry Political Contribution Growth (in millions of dollars)
  1990  1.3
  1992  4.8
  1994  3.9
  1996  8.9
  1998  9.5
  2000 22.1

The Consequences

Just a few years after these events a study (partial article) conducted by the Coalition for Fair Employment in Silicon Valley noted that black IT workers are under a 'Silicon Ceiling.'

The study revealed that only 5.5 percent of IT workers were black, while according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), blacks account for 10.6 percent of the entire U.S. workforce.

"Clearly there's a disparity between high-tech companies and other employers in the way they recruit, hire and promote African Americans," said John William Templeton, editor for blackpressonline.com and board member of the coalition. "Compared to the 12 major industrial categories as listed by the BLS, high tech industries ranked 10th, only ahead of mining and agriculture, in the proportion of African Americans whom they employ."

Templeton said the argument that many minority workers just aren't qualified for the high-tech field falls flat because his coalition and BLS statistics show that other information-based, technology-driven industries, such as telecommunications and radio and television broadcasting, employ far higher percentages of blacks--13.9 percent and 15.4 percent, respectively.

Harris Miller, president of the ITAA, said that outsourcing and offshoring benefit consumers by enabling companies to provide lower-cost products. While remaining strong and profitable, which in turn can create more jobs.

However, Miller said he has seen no data that links offshoring and outsourcing to the poor performance of employers hiring minorities for IT positions. "We must do a better job of training and retooling U.S. workers' skills so we can continue to have the world's best workforce," said Miller. "IT companies must have the ability to compete in both domestic and global markets. IT businesses that ignore changing market conditions and customer expectations do so at the peril of their long-term competitiveness."

And we now know that those magical mystery jobs will never appear because we're having a "jobless recovery."  Well, small wonder.

Appendix

From the Congressional Record of the House, Tuesday, October 3, 2000, 2nd Session.

Mr. CANNON. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the  Senate bill (S. 2045) to amend the Immigration and Nationality Act with  respect to H-1B nonimmigrant aliens, as amended.
...

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, the process is a betrayal. The process by  which this important legislation has been brought to the floor is a  betrayal of all of the reasonable Members of this House who are ready to move to meet an emergency. We understand that there is a great need  for more workers to be brought in. We understand that there is a shortage, those figures are not rigged, that there is a shortage and it is mushrooming. We understand that we are going into a cyber-civilization and brain power is very important and we cannot hesitate  and slow down the process. We understand the need to do something.

But why have it brought to the floor in the form of a suspension bill and not have it debated o the floor of the House fully and not allow amendments to be introduced which would be very useful for this process? What we are doing here is steamrolling through a cap. We will  have a cap which amounts to almost 600,000 people over a 3-year period.  600,000 people are going to be brought in without any further discussion of the process of creating brain power. We are going to let nations like India and China, et cetera, create or let their school systems fill this need for us because we are not willing to debate and really come to grips with the process that is needed to generate and develop this kind of brain power in our own country.

We have a $230 billion surplus this year and all of the proposals for education have been milquetoast proposals. We are not coming to grips with the fact that we need to invest very heavily in infrastructure, very heavily in computers and equipment. In the area of immigration  alone, we are overlooking a supply of manpower that is already here. There are large numbers of young people who come out of our high schools, they are undocumented, they come out of the high schools because they are allowed to go to public schools, but they cannot go to college and receive scholarships because they are undocumented. They have the brain power. I wanted to offer an amendment where they would be allowed special status, also. There are numerous amendments that were waiting to be attached to this bill to make it better, and we have violated the trust of the people who wanted to make this happen.

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