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Subject:US professional issues From:Nancy Hickman <nhickman -at- GVI -dot- NET> Date:Thu, 15 Oct 1998 11:43:35 -0500
For those of you watching the US Congress, HR3736 was revived (after
being dead, of course) in the US congress to allow 142,500 more visas
for foreign workers per year. This may be of particular concern to those
of you in areas that have seen many layoffs recently.
At issue with the president of the IEEE, is that companies are not
making a good faith effort to hire local talent or to redeploy older
workers. Likewise, there is little evidence of enforcement of work
protections that are in place to require businesses that use the visas
to pay prevailing wages and have prevailing protections of local
workers. I have seen abuses in action. For example, a local business
posted a notice for a software job for only 40 minutes on a breakroom
bulletin board during the usual lunch hour when people were out. This
was called "a good faith effort to recruit locally."
Please contact your representatives and senators and let them know where
you fall on the issue.
If you are interested in how the US laws and proposed laws could affect
contractors and employees in our area of work, send an email to me.
