Posted on 07/06/2014 11:03:16 AM PDT by PoloSec
Kelly Parker was thrilled when she landed her dream job in 2012 providing tech support for Harley-Davidson's Tomahawk, Wisconsin, plants. The divorced mother of three hoped it was the beginning of a new career with the motorcycle company.
The dream didn't last long. Parker claims she was laid off one year later after she trained her replacement, a newly arrived worker from India. Now she has joined a federal lawsuit alleging the global staffing firm that ran Harley-Davidson's tech support discriminated against American workers — in part by replacing them with temporary workers from South Asia.
The firm, India-based Infosys Ltd., denies wrongdoing and contends, as many companies do, that it has faced a shortage of talent and specialized skill sets in the U.S. Like other firms, Infosys wants Congress to allow even more of these temporary workers.
But amid calls for expanding the nation's so-called H-1B visa program, there is growing pushback from Americans who argue the program has been hijacked by staffing companies that import cheaper, lower-level workers to replace more expensive U.S. employees — or keep them from getting hired in the first place.
"It's getting pretty frustrating when you can't compete on salary for a skilled job," said Rich Hajinlian, a veteran computer programmer from the Boston area. "You hear references all the time that these big companies ... can't find skilled workers. I am a skilled worker."
Hajinlian, 56, who develops his own web applications on the side, said he applied for a job in April through a headhunter and that the potential client appeared interested, scheduling a longer interview. Then, said Hajinlian, the headhunter called back and said the client had gone with an H-1B worker whose annual salary was about $10,000 less.
"I didn't even get a chance to negotiate down," he said.
The H-1B program allows employers to temporarily hire workers in specialty occupations. The government issues up to 85,000 H-1B visas to businesses every year, and recipients can stay up to six years. Although no one tracks exactly how many H-1B holders are in the U.S., experts estimate there are at least 600,000 at any one time. Skilled guest workers can also come in on other types of visas.
An immigration bill passed in the U.S. Senate last year would have increased the number of annually available H-1B visas to 180,000 while raising fees and increasing oversight, although language was removed that would have required all companies to consider qualified U.S. workers before foreign workers are hired.
The House never acted on the measure. With immigration reform considered dead this year in Congress, President Barack Obama last week declared he will use executive actions to address some changes. It is not known whether the H-1B program will be on the agenda.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is among the high-profile executives pushing for more H-1Bs. The argument has long been that there aren't enough qualified American workers to fill certain jobs, especially in science, engineering and technology. Advocates also assert that some visa holders will stay and become entrepreneurs.
Critics say there is no across-the-board shortage of American tech workers, and that if there were, wages would be rising rapidly. Instead, wage gains for software developers have been modest, while wages have fallen for programmers.
The liberal Economic Policy Institute reported last year that only half of U.S. college graduates in science, engineering and technology found jobs in those fields and that at least one third of IT jobs were going to foreign guest workers.
The top users of H-1B visas aren't even tech companies like Google and Facebook. Eight of the 10 biggest H1-B users last year were outsourcing firms that hire out thousands of mostly lower- and mid-level tech workers to corporate clients, according to an analysis of federal data by Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at Rochester Institute of Technology. The top 10 firms accounted for about a third of the H-1Bs allotted last year.
The debate over whether foreign workers are taking jobs isn't new, but for years it centered on low-wage sectors like agriculture and construction. The high-skilled visas have thrust a new sector of American workers into the fray: the middle class.
Last month, three tech advocacy groups launched a labor boycott against Infosys, IBM and the global staffing and consulting company ManpowerGroup, citing a "pattern of excluding U.S. workers from job openings on U.S soil."
They say Manpower, for example, last year posted U.S. job openings in India but not in the United States.
"We have a shortage in the industry all right — a shortage of fair and ethical recruiting and hiring," said Donna Conroy, director of Bright Future Jobs, a group of tech professionals fighting to end what it calls "discriminatory hiring that is blocking us ... from competing for jobs we are qualified to do."
"U.S. workers should have the freedom to compete first for job openings," Conroy said.
Infosys spokesman Paul de Lara responded that the firm encourages "diversity recruitment," while spokesman Doug Shelton said IBM considers all qualified candidates "without regard to citizenship and immigration status." Manpower issued a statement saying it "adopts the highest ethical standards and complies with all applicable laws and regulations when hiring individuals."
Much of the backlash against the H-1B and other visa programs can be traced to whistleblower Jay Palmer, a formerInfosys employee. In 2011, Palmer supplied federal investigators with information that helped lead to Infosys paying a record $34 million settlement last year. Prosecutors had accused the company of circumventing the law by bringing in lower-paid workers on short-term executive business visas instead of using H-1B visas.
Last year, IBM paid $44,000 to the U.S. Justice Department to settle allegations its job postings expressed a preference for foreign workers. And a September trial is set against executives at the staffing company Dibon Solutions, accused of illegally bringing in foreign workers on H-1B visas without having jobs for them — a practice known as "benching."
In court papers, Parker claims that she was given positive reviews by supervisors, including at Infosys, which she maintains oversaw her work and the decision to let her go. The only complaint: Her desk was messy and she'd once been late.
Neither Parker nor other workers involved in similar lawsuits and contacted by The Associated Press would discuss their cases.
Parker's attorney, Dan Kotchen, noted that the case centers on discrimination based on national origin but said that "hiring visa workers is part of how they obtain their discriminatory objectives."
Infosys is seeking a dismissal, in part on grounds that it never hired or fired Parker. Parker was hired by a different subcontractor and kept on, initially, after Infosys began working with Harley-Davidson.
A company spokeswoman said Infosys has about 17,000 employees in the U.S., about 25 percent U.S. hires. In filings to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said it has more than 22,000 employees with valid temporary work visas, some not in the U.S.
Stanford University Law School fellow Vivek Wadwha, a startup adviser, said firms are so starved for talent they are buying up other companies to obtain skilled employees. If there's a bias against Americans, he said, it's an age bias based on the fact that older workers may not have the latest skills. More than 70 percent of H-1B petitions approved in 2012 were for workers between the ages of 25 and 34.
"If workers don't constantly retrain themselves, their skills become obsolete," he said.
Norm Matloff, a computer science professor at the University of California, Davis, agreed that age plays into it — not because older workers are less skilled but because they typically require higher pay. Temporary workers also tend to be cheaper because they don't require long-term health care for dependents and aren't around long enough to get significant raises, he said.
Because they can be deported if they lose their jobs, these employees are often loath to complain about working conditions. And even half the standard systems analyst salary in the U.S. is above what an H-1B holder would earn back home.
Such circumstances concern Americans searching for work in a still recovering economy.
Jennifer Wedel of Fort Worth, Texas, publicly challenged Obama on the visa issue in 2012, making headlines when she asked him via a public online chat about the number of foreign workers being hired — given that her husband, a semiconductor engineer, couldn't find work.
Wedel said her husband eventually found a job in the health care industry, taking a $40,000 pay cut.
"It's a slap in the face to every American who worked hard to get their experience and degrees and has 10 or 15 years of experience," she said, adding that firms want that experience but don't want to pay for it.
To her, the issue isn't about a shortage of workers who have the right skills. Put simply, she said: "It's the money."
Only the most blithering race bigot or America-Hating Liberal Globalist thinks we need any foreign workers
Complaining about H-1B workers is racist and hateful.
When Patriot Law is declared (shortly perhaps) any immigration whether legal or not will be outlawed and any managers employing illegals could be hanged as an example to others. But illegal immigration and the H1B issue are only a few of the flawed cogs in the gears that run the USA these days. Patriot Law is going to have to deal with quite a few issues in short order.
I laughed at a guy several years ago who claimed that what these big multi-national companies really wanted was to be just like Foxconn with huge dormitories and guards to keep the workers in them until their next work shift let them into the factory to work.
I’m not laughing anymore.
Today I look around and I see these huge companies not wanting American workers because we are to ‘old’ or we cost too much. Yet they want us to buy all of the stuff they make and provide. How can we do that if we don’t get paid a prevailing wage? Answer: We can’t, which leads us to the inevitable point that the entire world-wide economy may just come crashing down.
The survivors of that will be the lucky and the prepared. Personally I think the lucky are going to out-number the prepared.
dittos!!!
They’ll just sell their crap in countries where people have jobs...like china.
An individual trained in engineering or comp sci can readily update to any new tech concepts or programming advances. It isn’t difficult for an intelligent, well-educated individual in these fields. I can speak directly to the use of H1B’s as cheap labor. A recent employer of mine (not a company but a state gov’t) hired individuals with visa challenges that US citizens don’t have—the pay rate was about 40% less than the going rate across the US for comparable positions and institutions. There was no overt advertising for such individuals but the pay and the situation would result in such candidates. The result was a department staffed with people from all over the planet and a few old-timers from the local area. Performance among the foreign hires was a mess. A few US citizens were hired but they either left quickly or were awful performers, too.
It is about the money. Good performers cost money—but they are well worth it. As far as gov’t goes, it is the gov’t’s responsibility to encourage economic opportunity for the citizenry. This gov’t works against that responsibility and that is arguably the worst thing a gov’t can do in peace time.
When big corporations have drained America dry to fatten their bottom line, what do they expect to do next?
This stunt by the ham-fisted nitwit is likely to backfire and strengthen calls for immigration enforcement and make any amnesty bill unpalatable even for Democrats.
Another Billionaire Marxist pushing my wages down in a field I've been unable to get a job in since the last lay off.
I don't care how much money he has, I do mind that he lies to legislators to personally benefit himself at my expense.
“The argument has long been that there aren’t enough qualified American workers to fill certain jobs, especially in science, engineering and technology.”
That is a lie.
The H1-B program should be eliminated.
IBM’s solution was to encourage their laid off US citizens to move to India where they would be paid a mere fraction of their old salary but it would “go farther”.
That might just be why he did it!
I agree with you, H1B needs gone.
Wow. Did the top brass lead by example?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2177476/posts
Information Week
IBM Offers To Move Laid Off Workers To India
Feb. 2, 2009
The easiest way to get rid of the H1B problem would be to eliminate the program altogether and alow those workers to get green cards. The H1B program is a promotion channel for all Indian staffing companies and you will not be promoted to management without an offshore stint by any of them. They send them here on H1B visas because they can’t take a better job from another firm without sponsorship and are at high risk of being deported if they look for another job.
I have been working with firms like Infosys for more than a decade and am well versed on how they operate as an employer as well as a supplier.
“Today I look around and I see these huge companies not wanting American workers because we are to ‘old’ or we cost too much.”
It is because you expect a certain standard of living (which probably touches on both of your points), especially if you want to have a family.
“Yet they want us to buy all of the stuff they make and provide. How can we do that if we don’t get paid a prevailing wage? Answer: We can’t, which leads us to the inevitable point that the entire world-wide economy may just come crashing down.”
Actually, most of their customers are in Asia now, with their new rising middle classes that have our former jobs.
Its simple, an H1B worker has to do what the company wants or they go home. Of course they will work longer and for less. Its indentured servitude. Now compete with that.
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