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Voices from the Community

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Specialty Visas

Contract labor program by any name hurts all workers

By David Bacon/PNS

Kim Singh left India thinking he had a good job in the electronics industry in Silicon Valley. Instead, he found himself in a high-tech sweatshop.

Singh, a software engineer, worked for three different companies. Each got him an H1-B immigration visa—the special non-immigrant visa that allows employers to bring in “persons in a specialty occupation which requires ... completion of a specific course of higher education.”

The first company, he says, withheld 25 percent of the salary of all its immigrant engineers. At the second, “I worked seven days a week, with no overtime compensation. And the only ones required to work on weekends were the H-1B immigrants.”

The third company rented an apartment for four engineers with H1-B visas, charging each $1450 a month, while holding onto their passports. This company “threatened to send some back to India if they didn’t get contracts. These workers were in tears. They were nervous wrecks, ashamed to ask for help from their families back home.”

The law limits on the number of H1-B visas that can be issued each year, but Silicon Valley electronics giants have been pushing to raise that number. Two Senate bills and one House bill would increase the cap from 115,000 to about 300,000 workers a year, or even lift it entirely—and word from Washington is that such move is unstoppable as both parties want the industry’s substantial campaign contributions.

But while contract labor boosts corporate bottom lines, it has a devastating impact on workers —as Singh’s story shows, even white collar engineers must work in abusive conditions and for low salaries.

Also protesting expansion of the program are African American and Latino engineers, who have waged a protracted effort to break down discrimination in high-tech hiring, and civil rights groups.

For India and the Philippines, the continuing loss of skilled engineers contributes to brain drain. Contract labor programs “are selling our human potential,” says Anuradha Mittal, Indian-born co-director of Oakland’s Food First. “Our educational system produces highly-skilled workers, who then leave to become the working poor in America. While breaking down our own ability to industrialize, we wind up subsidizing U.S. industry.”

Lobbyists for high-tech firms claim the industry faces a crippling labor shortage, threatening U.S. economic growth. The problem is not scarcity of labor, however, but a scarcity of people willing to provide high skills at the salary industry wants to pay.

AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson notes that companies themselves could train workers for vacant jobs. “They use this program to keep workers in a position of dependence,” she charges. “And because these workers are often hired under individual contracts, U.S. labor law says they don’t even have the right to organize.”

U.S. engineers used to consider themselves above unionized blue-collar workers. This year, however, thousands of Boeing Corp. engineers mounted one of the most successful strikes in recent history, using their hard-to-replace job skills as leverage to increase salaries.

Silicon Valley is clearly loath to see those events repeated. And the H1-B program — like contract labor programs for lower-wage farm and factory laborers — gives employers not only the power to hire and fire workers but also to grant them legal immigration status. If workers act in a way the employer doesn’t like — such as organizing a union or filing discrimination complaints — they can lose not only lose their jobs, but their right to stay in the U.S.

This is why organized labor sought to end the bracero program, under which growers contracted with farm workers from Mexico during the 1940s and 50s.

Agricultural interests have already introduced bills that would move back toward a bracero program — and other industries are also lining up. “We have a vast labor shortage,” declares Omaha meatpacker Angelo Fili. “I think a guestworker program would be good for our industry and good for the country.” Wages in meatpacking have remained flat for two decades.

While they quarrel over details, both Democrats and Republicans believe U.S. immigration law should be revamped to supply labor to U.S. industry. Even some immigrant rights groups support this notion.

It is true that we desperately need immigration reform—to end discrimination against Central American and Haitian refugees, fair treatment for those who missed or misunderstood the last amnesty, and more. But expanding contract labor will only increase the number of workers unable to organize and this will drive wages down for immigrants and native-born alike.

Instead, the AFL-CIO has proposed a general amnesty, to give undocumented workers the right to come out of the shadows, and an end to employer sanctions, so all workers can exercise their right to organize. Those proposals should be augmented by others increasing the number of normal immigration visas.

Immigrants will continue to arrive in the United States, driven by war and poverty. But out laws should not turn them into indentured servants. The best guarantee of a high-wage economy is enforcing workers’ right to organize, for immigrants and native-born alike.