In accordance with either a feminist liberal agenda or simply a marketing angle, a commercial has come out from Microsoft encouraging girls from a young age to embrace their scientific side and pursue STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education and career options. In an interview with Red Alert Politics, one fierce, feminine force in employment law says that notion is not only misleading, but downright cruel.
“Don’t ever tell your children to get into the STEM field, because the problem with it is… there’s no jobs for them,” says Sarasota attorney Sara Blackwell. “They come out, and the problem with the outsourcing… is that the salary for STEM workers has gone down, and even if they can find a job… it’s for very, very little pay compared to what people used to receive.”
Blackwell is an employment lawyer who was recently featured on a long-overdue 60 Minutes segment on the H-1B visa, and abuse of the program from some companies. Blackwell has toured the country on a rigorous travel schedule that will take her to New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, the last of which she gathered a rally of laid-off University of California, San Francisco Medical Center IT employees.
Her organization, Protect Us Workers, currently raises awareness and advocates for American laborers who are replaced by foreign employment. She most famously offered free legal work in early 2016 to represent the Walt Disney World employees who were fired and replaced. One of the biggest unseen tolls is the strain on these souls that not only are unable to provide for themselves or their families, but have to train their foreign replacements in order to receive a few more months’ salaries and a bonus.
“I have listened to people cry,” Blackwell says. “I cannot express to you the emotional impact that training your replacement has on these people. I’ve had people commit suicide, I’ve had divorces, people go into mental hospitals…for whatever reason it’s hard on people. They’re all scared, they’re super, super scared.”
These are the victims that felt so displaced from the business model of the past eight years and more, as well as the Democratic platform. Many of those workers featured in 60 Minutes were adamant that they were not xenophobic, or anti-immigrant; rather, disgusted at how the tides have shifted in favor of corporate greed over American labor. In fact, Blackwell has heard from many Indians who must be sponsored by corporations in order to stay in the United States.
What does this uncertain future mean for young Americans?
A quick aside: data from a 2016 Time article shows that STEM fields were actually projected to offer a 3 percent raise in salary from the year before, but the official STEM index on US News shows that as Blackwell said, women are in fact not being considered as often for open positions, as neither are racial non-whites and non-Asians. To Blackwell, the biggest tragedy with millennials is that they still don’t have the life and work experience to understand why in fact they’re not being hired, and how outsourcing works out.
There are, in fact, many with STEM qualifications in the unlikeliest of places. Last year, Walmart discovered after a company-wide memo was sent out, that in the last 24 months, 1,000 of their employees had graduated with STEM-related degrees. An optimistic outlook would be hope that companies begin to internalize their hiring processes instead of going out.
Blackwell also teaches employment law at the University of South Florida, and while she says her students, and any other crowd she speaks to, are blown away by the depth of corruption within outsourcing, she also explains that even the resume and job-seeking websites will skew results.
“The recruiting aspect of the job has been outsourced to India,” she says. “They have no idea of the geography of the United States.” This will result in Americans being offered short-term jobs 15 states away, and companies who put their job ads getting back more foreigners in need of sponsorship.
Ultimately, Blackwell simply wishes the system would be more honest and straightforward about the foggy climate of STEM fields for millennials.
“I think it’s really affected people that are trying to push STEM,” she says. “You can’t tell them to go to STEM when you know they’re going to come out and not have a job, that’s just mean.”
What makes this worse, Blackwell adds, is that this doubles the pressure for the STEM industry when it already expected to be the cutting edge for research and other developments.
“It’s really ruining the STEM field for the American people,” she says.
Watch the commercial below:
