Thread: Displacing American Workers w/o breaking the law

August 14, 2007

The Pearl Street Scam—Or How To Displace American Workers Without Quite Breaking The Law
By Rob Sanchez
http://www.vdare.com/

Several people in places like Detroit, Michigan got suspicious when employment ads in local newspapers requested that their resumes should be sent to a location in Dallas, Texas —on Pearl Street. Without exception the people who sent resumes to Pearl Street never got replies. It’s as if their resumes were being sucked into a black hole.

For several months, there were discussions on Dice.com and Indeed.com about the mystery of Pearl Street. Eventually several very clever people on those message threads pieced the puzzle together and figured out what was happening to their resumes. More importantly they cracked THE CODE. (Carrie’s Nation blog has a very good summary of the entire story.

Job ads that contained the Pearl St. mailing address aren’t hard to find. They are sometimes posted on the Department of Labor Job Bank and they often appear in newspaper classifieds for private companies. (NOTE: America's Job Bank is changing to America's Job Exchange. A couple of examples follow at the end of this article, and one of them was scanned from the San Luis Obispo Tribune. [PDF])

One thing that these job ads have in common: a job code at the end of each ad. Sometimes it’s very obvious because it’s preceded with the letters “ETAâ€

This ties in with the video that the Programmers Guild posted about how companies can avoid hiring Americans. That process was after they decided that the H-1B they hired instead of an American was a keeper, so they would sponsor him for a green card. In hiring an H-1B they usually don't have to post it where outside applicants can see the job, but for the process of turning the H-1B into a green card holder they do. Hence the fake ads.

We in the IT field caught heck from friends and relatives if we got laid off during the recent downturn. People would point to Monster and say, "Look at all these openings. How come you can't just find another job?" Actually, many of the ads were duplicate postings by different contingent staffing firms all competing to fill the same job. Then there were these plum jobs with tough requirements, and those of us who applied almost never got a response, even when the ad had everything but our picture. Nobody told us that the job was already filled, they were just going through this process.

Hi BR,
Tata* officials, who post to this website under the pretense of being "decent and hardworking" H-1B workers "just looking for a better life," will no doubt become infuriated about the linking to this article.

Visa Expansion of Non-immigrants

"Tech companies are overstating the scope of worker
shortages to maintain a steady supply of foreign-born employees
willing to work longer hours for lower wages."

``H-1B is indentured servitude,''

"Body shops,'' ...are at the heart of many of the charges of visa fraud and abuse.

`CONSULTANCY' PROCESS

Note: This describes how the H-1B earns half-salary and the other half goes to Tata. This refutes their false claims of earning the same as American workers. Why aren't they "falling on their swords" to praise Tata?

FAKE CREDENTIALS

Diplomas from existing or even nonexistent universities also can be arranged.

``It's a well-known fact that people in India will take two or three
classes in Java programming, then the body shop will create a resume
for them,''...``You will find that a lot of them don't have the work experience they
claim to have,'' he said. ``The body shop does it for them. They are
very good at glossing over resumes.''

DETECTING FRAUD [is] TOUGH

"21 percent of vocational resumes submitted
by visa applicants were fictitious and 29 percent more ``were either
probably or possibly fraudulent.''

COMMON Practice
...the practice of ``benching.'' This is when a body shop cannot find
immediate work for a ``consultant'' and leaves the worker essentially
to fend for himself...Workers who complain about being benched are frequently threatened
with being shipped back to India....it has become a routine part of the body-shop trade.

INDIAN CONSULTANTS PROFIT

...H- 1Bs being used at least in part to drum up business for foreign companies and their workers overseas.

Perhaps these are the Tata "officials" who post to this website from time to time.

*Not only Tata, but also Bangalore body shops such as, Satyam, Mastech, Syntel, Wiprospectramind, Infosys, Accenture

The whole article:
http://www.programmersguild.org/arch...00921fraud.htm

The 2004 H-1B PAYSCALE CHART itemized by employer
http://www.programmersguild.org/docs...aying_2004.htm

Thanks, and hats off to the Programmers Guild

Yes, both Rob Sanchez and Kim Berry keep outdoing themselves with expose after expose. To those who state that these guestworker visas are legal: what is not legal is fraud. From the pumped up resumes to the contracts behind closed doors, the whole process - as New Yorkers would say - stinks out loud. Proof that the visa program was misued - if a single American worker was displaced, as that was never the intent. In fact, hundreds of thousands have been, and incoming students are thinking twice about pursuing certain majors, such is the damage to what was once a strategic profession in which America held undisputed world leadership.

The internet is probably government's worst nightmare. It has provided millions of detectives who can monitor and track their actions. And then share their findings with the world. I remember a lesson from a physch 101 class. It was that to control people, you had to first control two things: money and information. Well the government still has control over the money but they can't do it covertly. However, they can no longer control information and it is bringing them down.

Very true, and I also remember how prevalent trolls became on our job hunter boards. It was very important to a lot of people, apparently, that we job seekers look no farther than the mirror to understand our predicament, that we not discuss, compare notes, and figure out what was going on.