Laid-off IT workers muzzled as H-1B debate heats up
computerworld.com
computerworld.com
1. The H1B visa is supposed to be a "skilled visa". But currently this visa is purely based on luck and not on skills & that's how many bad apples game the system. The DOL approves LCA based on minimum wages. The consultancies just pay the minimum wages and bring in the H1B employee. This minimum wage should be increased to match the salary of a skilled American worker. So that this exploitation will stop.
eg: (the salaries are approximate)
In Arizona , the minimum annual salary for LCA is 62K, the average salary paid to an American worker is 115K. Consultancy firms like TCS,Infosys and many other local "one room" consultancies pays 62K and bring in H1B employees because 62K is the minimum stipulated by Department of Labor. Increasing this minimum 62K to a realistic salary like 115K will stop this abuse.
2. There is no easy job portability for H1B workers. Switching jobs on H1B is a precarious act and if something goes wrong, you will have to be out of the country immediately, no grace period. So to be on the safer side, many H1B employees stay silent and accept lowball offers. They also have kids who are going to school and a spouse who cannot work because they are on H4. So H1B workers job portability is not really easy.
Make H1B jobs portable without any strings attached. So that if an H1B employee is paid less and abused by the employer. He/She can switch jobs easily. So this will prevent H1B abuse by the employers and they will think twice before low balling an H1B worker.
3. H1B is a dual intent visa. Once the employer starts GreenCard process for the worker. The H1B worker is literally on shackles. The rules are so strict that the worker cannot change jobs easily. Cannot accept promotions or title change for years. The worker silently accepts this because he/she has a family & kids to support just like any other American worker.
All I want to convey is: The H1B employee is not be blamed for this. The very rules of the H1B system are being gamed by the consultancy companies from India. Stopping H1B system is not the solution because all the large companies in US has huge dependency on H1B employees.
So to stop this abuse, 1. Increase the minimum wages to a more realistic one. 2. Stop lottery system and grant visas based on top salary. 3. Make the H1B job easily portable.
As a bonus, it means that the minimum wages aren't relevant, since supply and demand of skilled international workers will set the lowest wage that gets admitted to the US.
This rule would unfortunately favor employers in high cost-of-living areas over low COL ones. Employees are approximately ambivalent between taking home $5k/mo and paying $2k/mo in rent, and taking home $4k/mo and paying $1k/mo in rent. But, the higher rent + higher pay scenario will get admitted well before the lower rent + lower pay.
It also incentivizes putting as much of the compensation in salary as possible, and as little as possible in other benefits.
> It also incentivizes putting as much of the compensation in salary as possible, and as little as possible in other benefits.
Both of these to a pretty ridiculous degree. You would have issues with companies like Amazon (who pay reasonably well and so far as I know don't abuse the H1-B system) getting screwed because they either don't pay as much in cash (they like a stock heavy comp model) or because they aren't paying people bay area money.
They could also expand their presence in their SF office, if somehow an area costing a lot to live in would become an advantage. Unless there's an assumption that Amazon has some sort of unalienable right to hire foreign workers at less than local market rates, there really isn't anything unfair about it.
Suppose we raise the minimum salary to say 120k/yr, or if we use the salary to determine the order, what this will signal is that the more you are paid the more you are needed. And since this visa is for the best and brightest we will see that, hey, my manager/dentist/lawyer/doctor makes double what I make, that would indicate to me that we need more of those best and brightest from around the world.
But that's not what this is, there is no shortage that we need to address. We educate and train plenty of American citizens to fill these rolls. It is corporate welfare that the government is all to willing to play along with.
But even that visa is being gamed, see the Peter Roberts AMA here from a few weeks ago.
But the fact of the matter is a majority of H-1B visas go to positions that are bottom of the totem pole, back office development and IT. I mean 80% of them pay on the lower tiers of the pay scales. Seems an awful waste of talent and an overall raw deal for the worlds best and brightest.
Or perhaps you're talking about things you have no first hand experience with, which would greatly diminish the value of opinions you held about shortage of programmers.
Was it effortless? No, not remotely. But, hiring an skilled employee shouldn't be effortless. And the positions were filled in time to meet objectives.
edit - formatting
If believe that makes you feel better, then fine. It is not true for all sectors. Not remotely true for many specialized job descriptions. And not all jobs can be performed after a 6 month training period.
Now, these cases have nothing to do with "shortage", but rather, replacement. Disney's H1-Bs were not hired "in addition to" the existing workers, existing workers got replaced. That's bad.
Granting H1 to top salaries mean only big companies will be able to afford these visas. What happens to an H1 holder that starts off in a 200k position and wants to leave to a 150k+equity position?
No, it means only very profitable companies will be able to afford top talent. That's the idea.
> What happens to an H1 holder that starts off in a 200k position and wants to leave to a 150k+equity position?
It doesn't have to be based on a single form of compensation. You could adjust for equity based compensation and adjust the lower limit accordingly. Even if you didn't adjust for equity based compensation, you'd be far better off than the current lottery based system.
No, it means that companies-in-general will only use the H1B system for roles that are actually difficult to fill, domestically.
How difficult? Difficult-enough that the pay is high, that's how difficult.
Is this true? I thought that the salary of H1b worker must match an average paid for this kind of position in this area. In fact, I'm fairly certain that the company sponsoring H1B must supply documents showing they did the research, on both wages and the fact that they couldn't find anyone in the US to do this kind of work.
The wage for a Level 4 'Software Developers, Applications' in SF is 138k/yr[1]
Which option do you think employers choose?
[0] http://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?code=15-11...
[1] http://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?code=15-11...
It wasn't until I hired a few H1Bs that I understood that the H1B discount isn't just a simple wrong. When looking at H1B compensation, we should probably also include additional legal fees paid on behalf of the worker rather than simply comparing salary to salary if we want an apples-to-apples comparison.
Also, you are not accounting for non tech professions. For example, fashion industry doesn't generally pay as well. Do you expect that none of them are granted an H1 in that case?
The solution is much more complex than you have laid out here..
No offense at all to those in the US for H1-B, but too many citizens are unemployed or underemployed right this very second.
If Apple can attract the candidates and you can't, you're not offering enough money.
This is exactly the point about the "engineering shortage". If there is a shortage, salaries should be going up. Since salaries are not going up, there is, by definition, no shortage.
Unfortunately, if the changes you propose are implemented then that means a lot of H1Bs will lose their jobs.
Like it or not, the value proposition for employers is that H1Bs are cheaper and more dependent. Remove those two factors and US companies will just hire currently unemployed US workers.
This is fine for everyone except the H1B workers, so while you plan is well-meaning in its intent not to blame H1Bs it would have the effect massive job losses for them!
This is true - but there's no need to apply it retroactively. You can just change the regulations for the next batch of H1B participants in 2017 - the visa only lasts six years anyway.
The wage metric to use in the hiring of an H1B worker is the top end of the salary range of that job description for the city or area PLUS a 10-20% premium. This ensures that the company really needs to bring someone in. An entry level engineer in SF/SV would have the tier 1 salary apply to them while a senior engineer would get the higher tier.
The problem isn't just the definition of 'prevailing wage' or the use of the lower tier 1 salary figures for senior positions. The problem is the lack of enforcement by the goverment agencies approving these visa applications.
Heck, sidestepping academic/research quotas, 115k would even exclude professors from many top-ranked non-big city universities. Salary will unfortunately bias the H1B in favor of software engineering and high-cost-of-living geographical locations. Skilled professions earning < 115k in H1B include, professors, researchers, postdocs, resident doctors everywhere, engineers and accountants of all types outside big cities, etc. etc.
Working in your IT silos, it is easy for you to lose sight of the big picture.
Edit: To give you a sense of how dumb the idea is, look up assistant professor salaries at UIUC ECE, arguably one of the top 5 universities in this area in the country (or top 10 in the world, in fact), you'll find almost all assistant profs earn < 115k.
1. Spouses of H1B workers (H4) cannot work. Most spouses of H1B are well qualified advanced degree holders. Currently they idle their productive ages sitting at home. The H1B worker has to look after his/her home with a single source of income.
How will you feel as a citizen if someone restricts your spouse from having a job, though he/she is well qualified with advanced degrees ? How will the spouses feel when they are restricted by this 'out of the world' rule that spouse of an H1B cannot work ? How is this different from the Saudis that women can't drive cars ?
2. H1B workers cannot have a secondary source of income. So he/she has to do with a single income source unlike others who can work multiple jobs.
3. H1B workers pay social security and medicare for nothing. H1B is a 6 year visa. Why should H1B workers pay social security & medicare tax when they are allowed to work only for 6 years ? They do not have any use of these taxes. They will not be present in US at the age of 65 to reap the benefits of these taxes that they pay. So a higher salary will compensate this unnecessary loss for an H1B worker.
4. H1B workers cannot make a job change very easily, nor can they switch jobs if they are fired. They should immediately leave the country (imagine vacating the apartment,selling car,taking kids out of their school) else face deportation.
So 115K is not insane, it's a minimum. H1B workers ought to get paid more because they are losing a lot by these draconian restrictions imposed upon them by the H1B system.
C-Level Management->Shareholders->Customers->Employees
In this environment, one must be financially prepared to retire early once you reach your 50's because you will likely be replaced.
Replacement by H-1B's is just a symptom of a greater underlying problem: The need to enrich management and shareholders.
Instead of C-corporations which put profit above everything else, we need more public benefit corporations (B-corps) which have balanced priorities.
By this logic, we could see B-corps in niches where capital is not a strategic advantage. The search for these niches is left as an exercise for the reader.
"The Parnassus Endeavor Fund normally invests at least 80% of its net assets(plus borrowings for investment purposes) in companies believed by the Fund’s investment adviser (Adviser) to provide good workplaces for their employees. Companies with good workplaces usually are able to recruit and retain better employees, and perform at a higher level than competitors in terms of innovation, productivity, customer loyalty and profitability. While no company is perfect, the Adviser makes a judgment as to which companies have good workplaces based on factors such as respectful and fair treatment of employees, employee satisfaction and engagement, pay and benefits, family-friendly policies, and support for volunteerism and philanthropy."
Social investing as well as religious funds also put a higher priority on certain ethical criteria rather than overall profitability. The motive for investing in these funds depends on what one recognizes as their highest end.
An investor who's looking beyond the next quarter will look more at a company than just ROI.
Quality is going to decrease over time. Lay offs mean the loss of institutional knowledge, team experience, internal quality standards, business relationships, inter-team relationships etc. etc. etc. that let them get things done. The new teams will be riding any technical capital left behind by the old guard for a while but I'll predict it'll run into problems by the 5yr mark. Costs will skyrocket as projects take more time, work processes have to be rebuilt, relationships start from scratch, etc.
In terms of the bottom line, it looks good now, but they're going to be paying for it later. Either in higher costs to the contractors to fulfill projects OR paying consultants and internal teams absurd money to fix technical debt. It will happen. It's cost shifting.
Edit: The other thing I forgot to add is loss of ownership. Shifting IT/development staff to contractors is going to decrease the sense of ownership in the project which means the level of care and concern about the success of the project are going to decline. Yes, it's an intangible and an important one. If I own something and feel like my work on it is necessary for success, I'll put in the work to do it right and set it up for success. Contractors will build to the contract and everything else is an add-on that costs more. Want that plugin for a new feature an internal dev would have built in as run of course because they see a future need? That'll cost you another 4 weeks of contract developer time because it wasn't in scope of contract.
I could not agree more. I have worked with so many big companies that have outsourced their IT and tech (part of the reason I was doing work there in the first place) and the lack of empathy and general apathy by these providers has always been a huge reason for overruns and delays.
There's no accountability, so a mess up doesn't get anyone scared for their job. If the worker is offsite it means the work goes through their ticket system and you just wait for it to get some- but it's probably going to get bounced back three or four times because the person didn't read the ticket. A perfect example is "we need a new database schema deployed to a dev database instance- here's the instance name we need it deployed to, here's the SQL script to be run, and here are the user permissions we need."
Ticket gets bounced back: "What instance is this supposed to be deployed to?" facepalm
On top of that, most the companies that come in, provide the bare minimum of resources, so that guy that's not getting paid enough to give a shit has too much work on his plate to keep up with it anyways.
> C-Level Management->Shareholders->Customers->Employees
That's not really true. In the end the shareholders have all the clout. Management can go against shareholder interests for a time, to the extent they can hide what they're doing, but the interests of she shareholders will always be paramount in the end. I'm not sure what you're expecting. Yes, management looks after its own interests.
But so do employees. Said nobody ever to himself: "Self, there was a big flood in Thailand this year and the company lost a lot of money, so I'll take a lower salary than my skill set demands until the company is back on its feet. Otherwise it wouldn't be fair to the shareholders."
And it all works, because it doesn't matter if you don't care about the people with whom you're doing business. That's the beauty of the system.
As for the relative power of consumers/employees versus shareholders/executives - the former are disparate and disorganized and can do little other than vote with their feet (a pretty severe, last-resort option). The latter are few in number, can concentrate their force and get their way more quickly and efficiently.
This is why there needs to be public policies that tilt the playing field back in favor of employees and customers.
I'm a proponent of public benefit corporations. I think Kickstarter became one last year. There's also Just Capital, a nonprofit organization created by Paul Tudor Jones II with Deepak Chopra. They have a metric to measure and rank benefit corps.
The real problem is that a foreign worker should not get paid less doing the same job American do. That will kill the incentive and it's also very inhumane and racist to pay less for the same work based just on citizenship.
If they were to do it based on highest salary it would offer U.S. workers more pay protection, and it would still allow companies to bring over the high-quality talent they need.
Amends the Immigration and Nationality Act to establish an annual cap on H-1B nonimmigrant visas (specialty occupations) at between 115,000 and 195,000 visas depending upon market conditions and existing demand. (The current annual H-1B cap is 65,000.) "
https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/153
Seems unambiguous.
That's L1-B. L1-A (manager) has different requirements. But in any case you need to be high up in the org chart. "Project manager" won't cut it.
It gets harder the more you hire. Say you are the only one who knows about technology X (i.e., you created it). It is easy to make your case. It won't be as easy when you are employee #100.
Also, after a certain percentage of workers are on that visa, the fees get much higher.
I don't think it has minimum wage requirements, but good luck getting a low salary approved. You are supposed to have a unique skill set and proprietary knowledge, after all.
Disclaimar: I'm on L1B.
> Leo Perrero, an IT worker at Disney who was laid off after training his foreign replacement, says non-disparagement agreements hinder the debate over the H-1B visa. Without such agreements, "you would have a lot more people speaking out - real human beings with real stories, not just anonymous persons speaking out," said Perrero.
> "Their freedom of speech is being taken away from them with the non-disparagement agreements," he said.
Stating a fact is probably not disparaging. (Not a lawyer; I dunno.) But that's not a debate, either. If you want to debate about it, you basically have to say that this act hurt you, which may count as disparaging or discrediting your former employer.
They might also get you on NDA violations if your NDA includes not revealing corporate staffing strategies.
IAMNAL but I've been around enough to know it's possible to spin anything with an open-ended clause.
To wit, how much of the American government's dysfunction is made possible by today's captive press?
I've worked for two companies now that completely replaced their operations teams with TCS, and it's been a disaster each time, but it's cheaper and the tradeoff in ops quality doesn't matter when you have millions in labor off the bottom line instantly.
It's much easier to see that than any negative perception or lost sales.
You see often enough companies hiring H1-B's, have their American equivalents train them, and then fire the American workers.
H1B stipulates this. Here is how the companies work around this. The ADs that they put for this position should have the salary too. The salary will be the bare minimum specified by the Department of Labor for that work location. eg: Arizona I think its not more than 62K per year. There will not be any American worker who will be willing to work for that. So the AD will yield zero American applicants for that position and thus they hire an H1B worker.
If your company has H1B workers, go to to your company's public notice boards usually in the break rooms. You can find notices like "Labor condition application for a foreign worker". Take a look at the second page or the third one and see the salary for that position. Usually it will be a bare minimum or minimum + ~10K.
The only stipulations for H-1Bs are that you work in a specialized field as described by USCIS, that you have the requisite degrees (and that the position requires those degrees), and that you're paid market salary. Whether the "market salary" describes the actual market is another issue, and should be enforced by the government.
Holy hell. I couldn't do it, I'd starve first.
And can you imagine sitting with and being trained by someone that you knew you were causing them to lose their job?
Corporations making people hate each other, it's the American way.
Those H1B replacements should be keeping those American flags - what other country would allow this kind of nonsense to happen.
Trade is a 2 way street. If the west wants Indian and Chinese markets open to their goods (western brands are ubiquitous in those places), they will want concessions on services and immigration quotas.
Recent pushes by the US to open India's retail sector would have wiped out millions of jobs, much more than the few thousand complained about here.
"see this hahr buttin? rawt clack on't inwhat fer da fahl winder y'all need"
The H1-B program was designed to prevent abuses like these. It looks like enforcement is sorely lacking.
Then let's make anti-disparagement clauses illegal and severance packages mandatory.
Companies afraid of bad press may then be motivated to be even more generous than they would have otherwise. Not only would they have to pay you enough to sign, they'd have to pay you enough to make you happy enough that you don't speak against them. They'd only have a carrot but no stick.
Frankly, if a company doesn't want to be portrayed in a bad light, it should endeavor to avoid doing things worthy of disparagement.
Probably a more important reason for offering severance is to insure against former employees suing the company (for wrongful dismissal, discrimination, sexual harassment, etc.). Most severance agreements demand a "general release of liability" in return for the severance payment. (Of course, that doesn't shield the company from criminal liability if anything they did was actually illegal, e.g., wage theft.)
The general release of liability you mention is sometimes a one-way release. In that case the company retains the right to sue the employee. A word to the wise: Always have a severance agreement reviewed by an attorney before you sign it.
Modern tech corporations have been automated to the point that the biggest cost is labor, so they are now spending a lot of effort to address this cost. The claim that there is a STEM shortage is a myth invented by these corporations in order to lobby and expand these programs. They operate within the letter of the law but not in the spirit, with misleading job advertisements and preferential hiring practices. This becomes a self fullfilling prophecy in that the smart people who are paying attention are driven away from technology.
http://foreign-employment.findthedata.com/
Microsoft is the first big 'tech' company on the list at no. 11 with 3600 applications. Compare that to Infosys which had over 23,000 applications, or Tata with 14,000.
Its also conspicuous that the consultancy companies pay much less and seem to apply for drastically less green card labour certs as a percentage of H1B's than the tech companies.
It is a bit brutal. but effective.
IT outsourcing is like training you while you on pay. once entry level engineers get experienced and they will ask to migrate to US. eventually a local hire become out of job.
Things I don't understand is why all these IT jobs require degree. why cannot we train school dropout to do the works? don't listen to outsource company when they say we have 80% graduate/16% masters/4% PHD etc. see what skills you really want.
Reasonable salary to you is different from reasonable salary to a highly qualified CEO. Also, you should revisit your idea of qualifications. There are many VP/SVP level folks who are fully qualified to be CEO given the chance. CEOs weren't born CEOs. There were promoted to that position.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoHCT2bUjwg
My views:
http://journal.dedasys.com/2014/12/29/people-places-and-jobs...
To keep with his basketball analogy, imagine a basketball league with a separate farm system. There is an unspoken agreement that the farm system will train basketball players and when the major league needs them the farm system will get a percentage of the players salary. Now the major league teams are using players that didn't go through the farm system, and are only playing garbage time (80% of H-1Bs are paid on the lower 2 tiers of the DOL pay scale).
So young people and families see that the farm system isn't really all that viable and so they either don't participate or chose a different sport all together. Ultimately the farm system dries up...
I also skimmed your views, and I'd like to address the straw man in your moral section. People that are against H-1B aren't trying to keep out other people. I'd prefer that if we do indeed have a shortage which requires special immigration visas that we have actual hard evidence of the shortage first and if the data shows it then to focus on encouraging employers and education institutions to train citizens first. If that can't be done, I'd rather we automatically give citizenship to those that we deem are vital to our economy instead of keeping them in immigration limbo that is the H-1B system.
You wouldn't know that from reading comments in places like HN.
Your point about citizenship (it could be a green card or a different visa, too) is a good one: by giving people with a work visa the freedom to move around, they're no longer beholden to one employer, and their wages will rise to the market rate.
Yes, but the majority of people against H-1B are not proposing or pushing a feasible alternative. Let me just state a short argument here: currently ,there is no simple way for a programmer being offered a $300k salary to immigrate to the US within a reasonable timeframe (let's say <6 months). EB-x will take years depending on your country of origin (and still takes 1-2years even without waiting, just for the processing time alone). Said programmer will not qualify for O-1 (O-1 requires specific types of achievement/ popularity). L-1 requires you to stay with the company abroad for at least a year.
Either way I'd rather not keep a broken system just because it works some of the time. 80% of H-1B use the lower 2 pay tiers, so your 300k programmer is an outlier when it comes to H-1B.
[0] http://www.dirkdekok.com/2013/08/my-o1-visa-story-and-how-it...
I think if most people around here agrees that Big Old Industries can be "disrupted", there is no reason to think that the same cannot happen to Big Old Geopolitics.
Not to say that Tyson's mom does not have her own nerds working in her own garage, but the scenario is probably more complex that what you made it out to be.
Another example of a still larger time-frame are geographical and ecological changes (multiples of 10,000 years)
IMHO, the GP's argument is relevant to time-frame of politics/policies in a few years/decades. Post 2nd world war and more so end of cold war era. Its US which rules the world, and so GP is quite right (found the Tyson example, hilarious).