Ohio companies are following the national trend of using H-1B visas to replace American workers with cheaper, foreign labor, more than one third of the H-1B visa applications for the state of Ohio were for workers at the lowest wage level, similar to an internship.
Loopholes in the H-1B program allow companies to pay the foreign workers at internship-level wages. “The worker could be experienced, but because the company has defined the position as entry level, you can pay those entry-level wage,” said Ron Hira, a Howard University professor who analyzes H-1B application data.
Many companies claim there is a labor shortage in the IT industry that the H-1B visas can fill, however, an investigation from a Dayton newspaper found that 82% of the 33,348 preliminary applications for H-1B visas in Ohio last year were for jobs paying below-average wages.
According to Hal Salzman, a professor of public policy at Rutgers University, this matches national trends, around two-thirds of H-1B visas are for workers are at the lower end of the scale. “The IT industry plans to lay off more people than it will hire under the H-1B program,” Salzman said. “That doesn’t sound like an industry that can’t find workers. The numbers just don’t add up.”
The Ohio based company, Cengage Learning, recently laid of 75 employees in January and like Disney and Toys ‘R’ Us, forced the employees to train their foreign replacements in order to receive their severance pay. Cengage Chief Information Officer, Bryan Smith, cited financial reasons for the replacement. “It was imperative that we change some of the ways we service customers in order to remain competitive in this marketplace,” he said.
While H-1B visas are not supposed to be used to displace workers there are many rules that help companies circumvent the system. Only companies who have a workforce made up of 15% of H-1B workers are required to show that they made a good effort to hire Americans first. This rule can be avoided, however, if the foreign workers makes more than $60,000 a year, which is still below the average wage for many American IT workers.
A 2011 study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office exposed how the H-1B visa was being exploited and showed that there was very little oversight of the program. According to the report the government doesn’t even know how many workers are actually in the U.S. on H-1B visas at any given time.
Read more on this story at the Dayton Daily News.
