Thread: Expert: Gov’t Data Reveal Guest-Worker Firms ‘Abusing’ System to Displace U.S Workers

by Tony Lee
19 Feb 2015

The top two importers of foreign H-1B guest workers are gaming and abusing the guest-worker system to bring in temporary, disposable, and cheaper labor and may be violating the spirit of U.S. immigration and labor laws, according to government data obtained by a prominent Howard University public policy professor.

Ron Hira, one of the nation’s foremost experts on H-1B visas and guest workers, noted in his Thursday Economic Policy Institute report that Tata and Infosys, the “two India-based outsourcing companies,” are “major publicly traded companies with a combined market value of about $115 billion, and are the top two H-1B employers in the United States.” He obtained data through the Freedom of Information Act and found that in fiscal year 2013, “Infosys ranked first with 6,269 H-1B petitions approved by the government, and Tata ranked second with 6,193.”

Hira found that “the average wage for an H-1B employee at Infosys in FY13 was $70,882 and for Tata it was $65,565,” compared “to the average wage of a Computer Systems Analyst in Rosemead, CA (where SCE is located), which is $91,990 (according to the U.S. Department of Labor).” The savings at Southern California Edison, which has come under fire for replacing at least 400 workers with young and cheaper foreign H-1B workers, though, is much greater:

SCE recently commissioned a consulting firm, Aon-Hewitt, to conduct a compensation study, which showed that SCE’s IT specialists were earning an average annual base pay of $110,446. That means Tata and Infosys are getting a 36 to 41 percent savings on labor costs—or saving about $40,000 to $45,000 per worker per year.

H-1B employees generally are not even put on a path toward permanent residency, according to the data. Hira found that “Infosys only sponsored seven H-1B workers for permanent residence, and Tata sponsored ZERO H-1B workers, while the U.S. government approved 12,432 H-1B visa petitions for these two companies alone” in fiscal year 2013.”

“In other words, the H-1B workers Infosys and Tata hire are being used as temporary, cheaper, disposable labor, not as a way to permanently introduce talent and innovation into the American labor market,” Hira concludes.

Hira also found further evidence that the notion that H-1B guest workers are better qualified than Americans is specious. In fact, “the vast majority” of the H-1B workers Infosys and Tata import “hold no more than a Bachelor’s degree”:

If American workers are training their foreign replacements before they get laid off, then it is quite obvious that it’s the American trainers—not the H-1B trainees—who have the superior skills. Are H-1B workers being brought in because they have extensive formal training, like an advanced degree? The answer to that is a definitive no. The vast majority of Infosys and Tata’s imported H-1B workers hold no more than a Bachelor’s degree.

During the FY10-12 period, 78 percent of Tata’s and 85 percent of Infosys’s H-1B employees held only a Bachelor’s degree or less. Finally, there’s also no evidence that Tata and Infosys are using the H-1B to retain foreign students who studied and earned an advanced degree in the United States: Only 1-in-206 of Infosys’ H-1B workers held an advanced degree from a U.S. university, and even less of Tata’s H-1B workers did, just 1-in-222.

As Breitbart News has thoroughly documented, “despite evidence to the contrary, the tech industry has spent millions trying to get massive increases in the number of H-1b guest-worker visas, claiming that they ‘can’t find’ Americans to do various tech jobs” even though there is a proven surplus of America high-tech workers.

A Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) report, “using data from the American Community Survey (ACS) that the Census Bureau and the Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS) collect,” found that there is hardly a shortage of American tech workers. In fact, “there were 5.3 million immigrant and native-born STEM workers in 2012 compared to 12.1 million STEM degree holders among immigrants and native-born Americans.” In addition, “only a third of native-born Americans with a STEM degree actually has a job in a STEM occupation while at least 5 million native-born Americans with STEM undergraduate degrees are working in non-STEM occupations.”

The report also found that from 2007-2012, STEM employment averaged “averaged only 105,000 jobs annually.” And during that time, the number of U.S.-born STEM graduates grew by an average of 115,000 a year, and the “U.S. admitted about 129,000 immigrants with STEM degrees,” which means “the number of new immigrants with STEM degrees admitted each year [was] by itself higher than the total growth in STEM employment.” Numerous studies from left-of-center, nonpartisan, and right-of-center organizations have all concluded that the data do not support claims of a high-tech labor shortage.

Though Southern California Edison has claimed that H-1B workers “will lead to enhancements that deliver faster and more efficient tools and applications for services that customers rely on” and that “through outsourcing, SCE’s information technology organization will adopt a proven business strategy commonly and successfully used by top U.S. companies that SCE benchmarks against,” the employees ComputerWorld interviewed have said the H1-B workers “do not have the skill levels of the people they are replacing.”

“They are bringing in people with a couple of years’ experience to replace us and then we have to train them,” a longtime IT worker told ComputerWorld. “It’s demoralizing and in a way I kind of felt betrayed by the company.” The Southern California Edison employees were “beyond furious” because “not one of these jobs being filled by India was a job that an Edison employee wasn’t already performing.” And, that, according to Hira could violate U.S. immigration and labor laws.

As ComputerWorld noted:

Hira pointed out that as a part of the application process to obtain H-1B approval from the Labor Department, an employer is required to attest to the following: “Working Conditions: The employer attests that H-1B, H-1B1 or E-3 foreign workers in the named occupation will not adversely affect the working conditions of workers similarly employed.” This statement is in Form 9035CP of the LCA.Further, Hira noted that the Labor Department states, “The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) requires that the hiring of a foreign worker will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of U.S. workers comparably employed.

“The SCE case is clearly one where the hiring of the H-1B is adversely affecting the wages and working conditions of American workers,” Hira told ComputerWorld. “There isn’t a clearer cut case of adverse impacts – the American worker is losing his job to an H-1B.”

In an open letter to Secretary of Labor Tom Perez and Wage and Hour Administrator David Weil this week about Southern California Edison’s layoffs, Ross Eisenbrey, the Vice President of the Economic Policy Institute, called for Perez to conduct a thorough investigation of Southern California Edison’s H-1B practices.

“I hope that we will soon learn that the Department of Labor intends to investigate and remedy this harm to skilled U.S. workers who have pursued education and training in a technical field, worked hard, and played by the rules,” he added. “Our government should, at the very least, ensure that its programs, including its visa programs, are not used to destroy the careers and financial security of its people.”

Eisenbrey reminded Perez that “the law (the Immigration and Nationality Act) forbids the hiring of H-1B temporary foreign guestworkers whose employment would ‘adversely affect the wages and working conditions of U.S. workers comparably employed.'”

“Clearly, taking away the jobs, wages and benefits of the laid-off SCE employees does adversely affect their wages and working conditions,” Eisenbrey said. “You have authority under the Immigration and Nationality Act to investigate this case, but I have seen no announcement that you intend to do so or that you share my sense of outrage that the H-1B program is being abused in such an egregious way.”

He mentioned that, as his colleague Hira has written, “adding to the injustice, American workers losing their jobs are being forced to do ‘knowledge transfers,’ an ugly euphemism that means being forced to train your own foreign replacement.”

In addition, Hira noted that “Infosys and Tata have a history of getting in trouble for paying even lower wages than they are already legally allowed to pay. In 2013 Tata paid $30 million to settle a wage theft dispute involving 13,000 foreign workers, and Infosys paid a record $34 million to settle a visa fraud case after it committed “systemic visa fraud and abuse of immigration processes.” He concluded that, “as a general principle, companies that behave like this should not be allowed to benefit from the U.S. temporary foreign worker programs, much less be the top two beneficiaries of them.”

“If the investigation finds willful violations of the H-1B program, Tata and Infosys should be debarred from using the program,” Hira wrote.

Hira, as Breitbart News has reported, previously emphasized that the IT sector has traditionally been an “area of social mobility” where “people who come from working-class backgrounds” move up the economic ladder after going “into these sectors.” Proving Hira’s point, one Southern California Edison employee who was laid off may have trouble keeping his home.
Last year, Vice President Joe Biden emphasized the importance of good-paying tech jobs in helping Americans move up the economic ladder, especially for women from, in Biden’s words, “from the ‘hood.”

“These were people with high school degrees coming out of the most hard-scrabbled neighborhoods, every one of them in Detroit,” Biden said. “Every one had a job. The lowest starting salary $58,000. The highest, [$81.000], because in Detroit, there is an immediate need now for 1,000 programmers… Every one of those women has a job… average job $65,000 a year.”

Even President Barack Obama, who “could not claim legal authority to award the tech industry more H-1B visas,” has said he becomes “skeptical” when companies claim they need more guest workers.

“I’m generally skeptical when you hear employers say, ‘oh we just can’t find any Americans to do the job,’” Obama said at an immigration event in Nashville shortly after enacting his executive amnesty. “A lot of times what they really mean is that it’s a lot cheaper to potentially hire somebody who has just come here before they know better…”

But massive increases in H-1B workers is the crown jewel for the tech industry in any immigration bill. Groups like Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us have spent millions trying to get increases in guest-worker visas while tech titans like Bill Gates have pushed for more guest workers even while Microsoft announced it was laying off 18,000 American workers.

Top GOP leaders in the Senate and House, though, have indicated they want to move forward with legislation that will massively increase H-1b visas in this Congress. As Breitbart News noted, lawmakers are hoping to use a bipartisan guest-worker bill that benefits the tech industry as a “gateway” to a broader and more comprehensive immigration bill.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-governm...e-u-s-workers/

Top GOP leaders in the Senate and House, though, have indicated they want to move forward with legislation that will massively increase H-1b visas in this Congress. As Breitbart News noted, lawmakers are hoping to use a bipartisan guest-worker bill that benefits the tech industry as a “gateway” to a broader and more comprehensive immigration bill.

Not if they hope to win another Republican primary. This was past, I don't believe that's the case today. Opinions in Congress are "reforming" quickly as new information is revealed and Americans express their views, and rightly so. Keep the pressure on fellow Americans. No more immigration, we want a pause say the polls, which means we want Congress to pass a bill that stops all new immigration for at least 10 years.

Patriots must hammer away at the jobs issue.

The truth is that illegals and legal immigrants really are displacing Americans. We had a recent thread re the displaced Southern California Edison workers actually having to train their replacements. So much of the unique skill set supposedly brought to the United States.

Patriots are lucky that Americans - including Hispanic Americans - are catching on to how their jobs and the jobs of their children and grandchildren are being given to foreigners. If the Repub leadership wants to try to pull the wool over Americans' eyes, it's up to us to expose them.
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Americans first in this magnificent country

American jobs for American workers

Fair trade, not free trade

Originally Posted by Jean

The top two importers of foreign H-1B guest workers are gaming and abusing the guest-worker system to bring in temporary, disposable, and cheaper labor and may be violating the spirit of U.S. immigration and labor laws, according to government data obtained by a prominent Howard University public policy professor.

Almost from the inauguration of the H-1B farce, employers have been using cheaper foreigners as a way to lower their costs - including, of course, pensions and health benefits. The cheaper imports are, in general, not bringing any unique skills to the United States, nor are they bringing skills which Americans could not quickly develop.

It's all about money. Owners are dumping Americans, to get those cheaper imports. Closet Republicans, such as Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, are only too happy to accommodate employers who want to dump Americans.
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Americans first in this magnificent country

American jobs for American workers

Fair trade, not free trade

Originally Posted by vistalad

Patriots must hammer away at the jobs issue.

The truth is that illegals and legal immigrants really are displacing Americans. We had a recent thread re the displaced Southern California Edison workers actually having to train their replacements. So much of the unique skill set supposedly brought to the United States.

Patriots are lucky that Americans - including Hispanic Americans - are catching on to how their jobs and the jobs of their children and grandchildren are being given to foreigners. If the Repub leadership wants to try to pull the wool over Americans' eyes, it's up to us to expose them.
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Americans first in this magnificent country

American jobs for American workers

Fair trade, not free trade

Indeed it is. And united we can do this and do it very well. Once everyone is working to save America from the ravages of illegal immigration and excess legal immigration, the message is clear, concise, simple, irrefutable and indisputable. This is like a prize fight, when the loser is cornered with nowhere to go, no way out, just waiting for the clock to ring or to go down and listen to the count. This is where we want every politician on the take with the cartels behind this travesty to be, cornered like the rats they are with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

February 20, 2015
Michael Hiltzik
Los Angeles Times

Imagine getting a layoff notice, then being ordered to train your replacement.

That's what has happened to hundreds of information technology employees at Southern California Edison. Since last summer, Edison, which serves nearly 14 million customers, has been firing its domestic IT workers and replacing them with outsourced employees from India.

In doing so, the utility is exploiting a gaping loophole in immigration law, which Congress has failed to close despite years of warnings that it's costing thousands of American jobs.

The Indian workers are brought in on H-1B visas, which are temporary work permits for "specialty occupations" — those requiring "highly specialized knowledge" and a bachelor's degree.

The purpose is to allow employers to fill slots for which adequately trained Americans aren't available, not to replace existing workers with cheap foreign labor. That's why employers such as Google and Microsoft, which say they're short of highly trained software engineers, have lobbied hard to expand the program beyond the 65,000 visas available annually. These high-tech companies say they can't meet their needs from the pool of U.S. graduates in STEM specialties — science, technology, engineering and math.

But Edison is using the program for a different purpose — to cut its wage costs, possibly by as much as 40%, according to data compiled by Ron Hira, a public policy expert at Howard University.

The pay for Edison's domestic IT specialists is about $80,000 to $160,000 not including benefits, with the average at about $120,000 for experienced personnel, according to records Edison submitted to the state Public Utilities Commission. The two Indian outsourcing firms providing workers to Edison, Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys, pay their recruits an average of about $65,000 to $71,000, according to their federal filings.

"They told us they could replace one of us with three, four, or five Indian personnel and still save money," one laid-off Edison worker told me, recounting a group meeting with supervisors last year. "They said, 'We can get four Indian guys for cheaper than the price of you.' You could hear a pin drop in the room."

This worker and the half-dozen others I interviewed asked to remain anonymous because their severance packages forbid them to speak disparagingly about the company.

These employees perform the crucial work of installing, maintaining and managing Edison's computer hardware and software for functions as varied as payroll and billing, dispatching and electrical load management across Edison's vast power generating and electric transmission network. The workers I interviewed are in their 50s or 60s and have spent decades serving as loyal Edison employees.

They're not the sort of uniquely creative engineering aces that high-tech companies say they need H-1B visas to hire from abroad, or foreign students with master's degrees or doctorates from U.S. universities who also can be employed under the H-1B program. They're experienced systems analysts and technicians for whom these jobs have been stairways from the working class to five- or six-figure middle-class incomes. Many got their training at technical institutes or from Edison itself.

Some laid-off Edison employees say the transition is not going well.

Some report that Tata was unable to recruit enough workers in time to replace — or get training from — the domestic workers ushered out the door. Edison delayed some layoffs scheduled for November and December until as late as March. Sources say the utility may now even be considering recalling some laid-off employees to fill the gaps.

Meanwhile, important IT projects have been delayed and complaints from Edison offices about poor tech support are rising, according to some workers and sources at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which represents thousands of Edison employees (though not the laid-off IT workers).

Edison acknowledges that the transition "has not been seamless but it is also not complete." The firm says the outsourcing will be completed early this year, and that once the transition reaches "a mature state," its IT operating costs will fall 20%.

Thus far, the PUC's interest in this affair has been to demand that any savings get passed on to ratepayers. The commission should be more concerned about potential problems: The consequences a botched transition could have for Edison's service and emergency response could be dire.

Edison has been less than forthright about the outsourcing, which it says will cost the jobs of 500 IT employees — 400 laid off and an additional 100 "leaving voluntarily."

Edison relies on a loophole to skate around rules forbidding the use of cheap H-1B labor to replace existing domestic employees. Technically, Edison isn't the H-1B employer; Tata and Infosys are. This sleight of hand allows Edison to say, as it told The Times, that it is "not hiring H-1B visa workers to replace displaced employees." The contractors, Tata and Infosys, are doing the hiring. Edison says those firms "determine the composition of their own workforce." Because the outsourcing firms employ minimal American staffs themselves, the thousands of Indian workers they import aren't technically replacing Americans.

What's even more disgraceful is how Tata and Infosys are alleged to treat their employees. In 2013, Tata paid $29.8 million to settle a federal class action brought by 12,800 outsource workers. The employees alleged that Tata cheated them of wages they were due and forced them to sign over their U.S. tax refund checks to the firm. Tata didn't admit wrongdoing.

The same year, Infosys paid $34 million — a record penalty in an immigration case — to settle federal charges that it had systematically defrauded immigration authorities.

Infosys told Edison the settlement was related to "paperwork administrative issues."

The Department of Justice put it differently. When federal prosecutors announced the settlement, they specified that Infosys was alleged to have deliberately submitted falsified documents to U.S. immigration authorities, and even instructed visa holders how to deceive consular officials. Infosys denied wrongdoing.

Tata and Infosys declined to comment.

It has long been an open secret that the H-1B program has gone off the rails.

"The reality is that what's going on at Southern California Edison is the most common usage," Hira says. Last year, for instance, Minnesota-based agribusiness behemoth Cargill said it would outsource as many as 900 IT jobs to Tata.

Tata and Infosys have become two of the largest recipients of H-1B visas, receiving more than 12,400 new visas in fiscal 2013. A report last year from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston observed that a majority of firms requesting and receiving H-1B visas "specialize in offshore outsourcing and rarely sponsor H-1B workers for permanent residency."

That conforms to Hira's findings that Tata filed only seven applications for permanent residency in fiscal 2013 despite receiving 6,163 H-1B visas; Infosys received 6,269 visas and filed no applications for permanent residency.

The H-1B system turns the Indian workers virtually into indentured servants, Hira says. The visas are held in the employer's name, and are canceled if the worker loses the job. That gives the employer immense power to keep its workforce docile. "If you speak out, they'll terminate you and you'll have to leave the country," Hira says.

The H-1B program has turned into a scam for outsourcing firms and their U.S. clients. Congress must fix it so it serves its original purpose. Instead, a measure introduced by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) would increase the number of available H-1B visas to 115,000 per year. Democrats Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), whose state is home to Cargill, and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, where Northeast Utilities announced plans last year to outsource some 200 IT jobs, have signed on as co-sponsors. But critics say the bill would do almost nothing to stem the abuses.

Some pushback is coming from legislators such as Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.); Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa); and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.).

Sessions asked, in a "primer" for his GOP colleagues last month, why Congress should ever consider "advancing legislation that provides jobs for the citizens of other countries at the expense of our own."

As it stands now, the H-1B program works chiefly for employers looking for new ways to fire older, experienced workers. One laid-off Edison worker put it best: "When you are referred to as a commodity or a cost, not even treated as a human being, it's pretty degrading."

http://www.latimes.com/business/hilt...mn.html#page=2

It's just outrageous. Congress needs to pass a bill that puts a lid on all new immigration for at least 10 years. When public utilities, probably the last of the once great companies that used to play by the rules, used to set good standards for operation, quality, reliability and did so through the highly trained, dedicated and well paid work force, and were essentially the companies everyone wanted to work for, start playing the cheap imported labor game, then you can count on our whole country of companies turning into low standard, low quality, no reliability crap houses. And don't count on any security with your private personal information you give to them to establish utility service or work for them. Oh no, those SS numbers, home addresses, birth dates, telephone numbers, addresses, all that information the utilities have on all their customers, from the now Indian run billing and payroll departments went straight to hackers and the highest bidder.

These employees perform the crucial work of installing, maintaining and managing Edison's computer hardware and software for functions as varied as payroll and billing, dispatching and electrical load management across Edison's vast power generating and electric transmission network. The workers I interviewed are in their 50s or 60s and have spent decades serving as loyal Edison employees.

And the California Utility Commission needs to look seriously at those approved rates, now that the utility has cut its wage costs by .... 40%.

But Edison is using the program for a different purpose — to cut its wage costs, possibly by as much as 40%, according to data compiled by Ron Hira, a public policy expert at Howard University.

And if an employer told me the following, I would tell him/her/they, I wonder how many they can replace you with, 8?

"They told us they could replace one of us with three, four, or five Indian personnel and still save money," one laid-off Edison worker told me, recounting a group meeting with supervisors last year. "They said, 'We can get four Indian guys for cheaper than the price of you.' You could hear a pin drop in the room."

So, tell DHS that their big "cybersecurity" program is just another waste of taxpayer money, and cut it from the budget, because if DHS is approving H1B visas for foreign workers hired through a Tata and Inforsystem network, with no individual hiring process, to run our utility plants including specifically software and hardware engineering and installations, then they've already let the cat out of the bag on the security of our computer systems in the United States and no amount of government spending on "cybersecurity" will make one bit of difference. Hell, the government probably plans to hire H1B visa workers from Tata/Infosys to fill those slots.

Which raises the question, I wonder how many employees of USCIS are American citizens and how many are not?

In any event, we're being meticulously imperiled by this madness. It's why nothing makes sense any more. Nothing works and functions the way it used to. It's all related to, a consequence of, or a direct cause from hiring foreign imported workers who may have some skills in some areas, but they don't know our protocols, hold our high standards, or have any allegiance to our customers.

I thought we were on our way to becoming the World's Largest Banana Republic. But, I was wrong. We've become the World's Richest Shit Hole.