YouTube Video On Avoiding U.S. Job Applicants Angers Programmers

IT professionals criticize a law firm's video play-by-play description on how to circumvent the PERM process in favor of H-1B visas.

YouTube bites again. A law firm's attempt to get positive exposure for an immigration law conference by posting it on You Tube backfired when an organization that's been tough on H-1B visas and offshore outsourcing copied it and made a controversial video of its own. In the original video, posted by the firm Cohen & Grigsby from a May 15 conference, an attorney is shown advising attendees on how to meet the minimum requirements of advertising a job to U.S. candidates so that a foreign worker can more easily be hired. The firm's conference dealt with the U.S. government's labor certification requirement for foreign workers, the first step in helping them obtain green cards. The law requires that an employer prove there are no qualified U.S. citizens for a permanent job being offered before hiring a non-citizen.

In one 10-minute segment of the conference video, a panel of lawyers are shown discussing Program Electronic Review Management (PERM), an electronic labor certification system the government put in place two years ago to reduce certification to under 60 days. It was that portion of the video lambasted by the Programmers Guild, an organization of IT professionals that is staunchly protectionist against the loss of U.S. jobs to foreign workers both onshore and offshore.

The PERM process requires that an employer post a job in at least three places and allow 30 days for job candidates to respond for the employer to review resume. If no interested and qualified U.S. workers respond, an employer can instantly and electronically apply for a foreign worker's labor certification.

In the video, a Cohen & Grigsby attorney advises attendees that posting the job at an employer's Web site and with a local newspaper is usually enough to fill the minimum requirement, if the newspaper also posts the job online.

Another attorney, Lawrence Lebowitz, adds, "We're going to try to find a place [to advertise] where we are complying with the law and hoping, and likely, not to find qualified and interested worker applicants." A different firm attorney mentions less desirable methods that are more likely to pull in qualified and interested workers, including job fairs, online job sites like Monster.com, campus recruitments, and job placement firms.

In its YouTube video, the Programmer's Guild accuses the firm of using fake job ads to fulfill the PERM process. "These ads constitute fraud on American job seekers," says the organization in its text leading into the video.

Contacted at his Pittsburgh office the afternoon of June 18, Lebowitz said he was reviewing the matter with other partners in the firm and declined comment at this time.

The law firm removed the conference video sometime between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m. Eastern daylight time on June 18.

In fairness to Arnold, didn’t he become an American citizen years ago? ...let’s be honest, and not loose with the facts like the liberals.

Let's not be loose with the allegations.

Arnold is an Austrian citizen and a U.S. citizen. Austrian law automatically voids Austrian citizenship if an Austrian national swears allegiance to another nation. In 1983, Schwarzenegger took the oath of citizenship and became a U.S. citizen. Subsequently, Arnold lobbied friends in high places to have his prior Austrian citizenship reinstated. I do not believe you can pledge allegiance to two nations simultaneously. His pledge to the U.S. was weakened by his subsequent action.

I agree with what you posted. It’s individual greed definitely.

For instance, if any of you ever worked or knew someone who worked in retail, you know that they’ve all made it the sales clerks job to push store and credit cards on customers or magazines or service plans (Best Buy, etc) and that they are judged VERY harshly on this aspect of their job. They often do not inform people of this beforehand and spring it on them afterwards.

In any case, the ‘rewards’ the associates get are meager. A chance to COMPETE in a raffle for a piddling discount or free item or gift card somewhere. Meanwhile, the managers who do NOT do ANY of the sales work in getting customers to sign up for these credit cards or service plans collect fat bonuses based on how hard they drive the underlings to get results.

One of the things that people think is great about publicly-traded companies is that you or I can own a piece of an institution, an emerging business, whatever. The problem is that publicly-traded companies have far less accountability than a privately-owned company. It’s that example people brought up of Milton Hershey refusing to use too much machinery building a plant during the Depression because he wanted to hire more people. Or that guy who had the factory in New England that burned down and continued to pay people salaries and rebuilt the thing.

An individual can drive a company culture all by himself and be an exemplar of those principles elucidated in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments.

With the structure of the corporation, the management set up conflicts of interest among employees (such as I mentioned—why wouldn’t the people actually DOING the great sales jobs get rewarded MORE than the people who act like a-holes and drive others to do it from fear?) and to play shell games and numbers games with stockholders.

It’s all about stock price but half the time the numbers being presented at these meetings are illusory. I see it in my job all the time. Decisions and strategies that are actually DAMAGING (I’m in property management) to the company’s reputation, loses it customers (First rule of business, I thought—keep your customers) and cost it money are done for the sake of throwing some numbers in the faces of the stockholders so they can get that price up, get their own bonuses and set themselves up for their inevitable departure to another corporation to repeat the process.

I’m not saying corporations are evil or to ban them or that there are no disreputable or grasping privately-owned businesses, it’s just that the structure of the corporation and how it defines its successes and failures and how competing agendas within the structure of ‘the team’ will lead to certain results.

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