Jobs replaced in accounting section.
As the Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump continues to surge in polls with his anti-immigration stance, a new controversy seems to have erupted with McDonald’s replacing 70 of their workers in accounting section, working in Ohio, with H-1B visa workers hired from outsourcing company Genpact.
The 70 Ohio jobs that McDonald’s outsourced to lower wage foreign graduates are not Silicon Valley technology and software jobs — they’re white-collar accounting jobs performed by graduates from mainstream business schools, reported Breitbart.
Nationwide, the foreign population of white-collar temporary workers, dubbed “guest-workers,†now exceeds 800,000, including roughly 650,000 H-1B workers on multi-year visas.
The outsourcing in Columbus, Ohio, was explained as a cost saving effort by a McDonald’s spokeswoman.
“To deliver $500 million in savings, the vast majority by the end of 2017, we are restructuring many aspects of our business, including an accounting function,†said spokeswoman Terri Hickey.
The outside contractor is Genpact, a New York-based firm. The company is a spinoff from General Electric, and its biggest owner is Bain Capital.
“Thank you for your inquiry but we are unable to comment on details of our client engagements due to confidentiality,†Gail Marold, the Genpact spokeswoman, told Breitbart News.
The outsourcing deal was revealed when McDonalds sought federal taxpayers’ funds to compensate the 70 fired workers.
Ohio is now home to roughly 13,000 H-1Bs, of which roughly 4,000 are employed at universities which can get an unlimited number of “cap exempt†H-1B visas.
The inflow of immigrants though has been good for the state and for the Chamber of Commerce, as more taxpayers and companies pay taxes to the state and dues to the Chamber. The extra people have increased the size of the state’s economy and government revenue, which grew from $25 billion in 2010 at the depth of the recession, up to $28.5 billion in 2015.
But the extra labor has shifted wages and opportunities away from Ohioans, including both the white-collar salary earners at McDonalds and the blue-collar wage earners in low skill jobs, noted Breitbart.
In Ohio, for example, the Brookings Institute calculated that wages for African-Americans in six out of seven largest counties have crashed by 11 percent from 2009 to 2014, while wages for white people grew by an average of 3.5 percent.
According to Harvard professor George Borjas, the presence of all immigrant workers (legal and illegal) in the labor market makes the U.S. economy (GDP) an estimated 11 percent larger ($1.6 trillion) each year. This “contribution†to the aggregate economy, however, does not measure the net benefit to the native-born population.
Of the $1.6 trillion increase in GDP, 97.8 percent goes to the immigrants themselves in the form of wages and benefits; the remainder constitutes the “immigration surplus†— the benefit accruing to the native-born population, including both workers, owners of firms, and other users of the services provided by immigrants.