Surviving the New Economy by John Amman Tris Carpenter Gina Neff

Author:John Amman, Tris Carpenter, Gina Neff [John Amman, Tris Carpenter, Gina Neff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317251095
Google: F2EeCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-12-03T02:51:02+00:00

HIGH-TECH BODY SHOPS

One of the earliest and best publicized disputes concerning unfair job competition between foreign nonimmigrant and U.S. high-technology workers is the Sona Shah legal dispute, which continues to influence debates on immigrant workers. Shah, an American citizen of Indian descent, lost her programming job at the investment bank Goldman Sachs when the firm decided to subcontract the entire department to ADP Wilco, a London-based global outsourcing firm. ADP Wilco casts itself as a cost-efficient way to reduce labor costs by replacing higher-paid permanent staff with lower-paid temporary workers:

Users of ADP Wilco’s outsourcing solutions can benefit from lower operating costs. Processing expenses become a variable cost based on transactional volumes, rather than a fixed overhead requiring a significant up-front investment. This results in a more predictable profit stream and a fast-track return on investment.2

In 1998 Shah found herself working in New York City’s financial district alongside foreign programmers whom Goldman Sachs had outsourced through ADP Wilco. Most of the workers were earning a fraction of the going wages for programmers, $200–$250 per hour. Still, Shah told me that ADP Wilco billed Goldman Sachs $275 per hour.

Working conditions differed as well. Shah said in an interview that H-1B workers typically worked 70 hours a week, significantly more hours than full-time Goldman Sachs employees, who also received health benefits and pensions. “Wilco workers from around the world barely made enough to make ends meet and certainly not enough to save,” she added. Even some normally complacent H-1B workers began to complain about their working and living conditions. Most of the H-1B holders lived with co-workers across the Hudson River in New Jersey in ramshackle housing obtained through ADP Wilco.

ADP Wilco, according to Shah, is a body shop, a word that conjures images of indentured servants permitted in the United States to maximize corporate profits, only to be sent home upon completion of the job. Most, though, believe they stand a chance at permanent employment. Shah noted in an interview that “H-1Bs are told to work diligently without complaining in return for the possibility of getting a job in their home country or coming back to the United States on L-1 visas as essential company employees.”3 While some H-1B workers may earn enough to establish a business back home, Shah contends that most are essentially part of the global trade in workers. Subcontracting company executives, however, say that not all nonimmigrant high-technology workers end up working at low wages under poor conditions. But most body shops are smaller firms that mislead workers by promising that they will make it big in the United States, only to subject workers to living precariously and not paying them at all. Workers who complain can always be fired, subjecting them to deportation by government authorities. This is exactly what happened at ADP Wilco, say Shah and other visa holders who worked for the company and whom I interviewed.

When H-1B workers at Goldman Sachs discovered the disparity in salary and benefits, a large number wanted greater parity. In 1998, Shah and H-1B employees who complained about their conditions were dismissed.

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