Labor Department To Destroy H-1B Records

Presto Vivace writes H-1B records that are critical to research and take up a small amount of storage are set for deletion. "In a notice posted last week, the U.S. Department of Labor said that records used for labor certification, whether in paper or electronic, 'are temporary records and subject to destruction' after five years, under a new policy. There was no explanation for the change, and it is perplexing to researchers. 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. The cost of storage can't be an issue for the government's $80 billion IT budget: A full year's worth of LCA data is less than 1GB."

Comments

80 Billion IT budget???

[TyFoN]

That's more than some small countries national budgets..

How is that even even possible?

You could buy 80 million $1000 computers for that amount!

Sorry for not being completely OT, but that's insane..

The Cloud!

[wed128]

Is the data public information? if so, why not just make it publicly available, and whoever cares can download it. If the data is valuable, it will be mirrored and survive. if not, it won't.

Standard Document Retention Policy

[Jaime2]

The goal of an effective document retention policy is to identify documents that can be destroyed and destroy them as soon as it is permissible to do so. Old documents are a court case with a broad discovery order away from becoming a big cost. It's very cheap to say "the retention policy says these documents are only kept five years and we physically destroy them shortly after this date".

I know of a county government in New York that kept their backups tapes from their mail server as a method of retention. There was some political trouble with a mayor (who used the county's email system) and a contractor - suspicion of giving no-bid contracts or something like that. A request came to the county's doorstep for all of the email correspondence between the two for the four years the mayor was in office. The county had to buy a spare server and restore each monthly tape to it and manually pick out the email messages. It cost them $190,000. It would have been better for them to either have an effective archiving plan, or to have deleted them. Keeping stuff "just in case" is a horrible idea.

Of course, if these documents are being singled out for aggressive purging and other documents are not, then there may be some funny business going on.

Re:Indentured servitude and slavery

[hostmaster]

Can you cite some examples of the "abusive contracts with brokers" and "slave wages" and give us some data on how prevalent you believe these are?

Here's survey data on H-1Bs: http://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Resources/Reports%20and%20Studies/H-1B/h1b-fy-12-characteristics.pdf

and here's prevailing wage data for a random area (Denver, Colorado): http://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?code=15-1132&area=19740&year=15&source=1 prevailing wage for Level 1 is $64,230 for an application developer.

Most H-1B workers tend to be young in their mid-20s. In comparison, here's what graduating seniors from an Ivy League engineering school make in possibly the highest cost location in the country (NYC) http://www.careereducation.columbia.edu/sites/cce/files/2013_gss--cc__seas-ug.pdf The median is mid-50s.

It seems to me you have your panties in a bunch over imagined abuses. May I suggest a direction in which your indignation could be more constructively directed?

Here's what Colorado pays the school-teachers who are tasked with educating the next generation. http://www.cde.state.co.us/sites/default/files/documents/cdereval/download/pdf/avgteachersal/2011avgteachersalary.pdf

Salaries in most districts are in the 30s and 40s. In the Denver area, they creep into the 50s in some districts. This is an average, it includes teachers with decades of experience. And these are people who are spending hours and hours before and after classes end grading homework, preparing lesson plans etc. That's the real problem we have in this country when it comes to training and preparing skilled workers so they can move up the income curve.

Re:US Citizenship

[afidel]

Could they have imagined a government where something akin to the Dutch East India Company simply walked in and individually bribed every single Congressman and the President to do their bidding, without the American people even realizing it?

Sure they did:

1. “If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them, will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”
— Thomas Jefferson, 1802 letter to Secretary of State Albert Gallatin.

2. “I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”
— Thomas Jefferson.

3. “The power of all corporations ought to be limited, [...] the growing wealth acquired by them never fails to be a source of abuses.”
— James Madison

4.“Banks have done more injury to the religion, morality, tranquility, prosperity, and even wealth of the nation than they can have done or ever will do good.”
— John Adams