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Subject:Re: US professional issues From:David Knopf <david -at- KNOPF -dot- COM> Date:Thu, 15 Oct 1998 13:24:36 -0700
| -----Original Message-----
| From: Technical Writers List; for all Technical Communication issues
| [mailto:TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU]On Behalf Of Nancy Hickman
| Sent: Thursday, October 15, 1998 9:44 AM
| To: TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU
| Subject: US professional issues
|
|
| For those of you watching the US Congress, HR3736 was revived (after
| being dead, of course) in the US congress to allow 142,500 more visas
| for foreign workers per year. This may be of particular concern to those
| of you in areas that have seen many layoffs recently.
|
| At issue with the president of the IEEE, is that companies are not
| making a good faith effort to hire local talent or to redeploy older
| workers. Likewise, there is little evidence of enforcement of work
| protections that are in place to require businesses that use the visas
| to pay prevailing wages and have prevailing protections of local
| workers. I have seen abuses in action. For example, a local business
| posted a notice for a software job for only 40 minutes on a breakroom
| bulletin board during the usual lunch hour when people were out. This
| was called "a good faith effort to recruit locally."
I'm not a lawyer but I'm sure that's not legal. Having once hired someone
under an H1B visa, I can say we really had to jump through hoops to get it
through:
- The job posting was required to be up in-house for 15 or 30 days (I can't
remember which right now)
- We had to obtain a ruling from the California Dept of Labor substantiating
our claim that the salary we proposed to pay was in fact the "prevailing
wage" for someone with the background and skills we were looking for
- We had to run advertising in a major newspaper three times at a cost of
over $1,000
- We had to interview every single candidate who applied
- We had to provide a written justification for declining each American
candidate (none of the American applicants had even close to what we were
looking for in terms of qualifications)
- The process was costly in terms of legal fees, filing fees, and so
forth -- not to mention the agonizing frustration of dealing with INS, which
makes the IRS look downright efficient
Fortunately, we were able to find an H1B worker who could do the job. If we
hadn't, the position would have gone unfilled, period. Since the 65,000
visas allowable under the current law were all issued in the first six
months of this year, I expect there are quite a few companies in the Bay
Area that simply can't fill positions right now.
Also, for the record, I believe Congress is proposing a *temporary*
expansion in the number of H1B visas allowable on an annual basis, returning
to the 65,000 currently allowed in somewhat under 5 years.
