Thread regarding AT&T layoffs

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/1044/text

This bills will speed up all India H1b permanent residents. Too sad to say all of our jobs are in danger now.

@dmk - not sure you have noticed but trump has made friends with 50,000 indians in houston this past weekend after he figured out we can export a but load of oil to them. it's the art of the deal i guess, expect more visas to come.

https://www.texastribune.org/2019/09/22/trump-houston-modi-india-trade-economy/

It is not that we hadn't tried, but here was what we got in the past:

1. We interviewed great candidates with advanced degrees in good universities and gave them offers, they all passed;
2. We hired excellent people. All of them left within 2 or 3 years;
3. We hired a senior folk with decades of experience in the industry. He complained too much training to do and eventually decided to quit because he felt that was not what he signed to do and he had already earned enough to retire;
4. We hired a fresh graduate. He left within 4 months after we gave him many works in spreadsheets;
5. We once hired someone with a STEM degree and came from some good tech firm, not H1B and gave him top dollars. Guess what? He was not capable of most things he claimed on his resume.

So now we're very wary of hiring people especially FTE after we spent so much time to train them and tried to make them motivated only to see they left eventually.

If there is merit in this, then the complaint will have to against specific vendor and who employ the h1b where you see the abuse. ATO has nothing to with this part. Also, it is to be noted that h1b employees are full time with their company and most do not get paid by the hour. So the # of hours is not baked in the salary strucure..like non exempt management employee. So not sure of the legal or technical violation of the norms. Most folks in amazon, msft, google etc put in more than 40 hours regardless of visa or nationality anyways. Is it ethical for the companies to expect that, No? But does it violate laws? This is where companys legal and hr manage to skirt around by the way of contracts.

If you want to see the org chart for all ATT IDs with employee's vs contractor numbers I found this from some guy in labs (http://silk.research.att.com/~jklosow/INTERNAL/attorg.php/att.html) I am planning on tracking these numbers weekly to chart out changes in certain orgs and the company as a whole

Maybe if you showed more gratefulness for being employed with great benefits the company wouldn’t be repacking you with H1B scabs.

Yes, unfortunately no one complains to USCIS. The issue is AT&T is not hiring them as H1B Visa holders but they are hiring them as contractors through the Indian companies. Indian contracting companies treat the employees very bad including not paying wages when they are benched, overtime pay, etc. I know lot of personal stories. To even circumvent legal H1B rules, some of these Indian employers will pay them officially during their bench period but the employees has to give them back in cash what ever NET they got paid. The reason H1B Visa holders itself would not complain because they are at their employer's mercy to be in the USA. Now-a-days, if you look at India churns out dime a dozen engineering graduates with very sub par quality and skill set. Up until mid 80's it was very hard to get into Engineering colleges in India (Only very top cream of the crop) was able to get in, so the engineers who came here to do MS and subsequently got their GC's were of exceptional quality. Now 80% of the Indian graduates who come to work these high end slave jobs through H1B are very sub-par quality. 9 years back, I was trying to get rid of one Indian Contractor as I have to spoon feed her every step of the work and ended up doing her job and finally my manager at that time got rid off her after 6 months of me constantly complaining, only to be replaced by another Indian contractor -only good thing this replacement contractor was at least following directions!

The political problem is both parties are to be blamed. They succumb to pressure from companies like Microsoft, HP, Apple, Amazon, Google, etc. to increase H1B quota so that they can hire these cheap labors, where they get their funding for re-election. USA is not a true democracy, it's lobbyist(money powered) democracy.

H1B rules needs to be drastically changed - Faster H1B but not through contracting houses. But if companies like AT&T, Microsoft, Apple, etc wants to hire H1B then they have to directly pay them based on the comparable legal USA citizen/permanent resident would be paid for the same job. Those wages has to be reported to the Labor department. If these tight rules are bought in, USA citizen/permanent residents would not loose their job to be replaced by low paying H1B workers.

I am happy to see Trump is going after China, to stop flooding the USA market with garbage and in turn taking 1/6 off trade from USA.

I can go on...

You are barking up a tree to nowhere. None of these people are direct H1B hires. The company just has an Statement of work with the contracting company. Not sure what you claim is illegal abuse. All the one's I have interacted with have no problems with schedules, and they have all the time off as everyone else. It's all good business sense, as most are doing some temporary capital project. There are some expense filling spaces where nobody available to direct hire.

With the money the corps give to government good luck getting it enforced. But the working 60 hours and getting paid for 40 show what corporations really want. This is why lobbyists should be illegal because it leads to fascism which can take many forms.

"H1B contractors are forced to work weekends and nights but still only bill 40 hours to the client."

This gives the false impression that the H1B contractor is more efficient than the FTE with usually far more experience.

This is especially problematic with hourly contractors who subcontract below one of the large outsourcing firms. They work 60 hours but report and get paid for only 40, a clear violation of FLSA.