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Skilled Foreign Workers Treated as Indentured Servants
theodp writes: A year-long investigation by NBC Bay Area's Investigative Unit and The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) raises questions about the H-1B visa program. In a five-part story that includes a mini-graphic novel called Techsploitation, CIR describes how the system rewards job brokers who steal wages and entrap Indian tech workers in the U.S., including the awarding of half a billion dollars in Federal tech contracts to those with labor violations. "Shackling workers to their jobs," CIR found after interviewing workers and reviewing government agency and court documents, "is such an entrenched business practice that it has even spread to U.S. nationals. This bullying persists at the bottom of a complex system that supplies workers to some of America's richest and most successful companies, such as Cisco Systems Inc., Verizon and Apple Inc."
In a presumably unrelated move, the U.S. changed its H-1B record retention policy last week, declaring that records used for labor certification, whether in paper or electronic, "are temporary records and subject to destruction" after five years under the new policy. "There was no explanation for the change, and it is perplexing to researchers," reports Computerworld. "The records under threat are called Labor Condition Applications (LCA), which identify the H-1B employer, worksite, the prevailing wage, and the wage paid to the worker." Lindsay Lowell, director of policy studies at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University, added: "It undermines our ability to evaluate what the government does and, in today's world, retaining electronic records like the LCA is next to costless [a full year's LCA data is less than 1 GB]." President Obama, by the way, is expected to use his executive authority to expand the H-1B program after the midterm elections.
In a presumably unrelated move, the U.S. changed its H-1B record retention policy last week, declaring that records used for labor certification, whether in paper or electronic, "are temporary records and subject to destruction" after five years under the new policy. "There was no explanation for the change, and it is perplexing to researchers," reports Computerworld. "The records under threat are called Labor Condition Applications (LCA), which identify the H-1B employer, worksite, the prevailing wage, and the wage paid to the worker." Lindsay Lowell, director of policy studies at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University, added: "It undermines our ability to evaluate what the government does and, in today's world, retaining electronic records like the LCA is next to costless [a full year's LCA data is less than 1 GB]." President Obama, by the way, is expected to use his executive authority to expand the H-1B program after the midterm elections.
Is anyone even remotely surprised by this?
It's time to organize the world's programmers and make it clear to business that we won't tolerate this treatment any longer. It doesn't matter if we form a union or not as long as we band together to protect our common interests as programmers.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
They do. The talent is accepting slave wages.
The best thing to do is replace the H-1B visas that are tied to a specific employer and make them a general limited time employment visa.
If the employers say there's a specific need for more workers in a field then the govt can grant a few more of the new visas to those wishing to travel to the US.
This would mean employers would be have to pay the going wage to the newcomers, albeit with the downward pressures on pay that would come from an increased worker pool.
I could be crazy tho.
NOTE: All of the above is the view of a simple rustic Northern Irishman with no desire to move to the US. Well, mebbe somewhere with snowboarding. Seriously, I live farther north than Vancouver for fuck sake, but all winter is just rain and wind. An no. I'm not going to Scotland. Our whiskey is better. If i wanted to drink bog water i'd just drink bog water.
Finally someone else is making this obvious analogy, but in one way H1-B is worse. Two of my great grandparents came to Canada as indentured servants. My great grandparents got married and fled their servitude into what was then the wilds of western Canada where as long as you could work or scratch some dirt for food and kill a little wild for extra you got along. Most of all no one was going to look for you and ship you back because there was no one to DO the work so a body was appreciated in a way, even one that wasn't a slave.
That last word being the key point. They don't want employees, they want slaves. If the free market was driving this to attract the best they would be offering all H1-Bs a premium salary and premium working conditions above local talent which would drive up wages and then supply ... guessing that is not the case.
There are abuses on all sides of this program. Just end it. The tech worker shortage is a lie. This is no longer about cherry picking the best and brightest scientific minds. It has become a system of replacing local workers with lower cost indentured servants.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
What kind of stupid researchers are these? Regulatory capture, corporate welfare, and political corruption are plenty sufficient to explain the changes.
Only a knave looking for social justice in every action by a bureaucrat should be surprised, but he should be working at a daycare facility, not as a university researcher.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Companies like Verizon, Cisco, HP, and Walmart contract employment because direct-hire is nearly impossible. These companies insist you work in armpits like Bentonville Arkansas or Decalb Georgia so your salary can be shuffled down the chain to 40 grand a year not under the implication that your services are worthless, but under the assertion that the "cost of living" is so inexpensive you shouldnt need a respectable wage. American workers caught on to this shifty crap pretty quickly and now in the race to pedal labor in general into the earth, contract companies are picking up the slack. Cognizent and Infosys are two companies that actively avoid american labour capable of contesting wage theft and frivolous litigation in court. They avoid it by specifying explicitly the requirement for an H1B in order to incense foreign workers to apply. If you receive a call as an american, its generally from a roaring indian callcenter with poor diction and once your salary comes up, the call ends.
H1B is the new slave-ship, and because corporations control the general direction of american government, it isnt likely the H1B process will get any more reasonable.
Good people go to bed earlier.
still worth it. Making 55k in New Jersey, sharing a place with 3 roommates, we have much better life than at home. Two of us found new sponsored green card jobs in last three years. I hope to be next. Our neighbors don't have work visas, they work to install toilets and things and also would rather be here than home.
Office jobs are not hard and this small price to pay to live in USA.
"President Obama, by the way, is expected to use his executive authority to expand the H-1B program after the midterm elections."
I don't get it. If it's a good thing, do it now. If it's a bad thing then why do it later or at all ?!?!?
Filing this under hope and change
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold
...even in Denmark.
Believe it or not, this isn't much different than some desperate Russian woman seeking a future "husband" in a country with democratic freedom of some sorts, what they don't know - is that everything isn't milk and honey where they come to, they're still going to be second class citizens of the country they "escape" to.
Skilled workers dream of a permanent visa after slaving over minimum wages for 5 years in the U.S. And they pretty much have to accept the conditions, because they know...if they screw up after 3.9 years under slavery, all their efforts would have been wasted, and they have to return home. Don't like the job? No problem...there's 10+ million Asians just waiting to take your job mister so get in line or get lost is pretty much the response they'd get.
You'd believe it would be better in other countries, say...like the richest countries in the world...Scandinavia, but no. I have met a bus-driver that is a surgeon, an hardware engineer from Iraq that has to work at a friends convenience store to avoid being sent home. Several people that collects bottles in our cities, are former health care workers, well educated people, librarians, scientists and many more professional occupations they "escaped" from at home where their beliefs and freedom where suppressed, hoping to find a better life over here.
But all we do, is to complain about them taking our jobs (yeah, the jobs WE DON'T WANT TO DO...), and treat them like dirt.
The whole system has to change. We must modernize this world for the 21 century, we can't keep wasting our resources like that.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
He makes about 1/3 less than I do. In a free market economy someone really good should command what I can command.
No, in a free market economy you would both be making *his* wages. What you are advocating for is a protected economy - you want the government to put rules in place (or to maintain/enforce existing ones) to ensure artificially high wages for your particular skill set. You believe the status quo must be kept as is, even in a shifting global economy.
I am from EU, however this situation around the H-1B visa is why I am not even remotely interested in most of the job offers from the US that I am getting.
I have been in a similar situation in Europe before my country entered the EU and it is a lot of "fun" when you have to go every year to the immigration office, apply for a work permit renewal and pray that some clerk didn't get off the bed with the wrong foot and won't deny your application because of some bizarre reason - forcing you to lose the job and to leave the country, potentially incurring catastrophic financial losses (relocating abroad/overseas is one heck expensive, especially on a short notice!). On top of that, there is the inevitable "second class" treatment of the foreign employees, because the company knows that if the guy decides to leave, his or her permit is cancelled and they would have to leave the country on a short notice. The alternative is to have their new employer re-apply for the visa/permit again, but that must be done while the applicant lives outside of the country (yay, Switzerland ...), waiting another 6+ months for the paperwork to go through, with no guarantee of success ...
Sorry, but this is not how you treat skilled workers that you are ostensibly so interested in.
The US is doing itself a lot of disservice with this, because apart from the horrid H-1B regime, there is little else available for foreign workers (good luck trying to get the "green card" ...). I am sure there are many companies that use the visa responsibly and treat their foreign employees decently, but it is still a pretty big sword hanging over one's head.
I am certainly not expecting any entitlement to have a job in the US as a foreigner, but right now if someone wanted to hire me, they would have to offer a very sweet deal for it to be worth the gamble with the visas for me.
"Perplexing to researchers" would not be perplexing to criminal investigators.
What are you smoking?
The companies listed Apple, Cisco, Verizon pay wages most of America could only dream of -- especially since they typically require only a 4 year degree. According to GlassDoor:
Apple's entry-level Software Engineer title makes an average base pay of $119,268, plus $34kish in additional incentives.
Cisco's "Software Engineer" title has an average salary of $117,326 with about $20k in additional incentives.
Verizon's "Software Engineer" title has any average salary of $100,098. Only one person reported bonus, at $14k. I'm not sure if, like the above companies, bonuses & stock are all but a given.
Since H1Bs are, by law, required to be paid the same salaries as their American citizen counterparts, if anything, the travesty is that we're giving the nation's best-paying jobs to people from overseas. But having hired numerous engineers, I can say that it'd be difficult to staff a large tech company of any size without relying on a foreign labor pool.
There's certainly abuses of the H1B program, but they're mostly from the big Indian "work for hire" shops like L&T, Infosys, etc. They pay way below industry norms, and thus, paying domestic workers the same wage as your foreign workers isn't that big of a deal.
I am a European citizen living in California after six years on an H1B visa and now several years of permanent residence.
I don't doubt that these abuses occur at some companies, but there *are* companies who are interested in just hiring talent from wherever they can find it and paying above market rate to retain that talent. The US job market is a lot more cutthroat than in the main EU countries, with far fewer legal protections for workers and thus far more variability in working standards, but if you understand that going in and do your research you can do just fine.
I had a pretty easy case of a medium-sized company that got acquired by a slightly larger medium-sized company when I was on year 2 of my H1B visa, leading to a pretty straightforward transfer of visa and the only inconvenience being my green card application got delayed for a year while they repeated the labor certifications.
Other people I know in similar situations have run into other issues like their startup going out of business or laying them off. All of them who wanted to stay were able to find other jobs and transfer their visas. Others have actually left my company and transferred their visas to other companies with no problem whatsoever. I've never known anyone who was trapped or treated badly.
It's not all doom and gloom out here. If you have valuable skills and you choose the right job market (San Francisco Bay Area is the obvious choice) then there is lots of money to be made and career development to be had, even if you're from Europe. I compete with my US citizen peers with my skills and passion, not with lower wages. In fact, half of the manager/tech-leader tier in my organization (of which I am a member, after being promoted twice during my tenure) are foreign nationals from Europe, either currently on H1B visas or formerly on H1B and subsequently granted permanent residence.
Larger companies like Twitter even have employee incentives aimed specifically at immigrant workers. I'm not a Twitter employee so I don't know all the details, but some of my former co-workers (who transferred to Twitter while still on H1B visas) were immediately put on the green card track and tell me that the company offers in-office-hours training on things like understanding the US corporate culture, improving your English accent, and eventually helping you study for citizenship interviews/tests if that is the path you want to take. My company is smaller and not able to provide such perks, but they still put me on the green card track after only a year of tenure (green card application is expensive) and were supportive of my need to occasionally spend days waiting in government offices for various reasons.
I hate to advise that. It is far from an optimal solutions. But, NumbersUSA is about the only organization with any juice at all, that is opposing the visa worker scam.
Again, I have a lot of problems with NumbersUSA. They are very strongly republican, although repubs are just as bad about immigration as dems. Also, they much more concerned with illegal immigration from Mexico, than they are with issues of visa workers.
Still, as I said, they are probably the best organization out there.
Glassdoor relies on self-reported salaries and wages.
> Hatch, in a speech at the corporate offices of Overstock.com in Salt Lake City, called for raising the cap on H-1B visas. "Our high-skilled worker shortage has become a crisis," said Hatch, who heads the Senate Republican High-Tech Task Force.
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2838619/sen-hatch-calls-high-skilled-worker-shortage-a-crisis.html