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How-Not-to-Hire-U.S.-Workers Law Firm Fires Back
theodp writes "Congress is now calling for a Dept. of Labor investigation into a Pittsburgh law firm after a video showing its attorneys advising employers how to game the immigration system was posted on YouTube. Cohen & Grigsby, the firm in question, issued a statement insisting their statements were commandeered and misused, but would not allow CBS to view the original video in its entirety. Cohen & Grigsby has also been advising employers since 2002 that they have nothing to fear if they keep employees in the dark about the existence of DOL-required H-1B Public Access Files."
has the tag line 'progressive law' all over the place. I would suggest replacing the word 'progressive' with 'breakin' the'
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
If the dollar continues to fall as it has over the last few years.
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If you are going to evade the spirit of the law, don't be surprised when the lawmakers take note.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
This entire system is broken and should be scrapped. The government simply cannot enforce the restrictions in place. The H-1B is supposed to be a temp visa for positions that can't be filled domestically, but I see very few people using it that way. The sponsoring companies are using it as a means to keep labor costs down, and the visa holders seem to mostly be using it as a stepping stone to citizenship(the ones I know are). You should just accept this and roll the visa into a citizen-track visa, make it easy for visa holders to bring their families, make it easy for them to switch jobs, and then they won't have to worry about getting booted out of the country if they lose their job.
open borders and a welfare state are mutually exclusive.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I wish the courts had the power to force a man to work a minimum wage job when he is found doing such unethical work. The only way this would work would be if the courts were to take all of the mans other income as a fine as well. I want these people to see the life they are damning the rest of the country to.
The Generation
I'd say something witty here, but I'm not that bright.
Talk to ANYBODY who has got a green card thru their company (assuming they were reasonably cognisent of the process) and you will discover the same thing - this is standard operating procedure, and not just an abuse by this specific law firm.
The way the system is set up, how can it be any other way... if a company has decided they want to get someone a green card, then of course they do whatever they can to achieve that. If they instead wanted to replace the person with a US worker then they'd be doing an honest job search, and NOT pursing a green card. Duh! The law says you have to advertize the job, so you put an ad for the job in the most obscure paper possible, with the job requirements so custom tailored to the person you are trying to get a green card for that no one else can qualify. I'm sure it works better than ever in recent years now that most people expect to find job openings online rather than in the local paper.
What's lame here is Congress pretending to give a crap (presumably just because this particular story/video has hit the press) and wanting to investigate this particular law firm. One has to wonder are they being investigated for breaking the law, or rather just for making Congress look bad by openly flaunting the law? If Congress really gave a crap they'd fix the broken system rather than go after a law firm doing nothing different than every other law firm hired to assist in this process.
Second issue: Do "illegals" really want to stay in this country? Here in Washington State, that's not the case. Many "illegals" make reasonably good money here for hard work, and send it home, where they will eventually retire, in a place where money is worth more than it is here. Not all "illegals" intend to stay, and very, very, very few take any jobs away from "Americans". When people talk about "immigration problems", most are not talking about High Tech jobs.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I want these guys around to advise my competition! In fact, I hope every company I might ever
compete with, goes out and hires these guys to help them hire as many "low-bid" workers as they can.
Meanwhile, I'll focus on hiring the best workers possible, regardless of where they are from, and eventually run
these other guys out of business anyway.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Ask yourself why the US has so many high paying jobs compared to Mexico. It is maybe because over many years the actions of the government and the various freedoms protected by the government have made the US more powerful and wealthier than Mexico? No maybe you don't agree with the way the US got it's wealth and power but don't be so deliberately ignorant to deny that the wealth and power is here by design. That design is created and implimented by the US government.
We are all just people.
And for those of you bitching about how us Americans don't have any more right to a job than anybody else, suck it. Every country has a responsibility to give first priority to the employment and prosperity of its own TAX PAYING citizens. America is no exception. Any company, from any country, found acting in bad faith with the government and its citizens, should be dealt with very harshly.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
I have no reason to doubt that these lawyers keep their clients within the law, however much they might "game the system." That, after all, is why you hire a lawyer.
The job of the lawyer is to know the law inside out so that they can assist their client. The job of the legislator is to draft laws and regulations that have as few loopholes and weaknesses as possible.
If blame is to be assigned, it goes to the lawmakers.
Honestly though I suspect that most companies paying for this kind of advice are probably fooling themselves. Between the falling U.S. dollar, legal costs, and the inefficiencies associated with training and replacing short term or contract employees they likely aren't saving enough money to make it worthwhile.
Just because it looks cheap doesn't mean it really saves you money.
Three Squirrels
Yeah. I'm sure the wrist-slapping will be unparalleled in human history.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
What the lawyer is talking about is a green card application, usually for someone who has already worked many years at a company and lived and paid taxes in the US. There is a formal requirement that the company post a job ad. Of course, companies don't want any applicants for that job ad: they already have someone for that job that they have invested a lot of time and money in. Do you seriously think they are going to send that guy home based on someone who sends in a resume? And companies are likely paying that guy competitively because once they get the green card, he could leave immediately.
I've seen these requirements for formal job postings in non-immigration contexts as well, and they never work. If finding qualified, good applicants were as simple as posting a job ad and collecting resumes, headhunters and hiring bounties would be such a booming business.
Last refuge of the American tech worker. (We'll see how long that lasts.)
The rest of the world wonders why America has suddenly taken to blowing up small nations... when many of the only moderately secure jobs in the US are in the defense sector.
Sigh.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Did you actually watch the video in question? The lawyers gave explicit suggestions on how to rig the interview and advertising process to avoid getting responses from qualified US citizens. If that isn't bad faith, I don't know what is. This is not just an executive order, or a regulation propounded by a goverment agency, this is an honest-to-gosh law passed by congress. You may not like it, it may be inconvenient, it may even be foolish, but it is the law. You can challenge it court, you can lobby to have it changed, but to simply conspire to evade the law by fraud is corrosive of the rule of law.
An awful lot of Slashdot readers believe that US intellectual property law is out of step with the real world. Are they justified in simply ignoring it?
Hmmm...
This would explain all those job adds with ridiculous requirements, and how I could never find work when I lived in Pittsburgh. Then again perhaps it was just the economy at the time.
There is a rather simple solution to the great immigration and guest worker debate. I spent 10 years
of my life in the US military. There are 10's of thousands of other troops on the front lines
in Iraq fighting insurgents. These brave men are putting their lives on the line every day so that we here in the states can maintain what freedoms we still have and assisting in securing our national interests.
If you want to immigrate to the US then fine you spend 4 years active duty in my country's military and earn your green card. Everyone able bodied and of qualified military age should have to serve
4 years in our military to earn a green card. After those 4 years if someone want's to deny you
a green card, I will be the first to help you kick their ass.
Our troops ain't over there right now risking their lives just so they can come home and be
denied jobs because of crap like this!
Now tell me I am wrong!
Got Code?
Cohen? That's a jewish name. This is not surprising; jews are amongst the worst people when it comes to employee treatment. Their niggardlyness is legendary; they will go to great lenghts to avoid paying a fair price for anything.
Maybe he thinks "America" is something that stretches form Terra Fuego in the south to the frozen wastes of Canada in the North?We are geeks: We need precise term and the popular definition of American as someone from the United States is not that.
Also, he has a point: Employers shopping for workforce in cheap countries is no different from a consumer choosing to buy cheap products at a mall store than a more expensive and smaller local store.
The dumbest persons alive are the people who think that "hire American" will work any better than the car industry "buy American" did.
I'll give it a stab.
.10 like indians instead of for $5.35. We would be able to reimport those $2.49 movies and pay maybe $3.00 instead of $19.99. We wouldn't be competing against chinese child and prison slave labor. If you want real capitalism- I'm for it. Outsourcing bothers me- on the basis above. It is an end run around our labor laws that corporations get to make while they continue to charge full retail for their products allowing me to gloriously subsidize large parts of the rest of the world.
If my cornfield has plentiful heads of corn because I practiced wise field practices, watered and weeded regularly, should I have more rights to the corn than random people driving down the highway who decide they want some of my corn now that it is ripe?
If my city engages in good policy so that we have a good economy should I not have more rights to employment in my city than strangers who had no part in building but merely snuck in at night after we had done the hard work?
If my country engages in an economic and political system which over the course of 40 years causes my country to have surplus and the country next door (say a religious quasi dictator plutocracy with rampant corruption) reduces itself to ruin over 40 years, should non-citizens be able to come in, break the law (w/regard to housing, driving, paying taxes, forged documents, etc. etc.), and have more right to a job than citizens?
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However as far as capitalism goes- with real capitalism, we would be able to buy our drugs for
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
How are Americans more entitled to an American job from an American company that gets American tax breaks and largely serves the American consumer-base? Hmm.. Gee, I don't know. And don't you dare act like every other country isn't extremely protectionist of their jobs and workforce.
Further, capitalism is fine. However, while the average corporation can seek out labor all over the planet and simply put up an office or hire workers from the cheapest areas, the American citizen does not have such a pool to choose from - neither in terms of employment or cost of living.
A corporation can pick from the entire planet and decide to invest in an area where they can pay experienced professionals as much in salary as the average American citizen pays in rent. While the corporation and the American citizen may be based in America, the corporation is not constrained by the dynamics, labor supply and financial situation of this country. The worker, however, is. We don't have a choice. Milk is about $3.85 per gallon. Period. I can't go somewhere and buy it for a nickel a gallon. And if you want to live close enough to these corporations to work for them, you're usually looking at more expensive living. You will pay $800 or $1,000 or $2,000 for a one bedroom apartment or half a million bucks for a small house. Period. Unless you plan on commuting 1500 miles from some hill in the midwest out to the west coast every morning.
Then, to add insult to injury, this shoddy form of sham-capitalism isn't enough for them. They want to compound it by telling us that Americans are not plentiful enough or educated enough. Now, if there is a shortage of milk or gas, I have to pay more money for it. If there is a shortage of experienced labor in this country, corporations simply artificially adjust the value of these workers by lobbying government to let them bring in more employees from overseas or to simply move a chunk of their own operations overseas.
People try to suggest that Americans are racist or xenophobic when all they are doing is showing concern for their well-being and their careers. They have a right to do so. Especially when - on top of the imbalanced system - we have underhanded corporations and services as in this article working to drill us even further into the ground.
The argument, though, is that since the law states the employer must make a "good faith effort" to find a qualified US worker that they ARE breaking the letter of the law. When the whole objective of the process is to go through the motions with the end goal of not finding a qualified US worker (i.e. "we're going to make it look like you're looking for qualified applicants even though you have absolutely no plan of hiring a US worker"), it seems to me any rational person would not consider this a good faith effort.
I'm sorry to be so blunt, but that is just a dumb statement. Saying that replacing American workers with cheaper H1-B labor does the American employee a favor by freeing him up to go form the next Youtube or Google is absurd. Congratulations! You've just been laid off! Now you can go be a millionaire!
Yes, because it was that damn loyalty to the position that was keeping me from realizing my dreams of running the next multi-billion dollar IPO. Thank god for foreign labor or I might have been employed forever!