The H1B visa program that allows US employers to import foreign skilled workers on a temporary basis has long been the center of considerable controversy. Its stated purpose is to provide workers with specific skills that can't be recruited from the American workforce. The two requirements for filling a US based job with an H1B holder are that there is no qualified US worker available and that they will be paid the prevailing US wage for the work. Many people dispute the claims that these conditions are being met. It has always been very difficult to get any hard independent data on what is actually going on. Industry has been unwilling to divulge recruitment and payroll data and the US government has never appeared very interested in auditing their records. Now The Center For Investigative Reporting has released a detailed report that sheds some light on what is happening to the workers who are filling jobs under this program.
Job brokers steal wages and entrap Indian tech workers in US
Labor brokers providing Indian high-tech workers to American companies have hijacked a professional visa program, creating an underground system of financial bondage by stealing wages and benefits, even suing workers who quit.
About 840,000 people from around the world work in the United States on temporary visas, intended to help companies seek uniquely talented employees for specific jobs. In the tech realm, labor brokers often sponsor the visas, then contract out the workers to technology companies or government agencies to build databases, test software and complete other technical projects.
For decades, critics have sounded alarms about immigrant tech workers being treated as indentured servants by the worst of these staffing firms, known as “body shops.” In a yearlong investigation, The Center for Investigative Reporting has documented why this exploitation persists – through humiliation, intimidation and legal threats. Judgments against Indian workers sued for quitting their US jobs can exceed $50,000.
From 2000 through 2013, at least $29.7m was illegally withheld from about 4,400 tech workers here on H-1B visas, US Department of Labor documents show. And this barely hints at the problem because, in the hidden world of body shops, bad actors rarely are caught.
No federal clearinghouse logs labor brokers’ punitive lawsuits against employees, often filed in far-flung courthouses. But by running the Labor Department violators’ names through court dockets in tech hubs across the country, CIR unearthed a sample of 100 cases in which companies have sued workers for actions as commonplace as changing jobs.
Much of what this is about is the ability of an H1B worker to change jobs after coming to the US. The contracting agencies use the threat of law suits to keep them tied to them. There is a provision in the pending immigration reform legislation to eliminate labor brokers from the H1B program. The bill has been effectively quashed by the Republican controlled house.
US employers prefer to deal with staffing firms for both domestic and foreign labor. It is a means of outsourcing not only the cost of running a human resources department but also of shifting employer liability onto a third party. This is apparently what is happening with the H1B program. The large Tech companies such as Cisco and Apple are not directly paying the workers. They are purchasing service from the brokers. This provides them with a device to dodge the requirement that H1B jobs must be paid prevailing wages. Meanwhile the stated contract wages are often below market rate to begin with and what workers actually receive is even lower.
This report documents a number of specific complaints against labor brokers and the general pattern of efforts by the US Dept. of Labor to avoid investigations. I strongly urge people who are interested in the issue to read the whole thing.
When you look at the issue of diversity of employment in the tech industry, the statistics reflect glaring deficiencies in terms of race and gender. The big exception to this is the presence of a large number of Asian men. The response of the tech companies to diversity criticism is to point to this group and claim that it isn't a matter of race but of qualifications. The reality is that a large portion of the Asian men working in US tech jobs are not prosperous middle class professionals but people who are being exploited in what amounts to indentured servitude. American workers who have been frozen out of the tech industry certainly have legitimate complaints. It also appears that the foreign workers who are their instead are being seriously exploited.
The politics of the H1B program have always been highly devious. The tech industry has long lined the campaign coffers of politicians of both parties. Sen Feinstein is a leading advocate of the program. Most of the people who have been critical of it are disgruntled tech workers with no strong organization to back them up. There is growing pressure for diversity in tech employment. That movement needs to direct its attention to the H1B program and its manifold abuses.