How-Not-to-Hire-U.S.-Workers Law Firm Fires Back 462
theodp writes "Congress is now calling for a Dept. of Labor investigation into a Pittsburgh law firm after a video showing its attorneys advising employers how to game the immigration system was posted on YouTube. Cohen & Grigsby, the firm in question, issued a statement insisting their statements were commandeered and misused, but would not allow CBS to view the original video in its entirety. Cohen & Grigsby has also been advising employers since 2002 that they have nothing to fear if they keep employees in the dark about the existence of DOL-required H-1B Public Access Files."
their website (Score:5, Insightful)
Moot (Score:4, Insightful)
Chickens. Home. Roost. (Score:5, Insightful)
Shameful (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:DELETE THE BORDER (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish. (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing new here, sadly (Score:5, Insightful)
The way the system is set up, how can it be any other way... if a company has decided they want to get someone a green card, then of course they do whatever they can to achieve that. If they instead wanted to replace the person with a US worker then they'd be doing an honest job search, and NOT pursing a green card. Duh! The law says you have to advertize the job, so you put an ad for the job in the most obscure paper possible, with the job requirements so custom tailored to the person you are trying to get a green card for that no one else can qualify. I'm sure it works better than ever in recent years now that most people expect to find job openings online rather than in the local paper.
What's lame here is Congress pretending to give a crap (presumably just because this particular story/video has hit the press) and wanting to investigate this particular law firm. One has to wonder are they being investigated for breaking the law, or rather just for making Congress look bad by openly flaunting the law? If Congress really gave a crap they'd fix the broken system rather than go after a law firm doing nothing different than every other law firm hired to assist in this process.
What Problem? I don't see one. (Score:3, Insightful)
Second issue: Do "illegals" really want to stay in this country? Here in Washington State, that's not the case. Many "illegals" make reasonably good money here for hard work, and send it home, where they will eventually retire, in a place where money is worth more than it is here. Not all "illegals" intend to stay, and very, very, very few take any jobs away from "Americans". When people talk about "immigration problems", most are not talking about High Tech jobs.
Please don't sanction this law firm.... (Score:4, Insightful)
compete with, goes out and hires these guys to help them hire as many "low-bid" workers as they can.
Meanwhile, I'll focus on hiring the best workers possible, regardless of where they are from, and eventually run
these other guys out of business anyway.
Re:DELETE THE BORDER (Score:3, Insightful)
Tip of the Iceberg (Score:3, Insightful)
And for those of you bitching about how us Americans don't have any more right to a job than anybody else, suck it. Every country has a responsibility to give first priority to the employment and prosperity of its own TAX PAYING citizens. America is no exception. Any company, from any country, found acting in bad faith with the government and its citizens, should be dealt with very harshly.
Distasteful is not the same as Illegal (Score:5, Insightful)
The job of the lawyer is to know the law inside out so that they can assist their client. The job of the legislator is to draft laws and regulations that have as few loopholes and weaknesses as possible.
If blame is to be assigned, it goes to the lawmakers.
Honestly though I suspect that most companies paying for this kind of advice are probably fooling themselves. Between the falling U.S. dollar, legal costs, and the inefficiencies associated with training and replacing short term or contract employees they likely aren't saving enough money to make it worthwhile.
Just because it looks cheap doesn't mean it really saves you money.
Re:Chickens. Home. Roost. (Score:5, Insightful)
get real (Score:5, Insightful)
I've seen these requirements for formal job postings in non-immigration contexts as well, and they never work. If finding qualified, good applicants were as simple as posting a job ad and collecting resumes, headhunters and hiring bounties would be such a booming business.
Security Clearance (Score:3, Insightful)
The rest of the world wonders why America has suddenly taken to blowing up small nations... when many of the only moderately secure jobs in the US are in the defense sector.
Sigh.
Re:Shameful (Score:3, Insightful)
What the H-1B worker gets you is someone that can't switch jobs. They need a sponsoring employer and have about two weeks to leave the country if they lose that sponsoring employer that brought them in. Switching sponsors isn't trivial. So you have a worker that can't quit and unless they want to return to the armpit of a place they came from, they will do what they are told and keep their mouth shut.
This has little to do with wages and everything to do with worker "loyalty."
Re:Nothing new here, sadly (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right. This has been going on since the inception of the H1-B program. In 1990, I watched a parade of US citizens interviewing where I worked for an engineering job opening later filled by an H1-B. The opening had also been posted to a bulletin board there with a salary that was about $10k less than a US citizen fresh out of engineering school would have made. Management was annoyed at having to jump through these hoops to obtain the cheap labor.
What is new here is the YouTube factor. The lawyer isn't really sorry his comments were commandeered. He's sorry he and the others got busted on YouTube. This film is an outrage, as is the H1-B program. It takes a film like this to cause a stink. Too bad we didn't have YouTube 17 years ago.
Re:good faith (Score:4, Insightful)
Did you actually watch the video in question? The lawyers gave explicit suggestions on how to rig the interview and advertising process to avoid getting responses from qualified US citizens. If that isn't bad faith, I don't know what is. This is not just an executive order, or a regulation propounded by a goverment agency, this is an honest-to-gosh law passed by congress. You may not like it, it may be inconvenient, it may even be foolish, but it is the law. You can challenge it court, you can lobby to have it changed, but to simply conspire to evade the law by fraud is corrosive of the rule of law.
An awful lot of Slashdot readers believe that US intellectual property law is out of step with the real world. Are they justified in simply ignoring it?
That explains alot. (Score:2, Insightful)
This would explain all those job adds with ridiculous requirements, and how I could never find work when I lived in Pittsburgh. Then again perhaps it was just the economy at the time.
Re:get real (Score:3, Insightful)
I for one have no problem with that behavior. Would you rather have the H1B go back to his home country because he can't renew his visa any longer, and compete with you from overseas? He'll still get the job, be paid less, and not contribute to the American economy at all.
Make it easier for them to come here and stay here. Stopping them will just make the competition even more unfair for Americans.
The solution is simple really (Score:3, Insightful)
of my life in the US military. There are 10's of thousands of other troops on the front lines
in Iraq fighting insurgents. These brave men are putting their lives on the line every day so that we here in the states can maintain what freedoms we still have and assisting in securing our national interests.
If you want to immigrate to the US then fine you spend 4 years active duty in my country's military and earn your green card. Everyone able bodied and of qualified military age should have to serve
4 years in our military to earn a green card. After those 4 years if someone want's to deny you
a green card, I will be the first to help you kick their ass.
Our troops ain't over there right now risking their lives just so they can come home and be
denied jobs because of crap like this!
Now tell me I am wrong!
Cohen? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What Problem? I don't see one. (Score:3, Insightful)
You are making a common mistake.
Everyone understands that "If company A raises prices, people would go to company B".
But for some reason everyone assumes that if the *entire industry* raises prices, people would just pay up.
That is not true - if *industry A* raises prices, people will look for alternatives.
So, if McDonalds and Wendy's would have to charge more, people would look for alternatives - packing lunch from home, etc. Then their people would... lose their jobs.
These people could then afford to pay more for rent and maybe apartment building owners could make some improvements.
Nope, they cannot find any other job with their skills and will be out on the streets or on social security.
See? Everybody wins.
Only in a world where marginal productivity does not matter. Unfortunately (for you), in this world, people's rewards are tied to what they can produce. No amount of govt. meddling can change that fact.
Re:USians feel they're entined to everything (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, he has a point: Employers shopping for workforce in cheap countries is no different from a consumer choosing to buy cheap products at a mall store than a more expensive and smaller local store.
The dumbest persons alive are the people who think that "hire American" will work any better than the car industry "buy American" did.
Re:USians feel they're entined to everything (Score:4, Insightful)
If my cornfield has plentiful heads of corn because I practiced wise field practices, watered and weeded regularly, should I have more rights to the corn than random people driving down the highway who decide they want some of my corn now that it is ripe?
If my city engages in good policy so that we have a good economy should I not have more rights to employment in my city than strangers who had no part in building but merely snuck in at night after we had done the hard work?
If my country engages in an economic and political system which over the course of 40 years causes my country to have surplus and the country next door (say a religious quasi dictator plutocracy with rampant corruption) reduces itself to ruin over 40 years, should non-citizens be able to come in, break the law (w/regard to housing, driving, paying taxes, forged documents, etc. etc.), and have more right to a job than citizens?
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However as far as capitalism goes- with real capitalism, we would be able to buy our drugs for
Re:their website (Score:3, Insightful)
The "read between the lines" parts of the presentation are fascinating: the implication that an employer could and should find some excuse to block US employees that they can put on paper, even a weak one, is very typical of such a discussion with a corporate attorney.
Re:USians feel they're entined to everything (Score:5, Insightful)
Further, capitalism is fine. However, while the average corporation can seek out labor all over the planet and simply put up an office or hire workers from the cheapest areas, the American citizen does not have such a pool to choose from - neither in terms of employment or cost of living.
A corporation can pick from the entire planet and decide to invest in an area where they can pay experienced professionals as much in salary as the average American citizen pays in rent. While the corporation and the American citizen may be based in America, the corporation is not constrained by the dynamics, labor supply and financial situation of this country. The worker, however, is. We don't have a choice. Milk is about $3.85 per gallon. Period. I can't go somewhere and buy it for a nickel a gallon. And if you want to live close enough to these corporations to work for them, you're usually looking at more expensive living. You will pay $800 or $1,000 or $2,000 for a one bedroom apartment or half a million bucks for a small house. Period. Unless you plan on commuting 1500 miles from some hill in the midwest out to the west coast every morning.
Then, to add insult to injury, this shoddy form of sham-capitalism isn't enough for them. They want to compound it by telling us that Americans are not plentiful enough or educated enough. Now, if there is a shortage of milk or gas, I have to pay more money for it. If there is a shortage of experienced labor in this country, corporations simply artificially adjust the value of these workers by lobbying government to let them bring in more employees from overseas or to simply move a chunk of their own operations overseas.
People try to suggest that Americans are racist or xenophobic when all they are doing is showing concern for their well-being and their careers. They have a right to do so. Especially when - on top of the imbalanced system - we have underhanded corporations and services as in this article working to drill us even further into the ground.
Re:Shameful (Score:3, Insightful)
From Family Guy:
Guy: Hello I've come to join your town.
Peter: Do you have a degree in anything?
Guy: Well actually yeah I'm a doctor.
Peter: Yeah well I hope you get it. Pick a job.
[Guy picks a job out of the hat]
Peter: Woah you got the village idiot! On Tuesdays you get to wave your penis at the traffic.
Handing out visas by lottery and sending home a worker that a company would have paid a fortune to sponsor doesn't make any sense either.
The only problem is that we'd have to think about how government officials may be tempted to change the number of visas to affect revenue. My guess is that the number of visas that produces the highest overall revenue is probably the correct number to issue anyway, but I'm not totally sure.
They ARE breaking the letter of the law. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Distasteful is not the same as Illegal (Score:2, Insightful)
Who are mostly lawyers. So we are back to blaming the lawyers.
Re:their website (Score:3, Insightful)
When that happens, what are you supposed to do? Do you follow the "spirit" that the anti-immigration side wanted, or the "spirit" that the pro-immigration side wanted?
Re:their website (Score:2, Insightful)
Ever heard of justice, guys?
That's where you let serious people weigh the evidence before letting the axe fall.
If you have to do something write 'Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Representative Lamar Smith (R-Tex.)' and tell them how you feel.
They can at least use your engagement to positive ends.
Re:And without H1b you wouldnt have it today (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes, because it was that damn loyalty to the position that was keeping me from realizing my dreams of running the next multi-billion dollar IPO. Thank god for foreign labor or I might have been employed forever!
Re:Moot (Score:3, Insightful)
A strong dollar means lots of stuff can be imported. Maybe that's bad for you if you're trying to export some cheap crap, or sell to tourists, but it's good for everyone else. Your model works well in 3rd-world countries with good tourism economies, like various Caribbean islands. It doesn't work for an economic superpower. Have you noticed that western Europe has an extremely high standard of living, yet their currency is very highly valued? There's a reason for this. Now notice that the Mexican peso is worth less than dirt, and the standard of living there is downright horrific. Again, there's a reason for this correlation.
There's not enough raw materials in Europe or North America for our economies to be fully self-supporting, not yet at least. One big thing we're lacking is energy, mainly from oil. We also need lots of other raw materials for our industries, such as copper and steel. Copper in particular has risen in value dramatically, and is very important for the housing industry among others. The big problem we're having is that India and China's economies have dramatically strengthened, and they're buying a lot more oil, copper, and steel, and as a consequence our prices are going way up. If the Dollar were much stronger, we wouldn't notice this so much.