Wow! After reading this article in Business Week, it looks like the “H1-B Slave Labor Gravy Train” is starting to screech to a halt. Unscrupulous employers beware!!! You may have to pay their salaries at market value and treat them with respect too. Oh, the horror!
Check it out…
A few years ago, Vishal Goel had high hopes of moving from his native India to the U.S. to work as a computer programmer. He approached Patni Computer Systems, a Mumbai company that provides tech services to many American businesses, and Patni agreed to apply for a U.S. work visa on his behalf. By 2004, Goel was in Bloomington, Ill., working for Patni at State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance, the largest car insurer in the country.
But this was no dream job come true. Goel’s base salary was $23,310, about half the $44,000 that Patni had said it would pay on the visa application, according to a lawsuit he has filed against the company. When Goel complained, one official said that Patni would brand him a “troublemaker” and that his parents in India would be harassed unless he stopped, the suit alleges. Goel, who left Patni in 2005, filed suit in November, 2007, in federal court in Illinois. He’s suing along with a former colleague, Peeush Goyal, who alleges he was subjected to similar treatment. Patni declined to comment, though in court documents it denies the charges.
Goel’s is not an isolated case. A number of the most active users of the work-visa program, for what are known as H-1B visas, have been accused of underpaying or otherwise mistreating workers. Last year, Patni paid $2.4 million to 607 H-1B visa workers after a Labor Dept. investigation uncovered systematic underpayment of wages. “I highly suspect that these employment practices are widespread among the tech-outsourcing firms,” says Ron Hira, assistant professor of public policy at Rochester Institute of Technology, who will testify as an expert witness in the Goel case.
The Goel lawsuit is one of the first filed in U.S. courts by a visa worker against his employer, perhaps because of the murky legal status of such workers. The estimated 500,000 people in the U.S. on H-1Bs are by definition citizens of other nations, and they’re usually beholden to employers that can transfer them home at will. The Goel case provides rare insight into how one outfit allegedly has treated workers it brings into the U.S.
READ: Are H-1B Workers Getting Bilked?
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Jim, I just received this post via an RSS feed and wanted to reply asap on this one. In Atlanta here, you may be very well aware of a local IT staffing firm engaging in the same model. They ‘sponsor’ H1-Bs’ from India and bring them over on a ‘contract’ (to work at 30k for yr 1, 35k for yr 2, 40k for yr 3, etc.) on large contracts that large organizations put out for proposals (Home Depot, for example). Since their operational expenses are so minimal, U.S. based firms cannot compete on price, therefore losing the bidding process to organizations like this. Also, believe it or not, the firm here in Atlanta well known for this hires all “American-looking” (yes, I’m quoting from first-hand experience meeting their Sales Director) biz-dev reps while the ‘recruiting process’ itself takes place from centers in India at a ‘fully burdened’ cost of $9/hr per recruiter resource (which includes their real estate costs to build a facility from the ground up in New Delhi). Basically, their model is for “American-looking” biz-dev reps to build incremental business while the very large proposal wins are “house accounts”. Give me a ring and I’ll give you the skinny on this – it’s tough to say who is to blame here: the system, the large orgs’ putting IT staffing work out to bid, our H1-B process etc., but it’s tough to pinpoint. It’s the typical notion of the “horse before the cart” or the “cart before the horse” . . .
Nothing new .. Its happening from years (YES years)and no one wants to talk about it.
Good one Jim
2 thoughts on this:
1) it proves what citizens have said all along, that h-1 lowers working conditions and pay
2) h-1bs have always said that citizens ‘whine’ about h-1b. look whos whining now. lol