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Justice Department Slaps IBM Over H-1B Hiring Practices
Dawn Kawamoto writes "IBM reached a settlement with the Justice Department over allegations it posted discriminatory online job openings, allegedly stating a preference for H-1B and foreign student visa holders for its software and apps developer positions. The job openings were for IT positions that would eventually require the applicant to relocate overseas. IBM agreed to pay $44,400 in civil penalties to the U.S., as well as take certain actions in the way it hires within the U.S. The settlement, announced Friday, comes at a time with tech companies are calling for the U.S. to allow more H-1B workers into the country."
Could the justice department do any less? The fines are a joke.
Yep, a whole $44,400 fine. That's got to sting a multi-billion dollar company. Bet they won't dare try that again.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
The heavy hand of big government continues to stifle the economy. Just think how many jobs they could create if they still had that $44,400.
That fine is so small, it could be paid of of petty cash at a startup.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
The only wrong thing is that the 1965 Immigration Act was passed. Repeal that, remove the regulations from it, and tell the lobbying organizations that complain to EABOD.
By showing a preference for more despotic countries and locales over US citizens, businesses show a hate for freedom for anyone else that isnt one of them. They made the choice to use these countries instead of hiring in a more free US.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
IBM agreed to pay $44,400 in civil penalties to the U.S.
Well gee, why don't you make them switch the way the toilet paper falls over the roll as well, you fascists!
We need IT unions now and better training Not more high cost schools that give you skill gaps.
I agree, the system is being gamed by saying that there is a labor shortage and the only way we can fill the need is by bringing labor from another country and by the way oddly enough we can pay them less. It's clear that the system is gamed, like you said, normally someone who is in short supply is paid more.
Just wrote something about H1Bs in a different post. Modified to be more relevant to this post:
Every time a company tells Congress they need more H1Bs, they're not telling you they can't find programmers, they're telling you they don't want to pay a competitive wage. Combine this with the fact that a lot of programmer types consider themselves too "individualist" to be involved with anything so "workmanly" as a labour union, and you set up a system where talented workers' wages are artificially reduced.
The result is a competent creative who is suddenly being pitted against people whose standard of living requires a third or less of the salary by a company whose primary interest isn't in being a good corporate citizen, investing in the community, or even playing by the rules that conservative and libertarian proponents pay lip service to, but increasing "shareholder value" by any means necessary no matter who suffers, and no matter how bad it is for the community, the region, and the country.
I've seen strip club tabs higher than that...
Karma: Bad
$44k?! You know this is a joke because so many people at both IBM and the "Justice" Department are laughing about it. IBM probably spends more on toilet paper in a month than $44k. Brings a whole new meaning to the phrase, "No sh*t".
wouldn't it be a more of a free market, if companies could hire world wide, without control of the government (ie. without the restriction to hire US employees)? .. (until the wages aren't high enough any more to be motivation enough obviously..)
I think arguing with "free market" for preventing immigration is really a bit strange.. so in a free market IT wages would significantly drop, because there is no shortage of good educated IT personal willing to immigrate
Find me at http://herbert.poul.at
Both the summary and some commenters make the same huge mistake by putting IT people and programmers in the same bucket. A C++ programmer has completely different skills and responsibilities from a PHP/HTML programmer, who has a completely different job from a network/system administrator. The latter could be considered IT (and their pay is usually lower), whereas the former are developers (requiring extra creativity and more skill, and are better paid). In my experience working in the Bay Area, there really is a shortage of competent high-skill systems developers/programmers (the kind of guys who design Google and Facebook infrastructure, like Big Table), but not a shortage of PHP or Java programmers or sysadmins.
Unions in the USA all crawled into bed with the Democrats decades ago
Specifically, unions started really supporting Democrats in the 1930's, for a very good reason: The Democrats had just passed the National Labor Relations Act, which among other things gave unions the legal right to exist. For the 50 years or so before that, union leaders were operating under the constant threat of being beaten to a pulp or shot by company goons, and the unions tended to put their political support not behind either Democrats or Republicans but instead behind Socialists.
The Democratic Party continued to support organized labor up until the late 1980's or so, when they decided that the unions were basically a lost cause, and Bill Clinton abandoned unions in favor of corporate funding of the Democratic Party. Unions have never recovered either the political clout or the membership and funding they once had. And totally coincidentally, a worker today makes less (adjusted for inflation) than they did in 1987, despite the fact that the current American worker is more productive than any other worker that has ever existed on the planet.
I am officially gone from
ALL of those things would apply to an H1-B as well. 100%. So it's not that.
It's just cheap labor conservatives up to their dirty tricks again.
That is, in IBM's mad rush to eliminate 100% of all US employment (except for executives) by 2015 they, admittedly occasionally, offer a devil's bargain to US based employees being cut: relocate overseas on your dime to take a job at CURRENT LOCAL wages and you get to keep your job.
Makes you wonder how much longer IBM will be an American company, legally. They may as well re incorporate in India or Ireland at this point. 50,000 regular full time employees in the US and dropping. Most new jobs going to low skill contractors. And the funny thing is that IBM routinely comes up in surveys as not one of the companies one would want to work for - not because it's a bureaucratic meatgrinder run by spreadsheet wielding accounts but because there's simply very very few actual jobs at IBM in the US anymore. If you're not an executive then you're either a recent college grad who might stay for 3 years or less or you're an old timer hanging on for dear life. There's nothing in the middle of that any more. There's basically zero IBM employees between the ages of 30 and 50. And the 50 year olds aren't going to 'share' their experience with anyone else, it's too risky. They've all become 'program managers' which is a fancy way of saying a staff job that consists of reporting the status reporting of status reporting of metrics of status reporting and creating new processes to report on the status of that.