Slashdot Mirror
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."
Once H1-Bs get used to working for peanuts to fulfill their "American dream", the next step is give them US citizenship so government can say "see, US workers are willing to work for less," then use the lowest common denminator to set wages.
This is because the H1B visa problem is rife with abuse, ranging from fraud, most common, to basic slavery. If you don't believe the slavery port realize that a lot of people working on H1B visa's in the US have signed very abusive contracts with brokers in their home countries. If they quit and leave they'll be in a heap of legal and financial trouble when they get back.
The tech companies know this, the Labor department knows this, Destroying records s a way to hopefully prevent any future legal action on the part of H1B applicants in the future. Similar thing happened with Migrant workers from Mexico, taxes and fees were taken out, then records were destroyed to make it impossible for workers to sue later or collect benefits promised.
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..
... everything. The cover ups are wall to wall.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The answer to this is easy: plausible deniability. If the records are only temporary, and get expunged after 5 years, then the US government suddenly have an out for bad press over a long history of abuses of that H1B program that have gone unchecked. Instead of changing policy, fixing the program, and investigating historical abuses by various (mostly tech) companies, it is easier to rewrite histrory.
The answer will now be: 'Oh... we can't possibly investigate company X for H1B visa abuses. The records were temporary and no longer exist. Since the records no longer exist, we cannot possibly comment. To the best of our knowledge, the H1B program works.'
The article doesn't seem to point out the obvious explanation, ie that H1B applications contain personal data (of the type Slashdotters are usually passionate about protecting), and that it is good practice not to keep such information hanging around once it has served its primary purpose. There are presumably solutions to the research concerns, such as aggregating the data before it is deleted or collecting the specific data necessary before the records are deleted.
Virtually serving coffee
How many times will you be running this story, this week?
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
You may think 5 years is too short, but you do need some expiration date for non-critical data. Without an expiration date, whoever manages the data has to go into CYA mode and keep it forever. That gets expensive - it's not the cost of raw storage, it's the cost of ensuring that everything is kept as systems change.
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.
...except of course the private data of people they intercepted illegaly.
The Department of Defense Pork
The Department of Homeland Pork
The Department of Corporate Lawlessness
The Department of Corporate Welfare
Why is Snark Required?
Every single government form and department has a record retention policy of some kind. This is a labor certification record held by the department of labor. This doesn't tell you anything except that the person had the H1B and was OK to work at their original hire date, its a work verification not a visa data repository. The actual visa application and so-on would be with US CIS or US CBP. I'm honestly surprised they held it for even 5 years, since most forms of this nature have a retention of only 2-4 years.
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.
I am a citizen of the United States of America. I realize what is going on
But how many of my fellow Americans know?
And more importantly, how many of them give a damn?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
These are public records (according to TFA). Some research organization (university) can make periodic requests for the data, put it on line and store it indefinitely. They (or some third parties) could even create a few reports, to give the public an idea of which companies are making H-1B visa requests.
Have gnu, will travel.
You know your government is overreaching when they collect and keep your telephone records forever, but have to destroy lists of H1-B visas after five years "to save storage space".
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
. . . those of us who aren't arithmetically-challenged have noticed that this official fourth jobless recovery (although really the fifth or sixth, and we are now told that all the jobs lost have been created again, at least in numerical quantity), that with each and every one of those four downturns, meltdowns, etc., that exactly one-fifth of the US workforce was laid off --- now, to have precisely the same portion of the workforce laid off each and every effing time is just a little bit too mind boggling to be taken as accidental --- throw into the equation all those jobs now being offshored, or created offshore, and more and more foreign visa scab workers imported by the corporations (remember, please, that the NYC Times Square attempted car bomber had been sponsored to this country from Pakistan, by a hedge fund based in Connecticut).