Uncle Sam sues Facebook for allegedly discriminating against US workers in favor of foreigners on H-1B visas The US Department of Justice on Thursday filed a lawsuit against Facebook for allegedly unlawfully discriminating against US workers. In a statement announcing the legal action, US Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband of the Civil Rights Division, charged Facebook with illegally setting aside positions for temporary visa …
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I think the correct expression is "those who are not in a position to refuse being paid a lot less than their native colleagues". That they accept it doesn't mean it's acceptable - these people are exploited because back home they'd earn even less.
Then again, decency and civility seem to be incompatible with mega dollar setups.
"Foreigner is a British-American rock band, originally formed in New York City in 1976 by veteran British guitarist and songwriter Mick Jones, and fellow Briton and ex-King Crimson member Ian McDonald, along with American vocalist Lou Gramm. "
I couldn't help it.
"Don't the DOJ understand capitalism?"
Indeed. It's difficult to understand how a system can shovel shit onto your plate each meal then complain your breath smells.
I suspect it might be the classic "Capitalism is only correct when it's done my way with my standards and exceptions." Which is pretty American now that I think about it, so maybe your title is wrong?
Well, capitalism without any form of moderation or oversight /will/ eventually devolve into monopoly. This is hardly news. Periodically leveling the playing field is a good thing. The problem, of course, is that once the monopolies have enough leverage to control the government, this "leveling" is performed deliberately badly.
In the US these days, frequent manipulations of the playing field are performed, and sold to us as being a leveling of the field, but are almost always for the benefit of the monopolists.
"In the US these days, frequent manipulations of the playing field are performed, and sold to us as being a leveling of the field, but are almost always for the benefit of the monopolists."
That's just being better at capitalism, as I understand it. I'm pretty sure most people are impressed by Kirk's explanation of how he beat the Kobayashi Maru exercise.
Sorry, done on a tablet and I never get on with the keyboards on those things. Although I could claim an ironic statement?
Let me try again, on a proper keyboard, and with more time.
In the times when I have worked in the State's, for an American tech firm, the number of foreign employees greatly outnumbered home grown talent, EXCEPT in management which was a different split altogether. I still think the education system is to blame; Indian and Chinese systems really seem to produce people targeted at these tech firms, whereas the homegrown US system appears to be producing flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers and religious nutjobs. And management.
Yup, defo. autocorrect! State's. I mean, really. I should know better.
I should also have added that the UK education system also seem to be producing its unfair share of anti-science people, as shown by the number of people who don't want a COVD vaccine, and are willing to risk death or long term impairment rather than have what is a tested vaccine.
One thing that sure as fuck the UK system does not produce¹ is people qualified to work on IT. They'd much rather churn out MS Office users.
There are some brilliant IT success stories in the UK (ARM, RPi, etc.) but see footnote. Also some good developers, but that thanks to their own efforts not an education system conducive to achieving a consistently good result.
¹ Oxbridge being the exception, but not everyone can attend Oxbridge and those who do are not very likely to end up in lowly technical positions.
Quote:
Oxbridge being the exception, but not everyone can attend Oxbridge and those who do are not very likely to end up in lowly technical positions.
Yes Oxbridge churns out a very different kind of person.
Just look at the current government for prime examples of oxbridge education....... also the previous government............... and the one before that........... and the one before that ............ and the one before that....... and the one before that.... hmmm I'm beginning to see a pattern here...
Wheres the lying 2 faced self obsessed scumbag icon ?
> Just look at the current government for prime examples of oxbridge education
Yeah OK, but let's be fair. Along with those we also get brilliant engineers, scientists, authors and so on. Some of them become famous, others keep a relatively low profile but still excel in their professions.
And yes, it is sad that lots of people attend those universities only for the reputation and social cred aspect of it.
Bait? The education system in the U.S is not monolithic. Quality and funding very by region and whether the school is public or private. Also before Trump with his xenophobic policies and COVID-19 U.S university received quite a bit of interest from foreign students in various fields.
Of course being able to pay them less probably didn't hurt when it comes to H1-B hires. The system has been abused for awhile.
The US educational system is very good but emphasizes passing tests by knowing answers, not knowing how to do things.
To be called an "service engineer" in the US you have to have a degree, but you don't need the ability to fix anything, or discover what the problem was that cause you to have to fix the it. I'm not an "engineer" in the US but I've spent most of my life fixing problems for PhDs and MS engineers. They screw up and I fix it and show them what they did wrong but I'm just an employee.
Many years ago, when I was working for a Very Large company, the senior development managers used to go out on those college recruitment visits to US colleges. I was talking to one of these managers after she returned from such a trip and she reported that it was very depressing. Nobody was interested in doing the down and dirty backroom server development stuff our company did.
"Nobody was interested in doing the down and dirty backroom server development stuff our company did."
Nope, they want to step directly into a healthy 6 figure lead IT position with lots of bennies and perks. Shortly the words they use the most are "would you like fries with that?" because the loan company that funded their education wants paying. With penalties and fees added to their loan, they can't afford to take that backend job and make ends meet anymore. Well, they can't in NYC or SF where they are looking.
> I'm not an "engineer" in the US
Are you an engineer anywhere else in the galaxy?
> but I've spent most of my life fixing problems for PhDs and MS engineers
So you're a technician. And what's the problem with that? If you want to be called an engineer do your degree, get your experience and pass the relevant State examination (if your country has one), then you can call yourself an engineer. In Germany you even get an "Ing." as part of your official name and when addressing you, people other than friends and family will call you Herr Ingenieur, lest anyone present have any doubt as to your academic achievements.
I'm an IT generalist. I have an honorific 'Engineer' in my job title, but I in know way think it I'm a REAL engineer. Those guys are nuts smart. :) But, I'm pretty competent in my work and have made a nice living managing back end systems.
Nothing wrong with being called a technician. I often have fun with the problem solving approach differences with my son, who is one of those very smart engineering types finishing up his aerospace/astronautics bachelors degree. The approach to problem solving is quite different between the two types and leads to some fun and engaging conversations about how things are done and why.
" Indian and Chinese systems really seem to produce people targeted at these tech firms"
It sorta is now since the cost of a degree in the US is much higher than India or China and the wages have been driven down by H1-B slave labor.
If you are a H1-B worker, you keep your head down. No union talk, no political activism, no strikes against the company for taking on dodgy government contracts. If you get sacked, your visa is only good long enough for you to catch the next flight back home. There is no "take this job and shovel it" and sending out resumés the next day. Since you'll be breaking the lease on your flat, you aren't getting your deposit back either. Even if the company is paying a reasonable wage, that they have you under their thumb is a big bonus for them.
I graduated as an electrical engineer in 1995 as one of hundreds. At least 80% of my class were very good. We were one of the last years where there were good employment opportunities.
Since then, the practice of bringing in cheaper labor from another country has filled much of the demand for technical skills. Local STEM graduates now have difficulty finding work when they graduate, even though there are fewer graduates these days. So in Western countries few students enrol to study STEM because it is hard, expensive and has much more limited career prospects than it used to.
I have hired and managed cheaper labor foreign contractors and local IT graduates. I am still amazed at how good the local graduates are and am more than happy to give them that first opportunity to get into the job market. The technical education levels of Indian Universities is noticeably lower in my experience.
The US educational system is very complex as the most local form of democracy is school boards. The actual outcomes however are dramatically to the contrary of what your sneering and grossly uninformed comment portrays.
The big city systems are almost entirely the product of one-party far-left rule. They are barely even educational, team sports are more what they are about underneath jobs/patronage/political pay-off schemes. They feature massive administrative overhead full of political operatives who are very comfortable with a system that produces legions of ignorant followers who are easily mobbed up.
The "red" states you would presume to be full of "flat earthers" etc. are where you will find the best outcomes, usually at a dramatic discount to what the big metros produce. Utah for instance gets outstanding results while the Washington DC system spends triple the national average while getting the worst NAEP scores in the country. Baltimore nearby spends double and does no better.
For anyone who wishes to get down in the weeds of how this happens, you can't find much MSM coverage, independent sites cover the "untold stories" like the one about the famous math teacher Jaime Escalante
http://www.endteacherabuse.org/Escalante.html
or go on Youtube and watch the video where Morley Safer of "60 Minutes" fled to Chicago do a story about Marva Collins who got top-notch results while spending HALF of what the politicians who run the Chicago public system do. (Safer fails to mention anything about this in his "report")
Other useful search that tells a similar story
Rafe Esquith Los Angeles
Here is an example of the real priorities you find in places like New York City
https://nypost.com/2019/05/20/richard-carranza-held-doe-white-supremacy-culture-training/
Strange how creating a form of indentured labour in order to appease the natives is ultimately to their detriment.
If only there'd been other examples of the negative economic consequences of xenophobia that might have better guided immigration policy.
Indentured labour is a form of servitude in which you "voluntarily" agree to have your rights restricted for a defined period, but not in perpetuity. I'd say that was a reasonably accurate description of a system in which you are effectively tied to an employer and expect to be paid significantly less than the going rate for the job in the hope that eventually you might be released and treated like an equal.
I was on an H-1B for four years, ending just inside the Trump period; during my H-1B I switched employer twice.
There's a filing fee for an H-1B transfer, and it has to be performed by the prospective employer, but there's no quota or interview and the paperwork is relatively small so all but the tiniest employers usually don't consider it too much of an obstacle.
I had in my mind that I wanted to live in at least a couple of places before my visa expired, and one of the moves was a bit of a misstep. But everything worked out in the end. I'm grateful to America for hosting me.
Facebook isn't the only U.S. company to use these dirty tactics to undermine wages. In fact, many tech-companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon use similar practices, either directly or through intermediaries.
The only way to put an end to this is to limit the number H1-B visas and to set extraordinary high wages for the visa holders. That'll teach 'm to undermine U.S. workers' wages.
"The only way to put an end to this is to limit the number H1-B visas and to set extraordinary high wages for the visa holders. That'll teach 'm to undermine U.S. workers' wages."
Well, at least a premium wage plus sponsoring the return trip to the home country when the person leaves the company for whatever reason. It might also be a deterrent if the company has to indemnify the person's landlord for breaking a residential lease (of one year or less).
There needs to be a whopping big fine if the position being filled was advertised in the US with non-sensicle requirements. If the job is IT, putting a requirement for sewing plush toys with 3 years of verifiable experience isn't honest. I can certainly write job postings that nobody would apply for (or very few) and then advertise with an Indian placement firm with the real requirements that will be nearly impossible for some government checker to ever find and doctor the resumé of the person hired. I can even been trickier and put in an obscure language requirement and justify it by claiming the company is looking to port some software to a region where that language/dialect is spoken.
I need to add that there are great reasons for letting companies bring in workers from other parts of the world. Some disciplines don't have many qualified people or somebody may be a well regarded expert. It can be of great benefit to let US companies hire these people in a way that won't take an extended amount of time such as the person having to apply for residency (Green Card).
Right now it would mean somebody at the top in AI and ML, not somebody that's going to write printer interfaces and manage databases.
…for doing this is stated in the article and will be evident to anyone who has ever worked for a major multinational.
It is not because bringing in foreigner workers is cheaper. It is not and that would be illegal anyway.
It is not because they are as a rule better qualified. That depends on the individual, some are, some aren't.
Hiring practices of this sort, the government claims, increase the number of temporary visa holders applying for positions – thereby skewing the supply/demand equation – and make it less likely that temporary visa holders will change jobs.
"Such temporary visa holders often have limited job mobility and thus are likely to remain with their company until they can adjust status, which for some can be decades," the DoJ said.
It is because then they have you by the balls. To the above, also add that the foreign worker brings no family (so no commitments outside of work) and likely has no social support structure (friends, relatives, etc.) that he can rely on outside the company.
So it is not slavery, or even indentured servitude, but comes close.
About 5 years ago I started to see a few job postings where you had to mail your resume to some physical address or other. I really had not seen that in almost 20 years. Now I know why. It was just a H1 scam tactic.
As for the comment about why so many foreigners in tech jobs in the US the answer is easy. Until they made H1's trivial to get most of these jobs were done by Americans. You know, the guys who build Silicon Valley from the 1950's to 1990's. There were quite a few foreign nationals as well but they mostly went to school in the US and stayed. So a typical dev team in the Valley until the late 90's was about 95% Americans / foreign grads from US schools. Then the deluge of H1 Indians started.
The change between 2000 and 2010 was pretty startling. As was the quality of the new people. Foreigners who were grads of US schools were the same as always. The usual distribution of good / bad / indifferent. But it was only when I discovered just how endemic corruption is in the Indian educational system that I understood why the recent H1's although exceptionally nice people were almost universally mediocre technically. They are the products of what is little more than diploma mills. For some reason this is less noticeable with mainland Chinese even though corruption is an issue there too. I think the big difference is that is not a whole industry of Chinese body shops bringing in H1's in huge numbers.
So crap managers at big companies hire lots of the H1 people through body shops for the same reason that they hire Mexican gardens and Mexican nannies rather than Americans. Because the manager would rather hire powerless and submissive workers who are unlikely to complain no matter how badly they are treated rather than Americans who might ask to be treated with respect and fairness.
So the rule with any big company dev group is that if you see either outsourcing or lots of H1's then you know you are dealing with an incompetent manager so you stay well away. As it will be a clusterf*ck one way or another. If you see mostly in-house development and the usual mix of Americans, foreign grads etc, at the US locations then they usually know what they are doing. As much as that can be said in any big company, that is
> Ah yes! All those Mojave, Yokuts and Cahuilleno who built Silicon Valley with their own two hands.
Definition - American. Someone born in the United States. And pretty much every American I know with at least 8 to 10 generations of American ancestors has at least some Amerindian genes in there somewhere. If events had worked out differently my kids would have been 1/16'th Cherokee, for example.
So if you were born in Britain I must assume that you are a true born Brit all of whose ancestors were descendants of the first paleolithic settlers. The only people who can truly call themselves British. Not like all those bloody foreigners who arrived since. In my corner of the British Isles (according to recent genetic studies) my mothers side of the family have probably only been around since the first Bronze Age settlements about 4000 years ago. Although the neolithics never made it up that far into the hills so they would have been the first settlers of the area. A bit longer than my dads side, who shows the genetic detritus of all the the peoples who have passed through that particular neck of the woods over the last 3 or 4 thousand years.
Which oddly enough is almost as long the current Central California Coastal Amerindian tribes have been in the area. There have been at least three or four waves of permanent settlement on the Coast since the end of the Younger Dryas. The current lot seemed to have arrived about the same time as the Iron Age settlements in Britain. Who I might add, totally ruined the place. It was a pretty peaceful place, Britain, until those damn Celts arrived.
People get around , you know.
It was the Muwekma Ohlone tribe who were in the SF Bay Area when the Spanish arrived. You can search online to find what kind of huts they built. They apparently used no stone or even adobe so nothing remains.
The locale has an institution few other similar places have
https://www.indianhealthcenter.org/about-us/our-history/
no evidence of who funds them. The Big Zuck could cover them for what he blows flying back and forth to Kauai. Curious how the actual indigenous get very little attention from the Tech Titan billionaires, so busy they are bowing and scraping for immigrants.
Prof. Norm Matloff then of UC Davis was documenting all this as it happened. He testified before Congress on this and other matters (the Chinese-fluent professor also presented evidence of the book circulating in China called "How to retire in the US".)
He got about 5 seconds on one PBS news hour program about the issue. Like most other aspects of Big Tech the alleged news media has buried any serious analysis of the this. He still has a page
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html
good summary here
https://cis.org/North/Prof-Matloff-Busts-Best-and-Brightest-Ballyhoo-H1B-Workers
So once the Trump has left office, nice Mr Biden will kill the lawsuit and allow millions of H1 visa people to flood in.
Hmm sounds very ANTI AMERICAN.
As for outsourcing here in the UK it is massive in the financial sector THE IR35 rule almost forces employers to use off shore, the quality is truly something to behold ....
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