Laid-Off Americans, Required to Zip Lips on Way Out, Grow Bolder

As a former H1-B worker myself (please put down the pitch-forks :)), I can tell you that regular companies aren't hiring H1-Bs to replace you directly. Instead they contract swarms of us through companies like WiPro and other body shops. This, along with the inability to seek a more fitting job on your own regardless of skill level is the main problem I see. You're essentially shackled to these body shops. You can't go home because of their BS employee agreements that force you to pay thousands if you leave before a certain time, you can't ask for higher salary or healthcare benefits, you don't get to choose where you work so it may be Texas today, WA tomorrow, Alabama next week so forget having a family life, you're wife can't work if you bring her and kids with you so you have to just follow along to their whims regardless. It is pretty much human trafficking once you get here. I can tell most folks here are American, they have no idea how messed up the H1-B system is.

Listen, there&#x27;s no point claiming the H1 situation isn&#x27;t a rampant clusterfuck. Actual skilled laborers lie in limbo while busloads of cheap, disposable foreign workers are brought over to get exploited and depress domestic wages. It&#x27;s a full on disaster.<p>If you have to have temporary worker visas, fine. But don&#x27;t tie them to a company. If there&#x27;s a legitimate need, and they&#x27;re legitimately skilled, they&#x27;ll find work, and they&#x27;ll more than likely find work that pays comparably to a native worker (or they&#x27;ll get poached, because good help is always hard to find).

This causes some pretty strong mixed feelings for me. On the one hand, foreign workers are already disadvantaged compared with domestic workers and H1-B caps are absurdly low. I keep failing to see why we are all supposed to open world markets to the flow of every sort of capital and goods <i>except</i> labor, or why someone deserves a job for being born American, rather than Indian (Note that I feel the same way when Americans are disadvantaged elsewhere for similar reasons[1]). On the other hand, a clause requiring that you never say something bad about your employer nor discuss the situation under which you were laid off seems not only abusive, but repugnantly so. In a country that constitutionally enshrines free speech, the ability to sign away for money your right to complain publicly about a person or organization seems particularly dangerous, and the act of asking someone to do so seems truly vile.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@rachelnabors&#x2F;wtfuk-73009d5623b4#.466usnivl" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@rachelnabors&#x2F;wtfuk-73009d5623b4#.466usni...</a>

&gt; <i>Now some of the workers who were displaced are starting to speak out, despite severance agreements prohibiting them from criticizing their former employers.</i><p>You can easily reveal the facts it in a totally non-critical way.<p><i>At ABC Data, workers were encouraged to collaborate with management to come up with creative solutions to streamline processes and save costs. When I realized that ABC could save money by replacing me with an equally capable, yet much cheaper worker visiting the country on a temporary work permit, I immediately pitched this idea at the next big cross-departmental meeting. There was much resistance among management. They objected on the basis of the unique knowledge and skills that I bring to the team, and how we all &quot;go way back&quot; to the startup days. In the end they saw it my way and agreed to relocate my posterior to that outdoor concrete fixture which separates the road from the sidewalk or lawn. I was unfortunately not able to talk them out of the egregiously generous severance package, though even with that expenditure, ABC ends up ahead. ABC is a great company to invest in with terrific fundamentals and future prospects, and is led by a highly ethical team whose decisions are beyond reproach.</i>

I find it interesting the amount of sudden vitriol by some of the formerly &quot;free market&quot; supporters that thought that the terrible job market for non-STEM majors would never, ever hit the technology industry. Those that decry artistry and creative industry jobs as beneath them and their money, those that felt working class people were just too lazy to find &quot;good&quot; jobs, and generally feeling apathy if not schadenfreude for those suffering from the corporate recovery of 2010-present.<p>Those same free marketers also agreed with the destruction of unions and protections like minimum wage. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, look at the comments. &quot;H1-Bs are depressing prices&quot; have replaced &quot;why should I pay for music and movies&quot; and &quot;any industry that relies on ads should die&quot;.<p>Well, now with the tables turned, why should working class Americans and artists and content creators give one shit that the technology industry is suffering from &quot;depressed salaries&quot;. Suffer with the rest of America.

Former H1-B Worker as well. I was sponsored by Zynga Inc and Moz. Finally got my green card recently. As other people have pointed out above, I believe the problem relies on who is sponsoring these candidates. The following list speaks by itself:<p>1 Infosys: 23,816 2 Tata Consultancy Services 14,096 3 Wipro 8,365 4 IBM 7,944 5 Deloitte Consulting 7,016<p>Google, Facebook, Amazon and even Tesla or Palantir should be in the top spots. Setting a minimum wage to $100,000 would filter most of the sweat show applications out.

I am not surprised that companies that are broken enough to do the outsourcing in the first place are also often broken enough to have this term in severance agreements. But it really should not be standard.

Worth noting the headlines of the &#x27;related coverage&#x27;:<p>Lawsuits Claim Disney Colluded to Replace U.S. Workers With Immigrants JAN 25, 2016;<p>Large Companies Game H-1B Visa Program, Costing the U.S. Jobs NOV 10, 2015;<p>Toys ‘R’ Us Brings Temporary Foreign Workers to U.S. to Move Jobs Overseas SEP 29, 2015;<p>Pink Slips at Disney. But First, Training Foreign Replacements. JUN 3, 2015

It&#x27;s always amazing that the H-1Bs who have these rare skills that are unavailable in US citizens nonetheless always seem to require training by the native workers they are replacing.

At this point, with both Corporate abuses from American corporations and the H1-B holding companies along with the frequency with which we&#x27;ve seen the more expensive American work replaced with a much cheaper &quot;guest&quot; worker, I believe we need to ask ourselves, do we not have enough surplus American workers that are unemployed such that the H1-B program might not be necessary for a year or two until we&#x27;ve managed to get the unemployed American workers back to work?

Couple of things about H1B: 1. While H1B workers are cheaper, they are also pretty much stuck with their employer. Not 100% but much less mobility than citizen. Sorry, this reeks just a wee bit of indentured servitude. 2. If you take Corp. Execs at their word, and that rising H1B caps is good for country, then would be good for a journalist to probe: what about a 10M worker cap? Or 1.5 billion worker cap? That would make america even stronger, no?

In Canada Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) program was changed. It was getting to the point where entire industries changed overnight out with long-time employees and in with near slave wage &quot;TFWs&quot; (many people just say refer to the people as TFWs).<p>It got so bad it became a huge political hot potato and the law was changed resulting in many TFWs disappearing as fast as they arrived.<p>The law here was similar to the TFW laws in the US and it was abused the same way. The law was meant as a way businesses could get help by hiring cheaper labour if they couldn&#x27;t find local workers. But of course hiring someone at $5&#x2F;hour versus $11&#x2F;hour is strong motivation for a business to cheat.<p>This was every industry too each had its own preferred ethnicity mining (Chinese), fast food (Filipino), IT (India), agriculture (Central American). It&#x27;s only now changing back to local people born in Canada.<p>I don&#x27;t have any ill will against the TFW workers it&#x27;s the businesses who are the ones who ruined the purpose of the TFW law and now have to suffer for it.

I&#x27;m not sure I get this - are the workers coming in to replace them actually in the USA physically? Are they staying in the USA physically?<p>I mean is this offshoring &#x2F; outsourcing or is it replacing with cheaper workers?<p>Why can&#x27;t the existing employees compete for the jobs? I mean WIPRO must have going through some pretty big pre sales workups, so who else was competing?<p>I think what I mean is that doing this in secret implies that no one doing the actual job was ever consulted about the viability of outsourcing &#x2F; replacing them &#x2F; so you never get a real understanding of the costs or opportunities for improvement (essentially automating a bad process)<p>In summary - any company that does this cheap shot is usually one that is going to get its ass handed to it by a better more automated competitor.

As a Indian and worked in Indian body shops (but who never traveled aboard). My views on Indian-body shop immigrants :<p>In 2005, when I completed university masters degree. Our class has around 60 students, I&#x27;m pretty sure may be 5 or 6 of (1%) them are talented and good in computers. Most of us took IT job. We had chances to immigrate to other as early as 2007 through Indian body shops like Wipro, Infy, Tata, CTS etc.<p>In 2016, now most of them (60%) of them working in aboard. May be 40% in USA and 20% EU&#x2F;ROW. How did almost 59% of these not-so talented friends landed in other countries? Did they gained sound knowledge in those 48 months or later. I really _really_ doubt that. Its because we are low-cost workers and got close to Indian IT management. Typical Indian IT managers are ass<i></i>*. They want boot-lickers not skilled developers. So its easy for unskilled people to land in other countries in the name of skilled-person. I know few guys who worked in non-IT companies (later created fake IT experiences) joined these body shops and now living in US.<p>I assume almost 80-90% IT Indians in US are helping American companies simply because he&#x2F;she is low-cost worker. Its not like US companies cant find local talent to fill these roles, but they want low-cost solution.<p>If you got laid-off due to low-cost workers, please remember, its the US company &amp; IT Body-shop bosses &amp; stock-holders financially benefited a lot from these lay-offs not necessarily the worker who replaced you or the poor-outsourced IT slaves.<p>one simple solution : Please tighten the visa-interview process, make it more like real IT company interview (ask about data-structures and algorithms etc). This will ensure immigration rates from body-shops drop from 60%(from my numbers above) to 5% max.<p>---<p>My personal experience with Indian &amp; US&#x2F;foreign freelancers greatly differ. Even though US&#x2F;foreign freelancers are costly (1USD:66 INR), I find them worthy. They go-out and put extra-effort to finish the task. With Indian freelancers, they just want to finish the task quickly and get the paid. I find it amusing that US companies hire us for of lack-of talents there :)

&quot;Marco Peña was among about 150 technology workers who were laid off.....&quot; Going on a limb but guessing Mr.Peña might be of hispanic origin. Most talk about Trump has been tone, but little of substance. Sizzle vs steak, and all. My hunch is that most of Pundits&amp;Pols class focus too much on tone and too little on what Trump would actually likely do. And that there are many Mr.Peña&#x27;s for whom, while the would prefer nicer words coming out of TV set, are more concerned with what their wallets are saying. And that while Trump might take us to uncertain unknown, Clinton is doubling down on a crappy known.

<i>So, after thirteen years of my loyal and dedicated service, you&#x27;re offering me $10,400 severance, six weeks notice (during which I must train my H1B half-price replacement), if and only if I sign a non-disparagement agreement? And otherwise, I&#x27;m out on my butt tomorrow?</i><p><i>No. You&#x27;re going to give me one year&#x27;s salary with benefits (after all, Lester Burnham got away with it in &quot;American Beauty&quot;). You&#x27;re also going to pay me DOUBLE during the period that I am training the half price indentured servant who you imagine is going to replace me. Mind you, he&#x27;ll never replace my previous loyalty and dedication; that&#x27;s not something you can train into someone in six weeks... or ever. You have to earn loyalty, a lesson you&#x27;ll discover over the next few months as you screw your employees.</i><p><i>Also, you will sign a mutual non-disparagement agreement; I say nothing bad about you, and you say nothing bad about me, and my lawyer says if you spread malicious and damaging gossip about me, it will cost me one million dollars in lost career potential, so that&#x27;s what you will owe me if you do so -- plus punitive damages.</i><p><i>And if you don&#x27;t give me what I want, I&#x27;m quitting as of 5pm today and will immediately write a book and blog about the stupidity of management here at Wrecked Lives Inc. In fact I&#x27;ve already reserved the domain names that will be appropriate for my upcoming tell-all. Lots of luck stopping me; I&#x27;ll only tell the truth, and the First Amendment protects me. If you try to sue me, I&#x27;ll sue you back, and the resulting publicity will make my book and my blog and my Youtube channel famous enough that I&#x27;ll never need to work again. Your investors and commercial partners will also hear about it. So make my day.</i><p>I&#x27;m not saying most people would do this, or even if they did, that they would get away with it, but it&#x27;s how a person in that situation <i>ought to</i> respond. Granted, we in the U.S. have at-will employment, granted it&#x27;s a free market, and sometimes the smartest move is to simply move on and put this behind you. But we&#x27;re also human beings with emotions, loyalties, and a sense of betrayal, and when a management team tries to pull the H1b-swap-and-gag on the employees, they have to recognize the price.

I&#x27;ve never even had the option to sign a no disparagement clause for a settlement like that. I&#x27;ve had to support my family with what I already had whether I liked it or not. So what they did is shitty, but I have a hard time feeling bad for the 1% who complain that they have the option of getting more money by signing away their rights if they so choose.

Immigration for &quot;skilled&quot; workers is flawed in US Please look at other countries ( point based system ) and for the love of sanity just adopt best practices ... flaws: 1) Skilled worker immigration should be based on &quot;skills&quot; (country of origin is incorrect: Indian and Chinese immigrants suffer, US workforce also suffers) 2) Immigration should be tied to individuals, influence from employer has conflict of interest. (employer wants to make money even if it comes at the cost of employees ability to immigrate) 3) Immigration as whole should be based on what new individuals bring to the table (skills, age when joining workforce, true intent and ability to adopt new country)<p>Point 3 is complex and involves true value for US or country of adoption. <i></i><i></i>* Immigration overall is not as complex or difficult as most politicians publicize it, it has become far more political than it needs to be, thank you President Obama. <i></i><i></i><i>

Another commenter alluded to it, but I find both the article and the discussion miss what is really going on. It seems like a lot of firms are basically outsourcing their IT workforce; something that has been going on for a long time now.<p>For most businesses, IT is a cost center, and if that cost can be minimized, they will do so, full stop. What the articles doesn&#x27;t go into detail is whether those workers that are being trained will continue to work in the US, or whether they are in the US temporarily to understand the IT infrastructure and processes. It seems to me that the latter is the case here. Again, outsourcing has been going on for the longest time, and it really confounds me how many times the same issue will be brought up.

There is a simple solution, particularly in the context of congressional or other government investigations: subpoena them. Nondisparagement clauses don&#x27;t &amp; can&#x27;t cover compelled testimony.

It&#x27;s just businesses abusing the system. We need more legislation in place to keep businesses from Harmon Americans and shooting themselves in the foot long term. American workers who support unfeddered capitalism always end up wondering why they are starving when they supported tax cuts for the wealthy and big business while leaving no money to pay for the fallout of their disasterous decisions. Sometimes you get what you asked for.

A lot of uproar, but have you ever tried to teach a 60yo veteran working his paper trail to switch to python? The laid off personnel did not have the required skillset, and would be fired regardless of the source of replacement, H1B or local.

Honest question: if a guy in India can do the same job as a guy in the US, but coming from a country with worse economy agrees to do it cheaper, why would I sympathize with the american guy in this situation?<p>Honestly, to me it seems like american working class have been really privileged compared to the world&#x27;s population in 20th century, and globalization finally brings some equality — which might not be a good thing to american middle class, but is a great one for workers from China, India and all other 3rd world countries.

These companies seem not to believe in the free market if they suppress the free exchange of information about their labor practices.

Totally independently of other things, naming it &quot;Required&quot; sounds better than &quot;took 10.000$ for zipping their lips&quot;

To promote Entrepreneurs&#x2F;Local Jobs<p>1. Impose tax on corporate revenues, not profits<p>2. Regulate market capitalization of corporations

Free market capitalism.<p>You can&#x27;t have it both ways.

So, is it time for a union yet?

I have long been an open borders supporter, anyone that wants to come to the US (or any other nation) and make a life for themselves should be free to do so.<p>I am also 100% opposed to even the existence of the H1B visa program, this program is a modernized version of Indentured servitude that allows companies to take advantage of those employees by conditioning their immigration to their employment. These people are often coming from circumstances they do not want to return to, poverty, oppression, persecution, etc. So the threat of being fired and deported is a coercive force that employers use to exploit these workers.<p>I am fine with immigration, I am even fine if immigrant are willing to work for lower wages, provided that agreement is free from the threat of deportation...

Sorry, I don&#x27;t feel bad for any of these people. Even the poorest Americans have better material conditions than a lot of Indian workers. Why do you think the Indian workers are willing to work for less?

Most corrupt people on the Earth <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.petition2congress.com&#x2F;20324&#x2F;expel-indian-americans-from-usa&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.petition2congress.com&#x2F;20324&#x2F;expel-indian-american...</a>

&gt; Two years later, his work with a local tech contracting company pays $45,000 a year less than his Eversource salary. Many of his former co-workers are also struggling, Mr. Diangelo said, but stay quiet to avoid provoking the company.<p>So basically, the company wasn&#x27;t making enough money to support the affluent pay of its workforce so it had to take drastic measures to stay afloat.<p>If you are suddenly making $45,000 a year less than you were... Perhaps you were getting paid above your true market value

Why not ask the recruiter or company you are applying for if they are willing to sponsor or work with an H1B visa (pretend you are in that position) and move on if they say yes. It will be interesting to see how well these companies do when all they can hire are H1B workers. After all, they can only get so many of those visas, and there is only a 30% chance that the application will actually be approved. They do need a certain number of US workers to have a stable workforce. With that gone, all their projects will be at risk of failure. How much of this risk do you think they can keep up before they are forced to give up these H1B abuses? I say abuses because there are clearly qualified local candidates willing to work at the market rate, but they lie about the market rate and lie about not finding local candidates to hire their cheap labor. Ideally, they should have a Job ID assigned to all jobs where they are considering H1Bs and post the name, wage, and qualifications of the hired candidate if they hire an H1B candidate. That way, potential employees that were passed up can see who they were passed up for, and complain to the right people if they were unfairly skipped on for a cheaper employee with poorer qualifications just because they were cheaper or would be cheaper in the long run because they would never get a raise or benefits or unemployment or pay into social security and medicaid.

This is simple &quot;they stole our jobs&quot; rhetoric. It&#x27;s just like taxi drivers with their &quot;Uber stole our fares&quot;. If you can&#x27;t compete, go to another market. If you&#x27;re already overcharging, charge less. &quot;Depressing local wages&quot; is a good thing - it reduces the cost to society of getting productive things done.<p>The other argument about foreign workers being exploited is a clear sign of people pretending to care but really not caring. Sure there are some who were tricked into debt traps, but for most, they know what they&#x27;re getting into and they know it&#x27;s better than what they have back home. So they&#x27;re making a step up in life. You want to kick them back down because you care about their welfare? What it means is you only care about people in America and once they leave, they lose their status as worthy human beings who deserve good working conditions.<p>I used to be a foreign laborer. I was paid minimum wage to do grunt work that locals didn&#x27;t want. It was wonderful. The currency was worth more in my home country than where I was working. It helped me pay off my student loan. I would have hated to be forced out by someone trying to protect me from myself. My coworkers loved it too, they&#x27;d send money home to help their parents run their farms and pay off their own loans. They&#x27;d laugh at the lazy local workers who were mostly overweight and doing the same job more slowly.