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Tesla's New Factory Project Imported Foreign Laborers (mercurynews.com)
An anonymous reader writes: "Overseas contractors are shipping workers from impoverished countries to American factories, where they work long hours for low wages, in apparent violation of visa and labor laws," reports the Bay Area Newsgroup. For example, "About 140 workers from Eastern Europe, mostly from Croatia and Slovenia, built a new paint shop at Tesla's Fremont plant, a project vital to the flagship Silicon Valley automaker's plans to ramp up production of its highly anticipated Model 3 sedan..."
This "hidden workforce" arrives on B1/B2 visas, which federal authorities acknowledge are subject to "widespread abuse" in Silicon Valley. The newspaper reviewed visa, court, and payroll documents, and conducted dozens of interviews, identifying Tesla's small third-party Slovenian subcontractor ISM Vuzem as the company who ultimately recruited many of the workers.
While most of the imported workers were happy with their wages, one worker was earning the equivalent of $5 an hour while his American counterpart was earning as much as $52, and they worked 10-hour days -- without overtime -- up to seven days a week.
This "hidden workforce" arrives on B1/B2 visas, which federal authorities acknowledge are subject to "widespread abuse" in Silicon Valley. The newspaper reviewed visa, court, and payroll documents, and conducted dozens of interviews, identifying Tesla's small third-party Slovenian subcontractor ISM Vuzem as the company who ultimately recruited many of the workers.
While most of the imported workers were happy with their wages, one worker was earning the equivalent of $5 an hour while his American counterpart was earning as much as $52, and they worked 10-hour days -- without overtime -- up to seven days a week.
Americans today are horrendous at efficiency because their government made them absolutely inefficient.
Don't let a little thing like actual facts contradict your ideological rant. Sadly for your argument the US is among the most efficient and productive workforces in the world. (#3 in GDP per capita behind only Norway and Luxembourg) The notion that the US government has made the US hugely inefficient is not supported by any actual evidence.
As to what makes a person efficient - capital savings and investment into labour saving devices.
Which as it turns out the US economy is impressively good at. What do you think the computer you are typing this on is but a labor saving device? The US leads the world in utilization of many forms of automation.
The US has nowhere near the highest labor costs in the world. We're not even in the top 10.
If you actually believe that labor costs in the US aren't among the highest in the world then you haven't actually bothered to look at the data. Depending on how you measure it the labor costs in the US are mostly somewhere between 5th and 20th per capita. Yes there are some countries with higher labor costs but not very many of them. The fact that we don't have THE highest labor costs per capita is not important. What is important is that our labor costs are WELL above the mean globally. If you want to know why manufacturing companies have moved to China (and elsewhere) for labor intensive manufacturing, labor costs are by far the biggest factor. There are a lot of products that simply cannot be made in the US for the hourly wages that a US based manufacturer would have to pay.
I used to do global sourcing for a living. I've traveled all over Eastern Asia, Southeast Asia, and Central America for manufacturing companies. I work in manufacturing and I buy products and commodities from around the world. The US without question has some of the highest labor rates in the world. It's not even a debate. If you think otherwise you don't know what you are talking about.
Automotive does. And with all the regulations surrounding conflict minerals and child labor these days, pretty much anyone making a consumer product that cares about their brand does now too.
Aren't visas like this for jobs skills that are lacking in the US? This was a construction job. thousands of people could have been imported from Detroit, Buffalo, etc.
Wrong type of Visa. B1 Visas are meant for business professionals to temporarily enter the country for negotiations, meetings, interview staff, perform research, etc. This type of abuse is outright fraud. The problem is not simply poorly written laws (or at least not primarily that). The problem is enforcement of those laws. It may be prohibitively difficult to prevent this type of abuse, but I assume there is also a drastic lack of enforcement of these Visa regulations.
Tesla is able to rightly say they never hired these fraudulent visa holders and expects its subcontractors to follow immigration and other labor laws. Forcing all companies to perform detailed audits of all their subcontractors which goes above and beyond what even the federal government does is probably not reasonable. But increased scrutiny of all B1 visa requests would probably solve a great deal of abuse (certainly not all abuse though).
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Hell, even their CEO is a foreign worker!