I can give some insight into the tech industry.
Many of these “jobs” are designed to give the company an excuse to hire H1-B visa employees. They don’t advertise the job locally. They hire a recruiting company to look for people, but they only contact people outside the area. When they get 100 people rejecting their job 1,000 miles away, they can say “see, there is a labor shortage” and import an H1-B visa worker.
This is a known scam to play the H1-B program, but nobody wants to do anything about it.
Full-time/regular-employee jobs are shrinking. Instead, companies are going to contract employees. Or, they dangle a “contract to hire” position, where after working months as a contractor they might consider hiring you as a regular employee (a rarity).
I can see contract workers becoming the norm in the future as it allows companies to avoid all the government red tape associated with an actual employee.
Companies also don’t want to pay the prevailing wage. The old “we need immigrants to do the jobs Americans won’t” line should really read “we need immigrants to do the jobs Americans won’t do AT THE WAGE WE WANT TO PAY.”
This is true for the H1-B visa workers and illegal immigrants. There is no shortage of American workers. There is a shortage of CHEAP American workers.
I see ads for tech jobs regularly that are marked junior, entry-level, or mid-level where the job requirements are clearly senior-level. Yet, the pay rate is 50 percent BELOW the market rate for a senior level person.
Again, they float the ad where the requirements are out of sync with the pay level. Nobody (qualified) responds to the ads, so they can say “see, we need to import an H1-B visa person, because there is a shortage.”
The tech industry is at the forefront of this, but I expect to see plenty of other industries use these same techniques to create artificial worker shortages. It’s the wave of the future. We’ll all (even grocery clerks) be independent contractors and competing with foreign imported labor.
Yes, but businesses - especially smaller ones - can no longer afford to pay American workers the salaries they got used to a decade ago. The cost of government is now too high. And bigger companies have zero respect for the IT profession, anyway - they would fire every computer person in sight as unnecessary overhead if they could get away with it. Part of why I left IT behind in 2008.
Same thing I’m seeing, but I didn’t make the H1-B connection. I had a contract house try to recruit me for a senior/fellow level design engineer position. I have an associate’s degree and a lot of experience, but not what would be needed for military level design and development at the level they were looking for. I had previously tried to tell this recruiter that I don’t have a BS degree and am not an engineer, but they keep coming at me with jobs that are clearly beyond my training.
I do believe they are looking for someone way cheaper than what the prevailing wage should be for the position. I have seen a lot of this in the last several weeks since I started looking in earnest.