Vincenzo Corleone
Full time employment: Posting here.
- Joined
- Jul 20, 2005
- Messages
- 617
There is also "in-shoring" for work that cannot be done offshore, in the form of bringing in overseas workers under various programs (such as the H1B Visa program) where they do not have to pay them as much. I have noticed a great rise in the number of nurses from overseas in the last 10 years. Companies are constantly lobbying for an increase in the H1B Visa program to bring in more tech workers form overseas. Many of these types of workers are then paid on a lower wage and benefit scale - paid as contractors and not as employees.
Many Megacorps claim they have openings and cannot find skilled workers for good paying paying jobs, while laying off many who have those skills or can quickly obtain them. I cannot help if this is just "smoke and mirrors" sometimes It strikes me more as a effort to lower the wages for some of these jobs.
+1
While lobbying Congress for more H-1B visas, industry claims H-1B workers are the "best and brightest". Come payday, however, they're entry-level workers.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) put out a report on the H-1B visa that discusses at some length the fact that the vast majority of H-1B workers are hired into entry-level positions. In fact, most are at "Level I", which is officially defined by the Dept. of Labor as those who have a “basic understanding of duties and perform routine tasks requiring limited judgment". Moreover, the GAO found that a mere 6% of H-1B workers are at "Level IV", which is officially defined by the Dept. of Labor as those who are "fully competent". This belies the industry lobbyists’ claims that H-1B workers are hired because they're experts that can’t be found among the U.S. workforce.
The wage rules for H-1B and green card sponsorship are broken down into Levels I, II, III and IV, with Level III being the median. For software developers, the most common type of foreign tech worker, the green card data show the following percentages of foreign workers at Levels I or II making below-median wages:
Amazon 91%
Facebook 91%
Google 96%
These firms, putatively in the vanguard of advanced technology and certainly in the vanguard in Capitol Hill lobbying regarding H-1B, are paying almost all of their foreign workers - supposedly, the "best and brightest" - wages below the median for the given region.
The game is not rigged? Yeah, right.