Reply #52: The problem is there are loopholes around "paying the prevailing wage", and other things... [View All]

[cascadiance]

... that is why there have been "body shop" consulting agencies that ONLY hire H-1B visa people, and therefore can pay them whatever they want, since there is no other employees they hire that are getting a "prevailing wage". We need to make sure that we have rules that don't allow these sorts of loopholes to exist, to ensure that employers are paying even more than the prevailing wage for these employees (if they TRULY have skills that American workers don't have, and not that they can't hire for a skill set at a lower than market wage here). If its something like the ability to speak a certain language AND have certain technical skill sets, or other combinations like that which are very hard to find amongst domestic employees, THAT is the kind of hiring that H-1B visas should be used for. If the program weren't being abused, the current caps that exist would be WELL ABOVE what's needed for those kinds of hires, and companies wouldn't mind paying a little extra for those skill set combinations, where they might have to hire two domestic employees instead to get a certain job done.

I think another thing that could help American tech workers is to give them some form of union-like organization to represent their interests and be a source of information on their rights, etc. and one that could lobby to protect American tech workers for things like the H-1B Visa program, instead of counting on a lot of individuals being saavy as to what is going on and lobbying congress independently, but not as effectively, which is the situation we have today.

There are a number of technical worker professional organizations, like IEEE or ACM, that if they were to expand into this area, or work closely to help build a separate organization that would separately be tasked to help with tech worker's rights/representation if they feel their mission would conflict with a tech worker "labor" organization, that would help. I've often felt that if traditional unions had more of a "guild" like mission instead of just confrontational and workers' rights mission, that they might become more respected in society (not only for tech workers' organizations too). I think though that if such a labor organization grew out of organizations like ACM and IEEE, then perhaps it could become more of this "guild" type model, which would promote technical excellence and a brand name to get high quality workers, in addition to protecting tech workers' rights in general. That would be better than doing things like mob affiliations, etc. that got unions in trouble in the past, that more of a "power" obsession than a mission to truly help better the worker's conditions and expertise.

I think in the domain of technical workers, promoting technical excellence is especially important here, instead of just being confrontational, to maximize union membership there as well as respect from companies that would need to work with them if they were to become viable. Currently though, organizations like ACM and IEEE, as good as they are at helping tech workers improve themselves professionally, don't really provide a means to work politically/organizationally for workers' rights/well being. There's a hole there that needs to be filled.