Secretary-Treasurer Henson Participates in Labor Briefing for Senate Staff on the Abuses of the H-1B Work Visa Program
At a labor briefing for Senate staff, IFPTE Secretary-Treasurer Gay Henson shared the experiences of the TVA Engineering Association-Local 1937 members who successfully blocked their employer’s efforts to privatize their work to offshore-outsourcing firms replying on the H-1B work visa program.
The briefing was organized by the AFL-CIO Department for Professional Employees (DPE) with the support of Senator Dick Durbin’s (D-IL) office and hosted by DPE President Jennifer Dorning. Sen. Durbin and Sen. Chuck Grassley are lead sponsors of the bipartisan H-1B and L-1 Visa Reform Act, which was reintroduced in the Senate last month, legislation that reforms the H-1B visa by closing loopholes, curtailing offshore-outsourcing firms from taking advantage of H-1B visas, and increasing audits and enforcement of employers using H-1Bs.
Senate staffers from over 25 offices attended the briefing and heard Henson — who was Eastern Federal Area Vice President and EA/Local 1937 president at the time of the TVA privatization and outsourcing attempt — discuss how Local 1937 halted the outsourcing and was able to protect members’ jobs by raising the issue to national prominence, building solidarity in the community and with the broader labor movement , and pointing out the hypocrisy of outsourcing federal jobs meant to benefit and develop the Tennessee Valley. Local 1937’s experience shows how IT outsourcing firms are using the H-1B visa program as part of a model to outsource, offshore, and, in TVA’s case, privatize jobs while employing workers with lower wages who are captive to their H-1B sponsoring employers.
Henson shared, “Our members at TVA who were about be laid off were told by management to ‘take the high road’ and ‘be professional’” as they were tasked “transferring knowledge” under the employers threat that they would be fired immediately, lose severance, and not be considered for future employment at TVA.
The Senate staffers also heard from a union organizer from OPEIU Local 1010 about how H-1B work visa denies basic protections to H-1B workers and acted as a barrier to union organizing in a recent tech sector organizing campaign. Attendees also heard from an AFT union member from Maryland who was one of 350 Filipino teachers who was employed in Louisiana public schools on an H-1B visa after being cheated out of thousands of dollars and forced into exploitative contracts by international recruitment firms. Ron Hira, a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute and Howard University Professor, discussed his findings on how the flaws, fraud, and abuse in the H-1B program cheat H-1B workers and U.S. workers, crowd out employers that legitimately want to hire foreign workers with specialty skills, and disincentivize employers from offering higher wages and workforce investment to find workers with needed skills. Hira also shared the recent discovery of an internal document from offshore-outsourcing firm HCL that reveals the company underpaid H-1B workers by a total of $95 million in 2016, meaning the company knowingly reduced labor costs by hiring H-1B workers instead of recruiting workers already in the U.S. and then cheated H-1B workers out of a fair wage.
Read IFPTE’s 2022 Issue Brief [PDF] on the H-1B and L-1 Visa Reform Act here.