Report: Boeing Outsourced American Jobs to $9-an-Hour Foreign Workers

The Boeing Company Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Engineering, Oper
AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi

Boeing, the second biggest beneficiary of United States Defense Department government contracts, outsourced American software jobs to foreign graduates for $9 an hour, a new report states.

A report by The Atlantic this week details how Boeing engineers were taken aback in recent years when software jobs in the U.S. were dished out to foreign workers via an Indian outsourcing firm in order to cut costs:

Meanwhile, experienced Boeing engineers rolled their eyes as some software-development tasks (not specific to MCAS) were outsourced to recent college grads earning as little as $9 an hour, who were employed by an Indian subcontractor set up across from Seattle’s Boeing Field. [Emphasis added]

In June, Bloomberg News reported that Boeing’s recent problems with their 737 Max fleet — where the corporation allegedly knew of the issues two years before two fatal crashes occurred — coincided with Boeing executives outsourcing U.S. software jobs to foreign workers through HCL Technologies Ltd. — an India-based outsourcing firm.

Bloomberg noted:

The Max software — plagued by issues that could keep the planes grounded months longer after U.S. regulators this week revealed a new flaw — was developed at a time Boeing was laying off experienced engineers and pressing suppliers to cut costs. [Emphasis added]

Increasingly, the iconic American planemaker and its subcontractors have relied on temporary workers making as little as $9 an hour to develop and test software, often from countries lacking a deep background in aerospace — notably India. [Emphasis added]

In offices across from Seattle’s Boeing Field, recent college graduates employed by the Indian software developer HCL Technologies Ltd. occupied several rows of desks, said Mark Rabin, a former Boeing software engineer who worked in a flight-test group that supported the Max. [Emphasis added]

HCL Technologies Ltd. is one of the largest outsourcers of U.S. jobs — requesting to import more than 2,500 mostly Indian workers this year to take high-paying white-collar jobs from American workers.

Every year, more than 100,000 foreign workers are brought to the U.S. on the H-1B visa and are allowed to stay for up to six years. There are about 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans are often laid off in the process and forced to train their foreign replacements, as highlighted by Breitbart News.

More than 85,000 Americans annually potentially lose their jobs to foreign labor through the H-1B visa program. Despite claims by the big business lobby, American workers who have been replaced by H-1B foreign workers say there is no shortage of talented and qualified citizens for high-paying, white-collar jobs.

As Breitbart News reported last year, Boeing executives announced their latest manufacturing plant would be outsourced to Bengaluru, India where 3,000 Indian workers will be employed. This comes as Boeing has profited enormously from Defense Department contracts and the 2017 GOP tax cuts.

In 2017, for example, Boeing noted that about 79 percent of their profits came from government contracts with the U.S. federal government. Likewise, Boeing saved about $1.1 billion following the GOP tax cuts. This massive tax saving comes after years of already paying relatively low taxes to begin with at an average federal tax rate of less than nine percent over ten years.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

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