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India's Infosys To Hire 10,000 American Workers After Trump Criticism (bloomberg.com)
India's Infosys said it plans to hire 10,000 Americans in the next two years, following criticism from the Trump administration that the company and other outsourcing firms are unfairly taking jobs away from U.S. workers. From a report on Bloomberg: Infosys, which employs about 200,000 people around the world, will expand its local hiring in the U.S. while adding four hubs to research technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. The first location will open in Indiana in August 2017 and is expected to create 2,000 jobs for American workers by 2021, the company said.
It's still a race to the bottom, now it's just going to be done in a way that's harder to criticize. I wonder how this will impact salaries and the job market.
Are you certain all the employees of these outsourcing companies have valid credentials?
Are you certain these workers were not displacing American workers at lower wages?
Are you certain all these workers were either as qualified or better qualified than the workers they replaced?
Are you certain all these workers were working in the locations specified on the visa?
If not, then these companies were violating the law. It is the H-1B holder's responsibility to verify and validate these terms. Your defense of "we just responded to an RFP" will not defend you in a court of law.
These companies hold the visas - it is their responsibility to ensure the hiring company is not using them to violate labor laws.
"Just following orders" is not a good defense in court.
When they "discover" that they cannot hire/lure 2000 tech workers in/to Indiana, they will make the claim the indeed there is a tech labor shortage in the US.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I think you can blame those guys. It's not "just" responding to an RFP. Because of my work title, I get marketing and sales calls from the business end of these companies all the time (they want to convince me I need to put out an RFP, and that they can help write it). Trying to game the sales/business process isn't new, and could be considered firmly American. Where they lose me are the arguments that engineering labor is a commodity and that my business culture is less important than labor cost.
Now, keep in mind that I have never asked for anything from them. They come to me and my business partners making these arguments early and often to get us thinking about engineering a certain way. Enough effort like this can shift the standards in a field. They have made a concerted effort to set the standard for software to treat most programmers as commodities. Ultimately this is the problem. The standards they set for the field culturally and economically are not in the best interests of either the workers or the owners.
Also, they make it harder for me to get my PhD scientists H1-Bs when they need them.
Sadly that sounds likely, although I'm having trouble imagining how they attempted to apply that much pressure in browbeating.
I went into the first interview expecting to be interviewed by the hiring supervisor and his manager at a small tech company. The hiring supervisor got called away, the manager didn't feel comfortable interviewing me by himself, and, BTW, the position pays $20 per hour. The interview got rescheduled. Second interview had the manager called away, the hiring supervisor didn't feel comfortable interviewing me by himself, and, BTW, the position pays $15 per hour. I walked out. The HR person spent a month calling me to see if I would be interested in the job at $10 per hour, as it wasn't likely that anyone else would hire me. Shortly thereafter I had three job offers to pick a new job from.