Congressional hearing sees opposition to H-1B visa program.
AB Wire
A displaced Disney World worker who was fired and then had to train his replacement worker on an H-1B visa, as well as IT experts, criticized the H-1b visa program in testimony before Congress Thursday.
“We know exactly what will happen if Congress and the Obama Administration fail to act — tens of thousands more American workers will be training their cheaper guest worker replacements,” Ron Hira, a professor at Howard University, said in testimony prepared for a hearing held by the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and The National Interest, reported the Daily Caller.
The H-1B program allows businesses to hire 85,000 foreign workers annually.
Hira and other critics of the H-1b program contended Thursday companies are using the program to displace American workers with cheaper foreign workers, and that Disney-style layoffs are happening all over the country.
Like Disney, Southern California Edison, Fossil Group, and others have recently laid off swaths of IT workers, and then contracted with outsourcing firms that rely heavily on H-1b workers to replace them, in some cases forcing the laid off workers to train their foreign replacements, reported the Caller.
Among a shocking review of evidences that there is no shortage of American IT workers, Rutgers University Professor Hal Salzman noted in his prepared testimony for Congress:
- Only about half of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) graduates enter the STEM workforce each year.
- Only about a third of all STEM graduates are working in STEM jobs.
- The average number of workers businesses have laid off on average each year (176,000) since 2000 is more than double the number of H-1b visas handed out each year (74,000).
The tech industry continues to spend nearly $15 million lobbying lawmakers in Washington each month.
“There should be a complete, unequivocal ban on replacing Americans with foreign workers,” John Miano, an attorney at the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, said in his prepared testimony. “There is no shortage of Americans (or any other nationality) with average or below average skill.”
Leo Perrero, one of the laid off Disney workers, in his testimony, said: “We now have American IT workers being displaced by both H-1B visa holders, who are physically being flown in from foreign countries, as well as the growing use of foreign remote offshore workers. We are seeing a massive drain on job opportunities here on our own soil.”
4 Comments
There are many more companies abusing the H-1B visa program, bringing in cheap unskilled or partially skilled workers and having the existing US workers train them how to do their jobs before being kicked out the door. AT&T and Verizon alone have done this to thousands of their employees. I know this from first hand experience. Many more jobs are simply done by offshore people, also trained by the existing US workers before being ‘let go’. Leo Perrero was stating the truth. Just go by an AT&T or Verizon IT datacenter and see who shows up in the morning or leaves in the afternoon. Some of the locations have nearly all males from India. EEO laws do not apply to these people. WHY? It is shameful what the top execs will do to line their own pockets. These companies don’t need to do this, they make billions in profits each year. It is simply corporate greed. These foreigners are NOT taking US jobs because of their skill. They are given our jobs because they work for a fraction of the cost. You still get what you pay for. Most of these foreign workers (that I have to deal with on a daily basis) do not have the skills required to do the job effectively. If they do not have a script or detailed step by step instructions (written by US workers) they are lost. Corporate America used to have phrases like ‘raise the bar’ and ‘continuous improvement’. Somewhere along the way an accountant convinced an executive it is better to see how far they can ‘lower the bar’ and get away with it.
In addition, O’Neill, said the following in his submitted testimony is at http://www.judiciary.senate.gov/download/02-25-16-oneill-testimony :
> Competition is so fierce that my developer starting salaries have risen by over 50% in the last eight years, and senior positions command compensation that meets or exceeds even that of United States Senators.
This made me curious as to how many H-1B workers JackThreads was hiring and what they were paying them. You can see this information by going to the app at https://labor.shinyapps.io/lca1/ and typing JACKTHREADS in the “Search EMPLOYER_NAME” box. Following is the output:
[1] “H-1B DISCLOSURE DATA, OCT 2014 – DEC 2015”
[1] “(EMPLOYER_NAME=JACKTHREADS)”
[1] “”
[1] “SUM(TOTAL.WORKERS) = 2”
[1] “NUMBER OF ROWS = 2”
[1] “MEDIAN(LOW_WAGE) = 135,000”
[1] “MEAN(LOW_WAGE) = 135,000”
[1] “”
CASE_STATUS EMPLOYER_NAME JOB_TITLE WORKERS WAGE_RATE_OF_PAY WAGE_PW WORKSITE_CITY STATE
1 CERTIFIED JACKTHREADS, INC. IOS DEVELOPER 1 130,000.00 – 1.17 NEW YORK NY
2 CERTIFIED JACKTHREADS, INC. IOS DEVELOPER 1 140,000.00 – 1.26 NEW YORK NY
As you can see, JackThreads have submitted applications to hire just two H-1B workers in the last year and a quarter. They did offer to pay them reasonable salaries of 130K and 140K. The WAGE_PW values indicate that this was 1.17 and 1.26 times the so-called “prevailing wage”. Still, this is for the very expensive work area of New York City and is less than the 174K of U.S. Senators (see http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing/senate_salaries.htm ). Of course, by “senior positions”, O’Neill may have meant upper managers or executives for whom such a salary would be no surprise. Or it may even refer to some of their top technical talent. But it does NOT refer to his recent H-1B hires.
In any event, I did wonder why O’Neill was the industry representative called to testify when he has relatively little recent experience with H-1Bs. My guess, is that he was cherry-picked, possibly based on the LCA data, since his company’s data does not reveal any obvious abuse of the program. On the other hand, note the page that comes initially comes up at https://labor.shinyapps.io/lca1/ . As can be seen, the 11th through the 40th applications requesting the most workers comes from Apple Inc., all for 150 workers each to work in Cupertino, California. Those are likely to fill the new headquarters building (described as a giant spaceship, by some) that they are currently building. If you type CERTIFIED, APPLE, and CUPERTINO into the first 3 search boxes, you get the following totals:
[1] “H-1B DISCLOSURE DATA, OCT 2014 – DEC 2015”
[1] “(CASE_STATUS=CERTIFIED, EMPLOYER_NAME=APPLE, WORKSITE_CITY=CUPERTINO)”
[1] “”
[1] “SUM(TOTAL.WORKERS) = 21,985”
[1] “NUMBER OF ROWS = 1,616”
[1] “MEDIAN(LOW_WAGE) = 124,700”
[1] “MEAN(LOW_WAGE) = 124,388”
That’s 1,616 applications requesting nearly 22 thousand H-1B workers!
They do alot more then that. They force people who get injuried to quit The leaders hate Jews and treat them like dirt forcing them to quit. the VISA is just the icing on the cake.
The CTO of Jack Threads, Mark O’Neil, is asked by Senator Schumer, what kind of talent are you currently looking for?
O’Neil – “But we still have difficulty in attracting people, so the method we use, I’m going to meet up go around traveling the country to college career fairs…”
Schumer “What are the skill that you’re short of in your business Mr…?”
O’Neil: So the skills that I’m looking for, I am looking for talented developers who know javascript who know PHP who know Ruby who can code on the Apple or the Android platform those are the primary platforms that generate all of our revenue at Jack Threads, we have no physical store though the only store that we have is what we build electronically so its very important that we handle our client’s money correctly and that the right pants get in the right box and get to the right house and all that is complicated so we are seeking engineers that have those skill and are able to come on and join our team and you have a rough time finding them we have an extremely difficult time finding them we’ve had roles that are open for months at a stretch I know…
——- end (under oath) testimony snippet by Mr. Mark O’Neil ——
And then I checked the “Jack Threads” website for what jobs they actually have advertized (supposedly he needs them, according to his under oath testimony), and what struck me about the Senate testimony of Mark O’Neil, CTO of Jack Threads, when asked about what his current needs are:
Director, CRM and Loyalty
Merchant, Menswear
Not a single job post for engineers, nothing. How on Earth can this guy get up and lie to the Senate, and no one challenge him?
Why is it, whenever Industry or the Chamber of Commerce puts one of these lying shills up before Congress, they tell the damn lie?