Apr 1, 1998

CWA President Morton Bahr, in his role as chairman of the AFL-CIO’s Department of Public Employees, recently accused information technology (IT) managers of “crying wolf” on alleged shortages of skilled workers.

In a letter to Congress, Bahr urged caution about studies that purport to show a shortage of skilled IT workers, because these studies were commissioned “by the employers who would benefit most from lower cost foreign labor and a flooding of the labor pool. There is simply no economic justification for the labor shortage claim.”

Some Republicans in Congress have indicated a willingness to relax immigration laws to allow businesses to import lower-paid foreign workers for technological jobs.