More on why increasing H1B visas for scarce STEM jobs makes no sense.

The "shortage" of highly trained engineers and scientists to fill STEM jobs -- which employers point to when they demand an increase in H1B visas -- doesn't exist. It's a manufactured crisis designed to keep wages and benefits low.

And here's another way they keep wages low.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/science/2014/12/10/solving-postdoc-problem-national-report-suggests-higher-pay-better-mentoring/GaI3uLT1JmdxaylZHmdIdM/story.html

An exhaustive, 120-page national report on the state of scientific postdoctoral researchers released Wednesday urges a range of reforms to ensure that thousands of well-educated scientists do not spend their most creative years in low-paid training for jobs that are in scarce supply.

The report, released by three of the most prestigious national organizations in science, engineering, and medicine, suggests postdoctoral researchers should receive higher salaries, better mentoring, and a time limit on how long they can work in those jobs.

Although the authors say the problems facing the workers in the training pipeline have been “gnawing at the research community for decades,” they argue that the situation has become more urgent as the number of postdoctoral researchers has increased but the number of faculty jobs has not kept pace.

SNIP

Two key pressures have begun to turn that last step in the training pipeline into a trap. First, the number of trainees far outnumber the faculty jobs they seek. That means many people are spending years treading water in postdoc positions, where they are often treated by their advisers -- called principal investigators -- less as trainees and more as cheap labor. That trend has occurred as the principal investigators have found themselves in intensive competition for limited research funding, which creates an incentive to build large and highly productive laboratories filled with postdocs who can help produce high-profile findings.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/10/04/glut-postdoc-researchers-stirs-quiet-crisis-science/HWxyErx9RNIW17khv0MWTN/story.html

But in recent years, the postdoc position has become less a stepping stone and more of a holding tank. Some of the smartest people in Boston are caught up in an all-but-invisible crisis, mired in a biomedical underclass as federal funding for research has leveled off, leaving the supply of well-trained scientists outstripping demand.


“It’s sunk in that it’s by no means guaranteed — for anyone, really — that an academic position is possible,” said Gary McDowell, 29, a biologist doing his second postdoc at Tufts University who hopes to set up his own lab in a few years. “There’s this huge labor force here to do the bench work, the grunt work of science. But then there’s nowhere for them to go; this massive pool of postdocs that accumulates and keeps growing.”

RELATED: Grants for research get scarcer

Postdocs fill an essential, but little-known niche in the scientific pipeline. After spending 6 to 7 years on average earning a PhD, they invest more years of training in a senior scientist’s laboratory as the final precursor to starting labs where they can explore their own scientific ideas.

In the Boston area, where more than 8,000 postdocs — largely in the biosciences — are estimated to work, tough job prospects are more than just an issue of academic interest. Postdocs are a critical part of the scientific landscape that in many ways distinguishes the region — they are both future leaders and the workers who carry out experiments crucial for science to advance.