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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.
Deleted
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.
they should be forced to give their jobs to low paid H1B workers.
Monstar L
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.
Tell me USians, how are you more entitled to a job than the rest of the world?
I can't tell if you are just being sarcastic or actually the dumbest person alive.
Is this the equivalent of a sex tape for a law firm?
We came,we saw, we kicked it's ass!
First, let's outsource all the lawyers.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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
One of the earliest discussions of this video was on dice.com, and several people downloaded it before it got pulled. And they made certain that it was sent to the Programmer's Guild as well as Loub Dobbs, and other media outlets.
However, dice.com has initiated a censorship campaign against certain posters and postings against H1-B visas. It's not clear if this is approved by management, or it's the random act of a few moderators. What is clear is that requests for this to stop, and for clarification of Dice's censorship policy have been deleted as well.
Add to this Dice's postings of standard pro-H1B visa propaganda, and it's very clear that Dice is in full support of the H1-B visa program.
This is odd for a job board which seeks the best talent in the U.S., but I guess it's the H1-B shops which are paying Dice's bills.
So until this censorship and propaganda campaign ends, I am taking by business elsewhere. I urge others who seek new jobs to do the same.
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.
First fruit picking robots, then this. I suggest companies start developing robots to take over the lawyer's jobs. Then the robot lawyers could start telling employees how to cheat the system into somehow unethically profiting off their robotic workers (pirated software on them, maybe?). Then, seeing how corrupt employees are, replace them with robots, leaving us humans to enjoy life.
Give Kashyyyk back to the Wookies
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.
The companies I have worked for have looked for the best educated and qualified applicants. They post on mailing lists, network, and find people through word of mouth. People send in their resumes, some get invited for interviews, and the best get offers. At no point does nationality or salary play a role, either way.
Only once the companies have already decided who they want to hire do silly US regulations, like posting to "Sunday newspapers". Geez, who gets hired based on responding to a Sunday newspaper ad anymore? Day laborers? So, yes, people who are saying that these ads are a sham are absolutely right, they're just wrong about why people are posting these ads.
Don't kid yourself: if you can't get a job as a software engineer now, you won't get one even if no foreign labor gets admitted to the US. The consequence of restricting H1b visas is simply that the jobs themselves move overseas.
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.
There are economic requirements for entering the EU.
Actually, right now the UK is having a major problem with people sneaking in.
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.
These lawyers are talking about job ads as part of the green card application process. That is, the goal of the process is to get a current or future employee a green card. As soon as the employee gets the green card, they can quit and work somewhere else if they aren't being paid competitively.
So, why don't companies want responses to these ads? Because they already know that they aren't going to get any good responses to a newspaper ad. How do they know that? Because they are already running lots of ads all over the place. Any response they are going to get is just going to hold up the green card application unnecessarily.
These companies are trying to do the right thing--getting their foreign employees green cards. They don't deserve to be dragged through the mud for it.
Looks like conventional plagiarism rules don't always apply at Pitt's Katz Graduate School of Business, where the law firm of Cohen & Grigsby is paid to 'draft appropriate letters of support' for H-1B seeking MBA grads as part of the Pitt-funded Katzport Program. The school boasts that the program - which can cost Pitt upwards of $4,000 per student - 'levels the playing field' to 'facilitate the employment of international MBA graduates.'
Forcing lawyers to do honest work is prohibited by the clause in the Constitution that prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Lawyers have wrists?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
> The free market uses the most valuable labour. Now USians are probably
> too stupid to notice this, but the most skilled labour with the least
> costs most certainly isn't coming from USians.
>
> If for no other reason than the MASSIVE health care costs the, uh,
> "oversized" average USian places on the system.
"[...] what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things
I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were
you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought.
Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award
you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."
If you are a US company, US law requires you to make a good faith effort to find a US citizen qualified for the job. So yes, I would suggest that you had better be prepared to do just that. You may not like the law, it may even be a foolish law, but then a lot of Slashdot readers don't like the current state of IP law either. Are you prepared to give them a pass on that?
Why wouldn't we want skilled, educated, hard-working, people from other countries to come here and become citizens? Doesn't that improve the value of our republic? They pay taxes, do honest work, raise families...how are they any different from our Grandfathers, Great Grandmothers, or even farther back who came to the US looking for a better life? Do we have more a right to happiness than they, just because they weren't born here?
However, foreign workers who intend to go back and send the majority of their money back with them contribute much less to the American economy, since they are less likely to spend their wages in the US.
As a US worker, we already have several advantages over the foreign competition (language fluency, cultural understanding, better education (generally)); why do we need to further tilt the scales further in our favor?
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
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.
Bad land shark, no cocaine for you!
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Americans! Quit your whining and fscking compete! That's what makes this country the best.
Why would I as a manager go through all that H1B hassle if I could get the best right here at home? You know why they're going overseas for talent? They're better* and cheaper. Trust me, if you're good enough, they'll bend over backwards for you too. If they wouldn't, they're on their way to failure and you don't want to work there anyway.
* - Companies that just go for cheaper w/o the better are worse. Don't work there.
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?
Go for the sarcastic. This isn't digg.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
If you are going to evade the spirit of the law, don't be surprised when the lawmakers take note.
Microsoft has been breaking the "spirit of the law" for a long time. It's been known that they reject roughly 9 out of 10 resumes they receive, and also reject older workers, yet keep lobbying congress for more visa workers. The lawmakers only take note when it enters into the public conscience. They don't otherwise look for suspicious leads, especially when being funded by such corporations.
Table-ized A.I.
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?
---
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.
Actually, it is. The employee safety standards, training practices, and most especially *union* policies of foreign employees often differ vastly. While US workers in technology are often more skilled and more creative and more productive, for example, they're more expensive and more demanding of their managers. They're also more likely to say "this is a really, really stupid idea" or to blow the whistle on criminal activity than foreign workers on H1-B visas.
I've seen this in practice, where the US contractors immediately went to the company management and said "we are in violation of our contracts with this customer, and in violation of US law: here's what we have to do to fix it" where the foreign workers continued merrily breaking basic US law. (Including the GPL: I had a long talk with some of their US engineers about software that I'd contributed heavily to under the GPL, and its implications for what they were doing. They resigned from the company and are employed elsewhere now, and the project eventually cost that company a big loss when their clients noticed the contract violations.)
Go read the fine article yourself. Given a pool of 50 applicants, even if they're good applicants, the odds that any one applicant fulfills all the requirements exactly is low: there is a serious art to writing job ads that eliminate all but the previously selected candidate. This practice occurs in the managerial and corporate realm every day, to avoid any but the already selected candidate.
If you watch the video, the attorneys make clear that the employer can make interviews with any US applicants that run the gauntlet and should deliberately disqualify them on any pretext. I've seen the practice: it's nasty, and prevents applicants other than the previously chosen few from ever being considered. I've had an application shot down that way myself: the people who urged me to apply for the work were stunned I didn't get it, and truly lamented that the "golden child" applicant who was greased through the system wound up with it. The fact that he had a serious personal relationship already with his new supervisor became immediately apparent, and caused quite a legal ruckus 3 years later.
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.
If there is a huge demand for programmers, and the supply is SO limited that we need to import foreign workers, why the hell have salaries for programmers risen so little over the past five or six years? It's been a while since I've had an economics course but this argument would seem to break a law or two. I mean seriously, this alone should tell you that something is not right. It seems to me much more likely that corporations just don't like the idea of paying six figures for engineers, whether the market demands it or not. Maybe they think you should need to have an MBA to earn that kinda money. After all, everyone knows MBAs do most of the work at tech companies.
So, if you really need programmers, but you really really don't want to pay them what they're worth, importing cheap labor sounds like a pretty good idea. Of course, H1-B workers are supposed to be paid the prevailing wage but this just doesn't happen. Talk to anyone who works in an IT shop that uses them and they'll tell you that they make less money. Hell, just ask the people who are there on H1-Bs, they know they're getting ripped off.
What I really love is when companies that do this say, "well, we advertised that programming position and nobody responded for 2 months, so we had no other choice". Most of the time, this is bullshit. I used to work for a company that would advertise $85k for all senior level Java positions, even though the local average was around $100k for someone at that level. And then the managers at the company would feign dismay over the fact that they weren't getting any resumes. A couple of times I suggested that they just raise the salary to match the average market rate. Of course, each time I was told that "that's not in the budget".
It basically comes down to just that. A lot of US corporations have simply decided that cheap foreign labor is "in the budget", a fair wage for US workers is not.
"This has little to do with wages and everything to do with worker "loyalty.""
Well, it's a bit of both.
The idea is that the loyalty of the H1-B is enforced by the the U.S. Government. If you're not loyal, you get thrown out of the country. That probably makes you pretty loyal.
But the purpose of forcing such loyalty is that it allows the employer to pay less money. If the prevailing wage $60K per year, I'm guessing you can get by with $35K per year for the H1B, plus they're technically temps, so you don't have the additional expenses you would for a permanent employee.
Now that said, I think the H1B people coming over are good for the country, and really good for IT workers. If smart people want to come to the country and work, I think that's great. Imagine the best minds in the world coming to your country. Not only smart people, but people with the initiative to leave their country and move to another! I welcome anyone like that (and I work in IT). So with that in mind, I propose a solution. H1Bs after 6 months of employment with a company get their green card.
Boom. I've solved the problem. We get the pool of labor. Smart, talented, hard working labor. And they'd be paid at market rates. The companies would have to do that. Otherwise the H1B's they just spent 6 months training would go someplace else. The only people who could possibly object to this are people who have a vested interest in making sure H1B's are cheap. And that ultimately is not good for anybody.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you