(Marty again offers another encounter with his uber-evil doppelganger, Clem, who by now has secured himself a place in the 9th bolgia of Malebolge, the 8th circle of Dante’s hell – he will at least, burn in perpetuity in the company of Ulysses, which Clem might actually enjoy. Ed.)
The other day, I was helping my good friend Clem, who had just gotten out of prison again, prepare applications for H1a visas for his employees. Clem keeps getting convicted of various types of fraud, but, as he explains to me, there’s a fine line between shrewd business practices, for which one is rewarded with great wealth, and shady business practices, for which one is rewarded with three hots and a cot, courtesy of the People of California. Clem likes to skate on that fine line and, sometimes, as he would be the first to admit, he goes over the edge.
Clem is now running a microprocessor manufacturing company in Sunnyvale, California and has happened onto another, beautifully conceived scheme. He claims he can get an unlimited number of physics Ph.D.’s to work for him for minimum wage. “What??!!,” I exclaimed, “Why would someone with all that education work for you for minimum wage?”
“Are you kidding?” he replies, “I can get you Ph.D.’s in any field. Let’s say you have a biotech company. I can get you biology or chemistry Ph.D.’s, all for minimum wage. And, I’d like to add, I’m only saying minimum wage because I’m trying to stay legal. I can do the same thing below minimum wage, having the scientists live together in dormitories and pay them practically nothing, but I don’t want to go back ‘inside’ again any time soon.”
The secret he explained is the H1a visa, a U.S. government program that allows foreign workers to obtain employment in the U.S. and fill positions for which it is “difficult” to find qualified U.S. citizens. Of course, “difficult” is very much in the eye of the beholder, and Clem illustrated his point by showing me a help-wanted ad for which one might have difficulty finding an employee who is a citizen.
Then, with a flourish only Clem could muster, he pulled his laptop out of his briefcase, wirelessly connected to the APA PsycCareers web site, and showed me the following text: “12-month, Full time postdoctoral internship with $12,000 stipend September 2006- August 2007
Help Wanted: Physics Ph.D. to oversee product development for semiconductor manufacturing company. Hours: 6AM to 9PM, seven days a week, salary $14000/year. Contact Clem: (408) 765-80801.
The engine that runs this whole scheme, he explained further, is the overwhelmingly strong desire of people to live and work in the U.S. “See,” he continued, “the basic principle here is you take someone’s motivation to do one thing, in this case live in the U.S., and use that motivation to feather your own nest, in this case get highly qualified scientists to work for peanuts. You could do the same in your own field, if you wanted,” asserted Clem.
Well, it was time for a lunch break, so we took our conversation over to the bar next door. I knew I was going to need something to settle my nerves as soon as he referenced using some of his methods to recruit psychologists. Strangely, though, the longer we talked, and the more buzzed I became, the more it seemed as though the field of clinical psychology was already making use of Clem’s methods.
As Clem looked at our field, the first motivation he seized upon as a way to exploit psychology doctorates was the motivation to get that needed postdoctoral year. A long time ago, psychologists did what they do best: make life harder for psychologists. They thought we could enhance our credibility as a profession by making it take even longer to get licensed. Of course, it was only psychologists who thought our credibility needed enhancing—kind of like thinking you need plastic surgery to enhance some secondary sex characteristic but all your friends tell you that you look fine already. So now we have that needed postdoctoral year, and all these young psychologists are sitting ducks for exploitation of the sort that Clem so savors. They will work for minimum wage, or even for free, in exchange for tallying up those supervised postdoctoral hours needed for licensure. Clem became nearly tearful as he expressed his joy, “Imagine. Psychologists, fully trained and with doctorate degrees, American born, raised and educated, yet being compelled to work for less than the salary of a ditch digger. What could be more beautiful? Hire one licensed psychologist to supervise them, and you’ve got yourself a profit center with an inexhaustible supply of cheap labor.”
Then, with a flourish only Clem could muster, he pulled his laptop out of his briefcase, wirelessly connected to the APA PsycCareers web site, and showed me the following text: “12-month, Full time postdoctoral internship with $12,000 stipend September 2006- August 2007.2” Tears actually welled up in his eyes as he asked, “What more could you possibly want? A full-time, doctoral psychologist for less than the cost of even an illegal farm worker—and there’s proposed legislation to protect farm workers from exploitation. Show me someone who is proposing to protect psychologists!”
But then Clem surprised me with yet another angle on psychologists’ salaries. “They don’t make that much even after they’re licensed,” he asserted, “so I have to confess, there’s a little less incentive to use those ultra cheap, postdoctoral supervisees. What does a psychologist make? I’ll tell you, they make about the same as an executive secretary or an administrative assistant at a high tech company. Do you know why that is? Supply and demand!”
Clem then explained that psychology is one of those fields where people don’t go into it to make money. He said many new psychologists consider money to be very unimportant, although some, who have some self-esteem, do want to make a good living. “Since you’ve got an inexhaustible supply of the ones who will work for peanuts, you can do the entry-level shuffle,” he asserted, “and just keep hiring the ones who work cheap, never hire the ones who believe they deserve to make a good living, and never promote any of them.”
“The entry-level shuffle, what’s that?” I asked. Clem explained that anytime you have an oversupply of labor in a given market, you are in a position to hire workers for the lowest, entry-level pay. Then, you overwork them, never promote them, never give them raises and hope that they quit. Once they quit, you simply replace them with new entry-level workers. “It’s perpetual motion,” he exclaimed, “you will never exhaust the supply of psychologists willing to work for peanuts. Even if they go on strike, there’s an inexhaustible supply of psychologists willing to work as strike breakers. The beauty is, you never pay anyone one penny more than starting salary. You can even publish a pay scale, with a very attractive salary after, say, five years of employment, but you arrange things so no one wants to stay five years. Everyone is a new hire getting entry-level pay. I’m so excited about this, I’m gong to go open a clinic as soon as I have one more martini,” he concluded.
I felt sick. Indeed, every time I talk to Clem, I feel sick afterwards. I didn’t feel sick only because he’s a criminal, an exploiter and a psychopath who would take advantage of anyone and everyone if he could. And I don’t think I felt sick because I drank too much when I hang out with him. The thing that inevitably makes me the sickest is the knowledge that he’s right.
Footnotes
1 OK, don’t actually dial that number. It’s the main phone number for Intel, and I inserted it just for purposes of verisimilitude.
2 Although the author sometimes must make things up for dramatic effect, the preceding is an actual listing from PsychCareers as of March 2, 2006.
