Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPQ) announced on Tuesday that the company will cut about 10 percent of its 300,000 member workforce, but appears to be moving “forward” with expanding its use of H1-B foreign work visas.
HP Chairman and CEO Meg Whitman said the company will cut 25,000 to 30,000 more jobs, with most of the job losses coming from the company’s enterprises services division that caters to large corporate customers. Whitman stated, “We’ve done a significant amount of work over the past few years to take costs out and simplify processes and these final actions will eliminate the need for any future corporate restructuring.”
The new job slashing is in addition to the 54,000 job layoffs already taken by HP and are expected to mostly hit workers in North America, according to Bloomberg.
Despite the huge employment shrink, according to the myvisajobs.com website: “Hewlett-Packard filed 2668 labor condition applications for H1-B visa and 815 labor certifications for green card from fiscal year 2011 to 2014. Hewlett-Packard Company was ranked 30 among all visa sponsors.”
Breitbart News reported in February that the Obama administration just gave away a million more ‘Green Cards’ to would-be immigrants.
The administration is expanding the white-collar H-1B program by giving work-permits to the spouses of H1-B workers. The H-1B workers are not immigrants, because they must return home after six years of work. Roughly 650,000 H-1B workers are resident in the United States.
Carly Fiorina in June warned that the foreign worker program used by Hewlett Packard and other companies “was very different 10 years ago than it is now.” She added, “It’s become an issue, where people are using it as almost an industry. It’s become an issue where it appears that some companies that are abusing that program and asking American workers to train H1-B visa replacements so they can lower wages.”
Fiorina highlighted that there are currently at least 16 different visa programs. She acknowledged that there are some positions that can only be filed by foreign specialists, but she blames America’s education system as the real culprit for any lack of technical skills in America. She advocates rebuilding the American education system from the ground up to fill American jobs with Americans.
Fiorina added that when it comes to H-1Bs and the other federal programs, “We’ve got to fix the legal immigration system. People have talked about it for 25 years.”
Hewlett Packard previously announced that the Silicon Valley giant was planning to spin-off its rapidly expanding enterprise hardware and services unit from its slow-growth computer and printer businesses later this fall.
HP CFO, Tim Stonesifer, said the company will take $2.7 billion in accounting charges over the next three years, but HP will save $2 billion in cuts for “things such as site closures and the reductions of those, and further reductions of workforce across the broader portfolio.” He projected that with HP picking up an extra $700 million a year in cost savings due to the restructuring and spin-off, that HP will produce an operating margin of 7 percent to 9 percent of sales.
With the announcement of the write-off after the close of regular trading, HP stock plunged about 2 percent in after-hours trading. But as the conference call released the positive details associated with the cost savings and restructure benefits, the stock rallied back to just under its close at $27.11 a share.
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