TECHNOIR (26 page)

IT workers into bartenders

            As information technology companies go, Microsoft, IBM and Cisco, are behemoths of the industry. Indeed, they are some of the most valuable corporations ever. What’s more, their rise to unprecedented wealth and power was dependent on the other. Microsoft is famous for the software that runs on IBM personal computers that’s connected by Cisco networks. And like a lot of American corporations that made mind-boggling profits during the last 25 or so years, these companies abandoned their own citizen workforce so to exploit foreign employees. But there’s a twist – this isn’t happening in some far off sweat shop, this outsourcing is happening right on American soil. Yet accomplished with a familiar strategy: Corporate power, channeled by high-paid lobbyists and fat campaign contributions, strong-armed  elected  officials into passing laws that surreptitiously squashed the labor rights of both American citizens and non-citizens alike.

            How these IT companies got away with this begins with a US visa named the H-1b. The visa was created in the early 1990s so US companies could hire foreign nationals with college degrees for up to six years of service. Foreigners began to apply en masse, and now, nearly two decades later, 600,000 are working in the country via the H-1b.

            According to Gene A. Nelson, who wrote
An American Scam: How Special Interests Undermine National Security with Endless ‘Techie’ Gluts,
it was Microsoft founder Bill Gates who pushed and paid Washington the greatest to pass the H-1b visa law. Gates accomplished this by perpetuating a myth that America was facing a looming shortage of IT pros, scientists and engineers. Gates’ myth, states Nelson, earned Microsoft an extra $73 billion in profits between 1991 to 2005. Nearly all Microsoft H-1bs are paid a salary that’s far below the prevailing wage for their position and skill, far below what an American would make in his place. Some critics estimate that out of the 600,000 H-1bs in the US, a third are being used by IT companies for cheap labor.

            “The H-1b benefits many of the economic elite at the expense of the middle class,” wrote Nelson. “The resultant labor gluts (caused by the H-1b) depresses wages and benefits, enhancing employer profitability.”

            Essentially, the H-1b visa is another corporate and government neoliberal creation to undermine the wages and rights of the working class, both citizen and non-citizen, alike. In the end, it’s not an issue of foreign workers taking Americans’ jobs, but an issue of corporations being allowed to undercut the workforce by pressuring the government to apply policies that hurt workers for the benefit of the corporate elite.

            Here are a few examples of how the H-1b has hurt workers on both a macro and micro level:

•           According to the National Science Foundation, over 600,000 science and engineering degrees are granted annually by American universities. Yet the US produces only 120,000 science and engineering jobs per year, and much less of late. Now add those numbers to the annual influx of 85,000 H-1bs (the annual allowed cap) and the NSF believes half a million Americans are losing their jobs to cheap foreign technical labor, while another half million Americans waste their science and engineering degrees.

•           One H-1b worker (more than likely from India) complained in a letter to a Maryland Circuit Court judge that, “since I was treated like a bonded slave, I didn’t have any alternative to leaving the company,” which was suing him for breach of contract. Indeed, the H-1b visa law allows the holder to apply for US citizenship as long as his corporate employer is the sponsor. H-1b recruiters boast this indentured servitude made for “remarkable loyalty” to the corporation.

•           The US Department of Labor found that some US tech-companies have used the H-1b to bring foreign nationals to the US, train them, and then ship them and the job back to their homeland. This has been the sad fate of thousands of American IT workers who were soon fired post-training.

•           American International Group (AIG), given an $85 billion bailout to save its very  existence by the Federal Reserve, asked 250 of its computer programmers to train H-1bs from India, and then without warning laid off all its programmers and hired the Indians, who were paid substantially less.

•           After Bank of America asked Kevin Flanagan to train Indian H-1bs that would take his job back to India, he committed suicide in the parking lot of his B and A office, this according the Programmers Guild.

            At
WashTech
, the nation’s leading union for IT pros based in Seattle, they say the damage inflicted by the H-1b on the American IT worker and the field itself, is a deep wound that may never heal. Because as long as Microsoft and other IT corporations continue to stuff the campaign coffers of politicians – such as President Barack Obama – no lasting H-1b reform will ever make it into law.

            Rennie Sawade, a spokesperson for WashTech, says Seattle and other communities are still feeling the reverberations of H-1b visa bomb that Bill Gates and Washington dropped in the early 1990s. Seattle, says Sawade, is just one city where the H-1b visa has not only soured the careers of local tech and science professionals, but the community itself. “It has affected thousands in the Seattle region,” he says. “This is certainly not helping the local economy and is contributing to many of the closings of the local shops and stores.” Seattle’s regional unemployment in 2009 number is pushing 7 percent, and the number for the city itself might be 11.5 percent, as recently highlighted by
Business Week
in its ranking of “America’s Unhappiest Cities.” Seattle also that year watched one of its daily newspapers – publishing since the Civil War – bid adieu.

            Microsoft in nearby Redmond refuses to say how many H-1bs are on its payroll, but insists it has never exceeded the legal limit of 15 percent of its workforce. WashTech, however, says if you also include those with L-1 visa status (which allows foreigners to easily cross different borders to work), the number of non-citizens working at Microsoft is probably close to 10,000 in the Seattle area alone.

            “Who knows?” said Sawade when asked why no one knows an exact number. “You can’t find out how many H-1bs are over there. The government doesn’t even know.”

            Another H-1b loop-hole IT companies love to exploit, say critics of the visa, is the fact there’s no law forcing Microsoft, Google, Intel, IBM to pay an H-1b holder a wage that is equal to that of a U.S. citizen. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office discovered the medium wage for H-1b computing professionals in 2005 was $50,000 – less than what an entry-level American graduate tech worker would be offered.

            Sawade says Microsoft replaced him with an H-1b visa holder at the start of this decade. Since then his IT career has hit the skids. Before 2000, job seekers called him twice, three times a week. Now he’s lucky to get one or two offers every three months. “I am now forced into the contract positions,” he says. “Even a company I have worked for before was talking to me about a position that paid less money than when I worked there eight years ago.”

            Recently he got a call from an Indian outsourcing firm. “He offered me a contract that paid half my going rate. He said he would look for a position that paid my rate. I haven't heard from him since.” Foreign nationals, says Sawade, who are offered an H-1b job “are getting screwed too.” He says they’re sold “a bill of goods,” such as high American wages and the allure of the country itself, by H-1b “Body Shops” or recruiters. When they finally get here, that’s when reality strikes. In the Seattle region, he says it’s common to know an H-1b visa holder who lives in poverty-level housing, with many roommates, in a hard-scrabble neighborhood.

            One question  that Sawade asks is, how did both the American and foreign IT worker become undermined by a US visa? Sawade and other critics of the H-1b visa say take a page from “Deep Throat” – the legendary whistle blower who brought the Nixon administration its demise: Follow the money.

            In 2008, Microsoft paid nearly a dozen lobbying firms hundreds-of-thousands of dollars to produce 45 reports on immigration and submitted them to Congress for review, according to
OpenSecrets.com
, a website that tracks the influence of lobbyists and campaign contributions on US politics. Even though they were submitted under the guise of “immigration” the reports had a simple subject heading: “H-1b Visa Program, Workforce Issues.” The 45 reports ranked Microsoft number one for 2008 when it came to immigration studies for Congress. The second-highest  number given to Congress was 11 – by the National Immigration Forum, which is an organization that actually deals with the issue of immigration.

            Ron Hira, an H-1b visa expert and professor of policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, says as hundreds of thousands of H-1b visa holders came to the U.S. over the last twenty years, it was widely believed that American companies hiring these H-1bs were doing so only if they could not find Americans with comparable skills.

            That was a myth, says Ron Hira, an H-1b visa expert and professor of policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, US companies were actually turning their backs on Americans, many with IT backgrounds. The Department of Labor doesn’t require employers to seek local talent before recruiting abroad for their U.S. job openings. The U.S. Department of Labor’s 2006 Strategic Plan puts it bluntly, “H-1B workers may be hired even when a qualified U.S. worker wants the job, and a U.S. worker can be displaced from the job in favor of the foreign worker.”

            “There is no labor-market test,” Hira adds, “a firm doesn't have to show a need for the foreign worker.”

            During an interview Hira told me, “In spite of this unequivocal statement, there is widespread and mistaken public belief that firms must demonstrate a shortage before hiring an H-1b. For example, news stories over the past year in the
New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Diego Union-Tribune,
and
Wall Street Journal
(in a front page story at the height of last year’s immigration debate) have all erroneously claimed the program requires firms to first look for American workers. And the
New York Daily News
even recently made the false claim in editorial support for H-1B expansion. Many politicians also hold this misconception, making similarly false claims in their correspondence in response to constituent letters on the matter.”

            The H-1b isn’t the only visa abused by major technology companies, he says. Microsoft utilizes both H-1s and L-1s, the visa for multi-nationals so its employees can stay within different countries for up to three years. “In terms of abuse the L-1 is abuse even more than the H-1B, but volume of visas is less; the program has no transparency at all,” said Hira.

            The future for American IT pros is not getting any brighter. Hira says President Obama, during his run for the White House, called for a temporary boost in the H-1b visa cap. Obama’s appointments to op-level labor positions also support raising the number of H-1b visas. “It doesn’t bode well for American IT workers out of work. Every single one of his appointees is pro H-1b visa,” Hira says.

                Obama’s stance is surprising for a president who promised hope, change and putting Americans back to work. But maybe not that surprising.
OpenSecrets.com
reveals that Microsoft gave President Obama just over $700,000 in 2008, while Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) was given $73,000. Overall, Opensecrets shows that Microsoft gave $3.1 million in campaign contributions during the 2008 election cycle. With 72 percent going Democrats and 27 percent to Republicans. In fact, since 1990, Microsoft has contributed close to $20 million to federal office holders, according to Opensecrets.com, which calls the software company “one of the biggest contributors in Washington.”

            Powerful IT trade associations are also pressuring Congress to significantly boost the H-1b cap.

            Jeff Lande of the Washington-based Technology Association of America (formerly the Information Technology Association of America), said talented H-1B foreigners produce more jobs for America in the long run. He says American IT professionals “need to stay current with their skills,” he also disagrees the H-1B visa keeps American IT workers unemployed and their wages down.

            “I hear that all the time, that argument, but I really don’t see any evidence to that,” he said.

            Les French of Washtech, a Seattle-based IT labor union, said politicians and major IT corporations are always claiming the H-1B is for the best and brightest. French said it’s widely felt many H-1Bs are “just average.”

            “Point of the problem is, they don’t need just those workers. They could use a lot of grunt workers,” he said of major US IT companies. “They’re totally ignoring tons of average IT students that would do a good job.”

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