Posted on 06/18/2007 5:53:11 PM PDT by calcowgirl
IT professionals criticize a law firm's video play-by-play description on how to circumvent the PERM process in favor of H-1B visas.
YouTube bites again. A law firm's attempt to get positive exposure for an immigration law conference by posting it on You Tube backfired when an organization that's been tough on H-1B visas and offshore outsourcing copied it and made a controversial video of its own. In the original video, posted by the firm Cohen & Grigsby from a May 15 conference, an attorney is shown advising attendees on how to meet the minimum requirements of advertising a job to U.S. candidates so that a foreign worker can more easily be hired. The firm's conference dealt with the U.S. government's labor certification requirement for foreign workers, the first step in helping them obtain green cards. The law requires that an employer prove there are no qualified U.S. citizens for a permanent job being offered before hiring a non-citizen.
In one 10-minute segment of the conference video, a panel of lawyers are shown discussing Program Electronic Review Management (PERM), an electronic labor certification system the government put in place two years ago to reduce certification to under 60 days. It was that portion of the video lambasted by the Programmers Guild, an organization of IT professionals that is staunchly protectionist against the loss of U.S. jobs to foreign workers both onshore and offshore.
The PERM process requires that an employer post a job in at least three places and allow 30 days for job candidates to respond for the employer to review resume. If no interested and qualified U.S. workers respond, an employer can instantly and electronically apply for a foreign worker's labor certification.
In the video, a Cohen & Grigsby attorney advises attendees that posting the job at an employer's Web site and with a local newspaper is usually enough to fill the minimum requirement, if the newspaper also posts the job online.
Another attorney, Lawrence Lebowitz, adds, "We're going to try to find a place [to advertise] where we are complying with the law and hoping, and likely, not to find qualified and interested worker applicants." A different firm attorney mentions less desirable methods that are more likely to pull in qualified and interested workers, including job fairs, online job sites like Monster.com, campus recruitments, and job placement firms.
In its YouTube video, the Programmer's Guild accuses the firm of using fake job ads to fulfill the PERM process. "These ads constitute fraud on American job seekers," says the organization in its text leading into the video.
Contacted at his Pittsburgh office the afternoon of June 18, Lebowitz said he was reviewing the matter with other partners in the firm and declined comment at this time.
The law firm removed the conference video sometime between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m. Eastern daylight time on June 18.
Prior FR Thread: How to not hire an American
Money Quote:
"Our goal is clearly NOT to find a qualified U.S. worker... our objective is to get this person a green card ... so certainly we are not going to try to find a place where applicants would be most numerous."
-Lawrence M. Lebowitz - VIce President of Marketing, Cohen & Grigsby
FYI.
I'm sure some enterprising lawyer can manage to find RICO case.
That’s why our corporations are always bribing congress to increase the number of H1-B visas,so they can avoid paying Americans the going Market wage.
These Corporations are going to kill the middle class because of greed.If they wreck the American Middle class who do they think will buy their products.
Job Fairs. What a laugh. They only serve to make an employer look good.
Nothing like a lawyer....
Not just Corporations.
Apparently the California Republican Party couldn’t find any Americans to employ, instead using an H1B visa to hire a Canadian. The guy doing the hiring for the CRP is an Australian.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1850876/posts
Of course, the Governor is an Austrian citizen, so I guess we shouldn’t be surprised.
They just hate it when their anti-American unethical tactics are exposed.
No doubt they will continue on without shame. ;-(
But of course. They can’t become something other than what they are in the dark, greedy heart of hearts.
Wow. This is bullshiite. Good find Calcowgirl.
Sam, please forward this on to your father. I think he will be very interested in this.
Which is funny cuz that's where the middle class works, and whose stock the middle class owns. The market will dictate. They're not trying to kill the middle class. Just trying to keep costs down.
Which is fine. It's the atempt to circumvent the intent of the law that bothers people. The whole point was to allow corporations to hire foreigners when they can't find a qualified US worker. That's not what's happening here, and that is what is wrong.
Wow - that video is wicked. I would like to see the HR people in it lose their jobs to an immigrant. How many applications do they get of people out of jobs? This is just wrong.
Correciton in previous post:
not immigrant - H1B visa person. Legal immigrants AOK. Corporations trying to NOT hire Americans - slimely.
As a veteran of Silly Valley, I can attest that what you see here is 100% true: job descriptions that are made to meet the legal requirements that “no H1B visa or green card holder takes a job from an American” are carefully crafted to make sure that no one will be able to meet the requirements of the H1B visa holder that has retained the lawyers in pursuit of a green card.
The other dirty little secret out there is this: H1B visa employees are the closest thing to indentured servants since the end of the Civil War. When you’re working under a H1B visa, you have to pretty much take whatever crap your “sponsoring company” is handing out until such time as you get your green card, which requires forking over quite a tidy sum to a law firm like Cohen & Grigsby. H1B visa holders, if fired, by law have to return to their home country before applying for another H1B (or other) visa to enter the US.
This ends up working as a lengthy probation period. If the H1B holder doesn’t work out for the hiring company, they just choose to not continue his employment at the end of his visa; legally, he is now up a creek. If the employer deems him worthy of retention, the employer might hire the lawyers to get the green card process moving right along. At the point that the employee gains his green card, then his pay often goes up, or generous stock options are granted to implement a golden handcuff to keep the guy in place.
my ex went to work for cohen and grigsby in pitt. I went to one of their events - they were mostly a bunch of a-holes.
Well, circumvention of legal intent all depends on who's ox is getting gored, doesn't it? I don't know a businessman doesn't try to cut costs/corners. And anyway, how do you know what the whole point was? Maybe the whole point all along was to import cheap labor, and the bit about "when they can't find qualified US workers" was just crapola to sell it to the rubes. Not trying to hassle you about it. Just saying.
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