The Department of Labor (DOL) banned two Silicon Valley contracting firms used by Apple, eBay, and Cisco from hiring immigrant workers with high-skilled visas for underpaying employees nearly $1,000 a month.
Sunnyvale, California-based contractors Orian Engineers and Scopus Consulting Group improperly classified immigrant employees with H-1B visas as entry level despite them having significant work experience or graduate-level degrees, according to the Labor Department’s two-year investigation.
“Some of the country’s most cutting-edge, successful organizations benefit from underpaid H-1B workers,” said Susana Blanco, director for DOL’s San Francisco-based Wage and Hour Division in a news release. “H-1B workers must be paid local prevailing wages. We will not allow companies to undercut local wages and hurt U.S. workers and businesses who pay their workers fairly.”
A total of 21 workers Apple, eBay, and Cisco hired through the two firms earned only $5,000 of the typically $6,000 monthly wages of non-immigrant workers with the same position, the San Francisco Business Times reported.
But while the tech giants aren’t legally culpable for the wage theft, but they can benefit from contractors’ behavior, according to Michael Eastman, the assistant director of Wage and Hour in DOL’s San Francisco bureau.
“Legally, the responsibility is with the (contractors) … but there’s also the potential for these tech companies to benefit from having these workers underpaid because the supplier charges less,” he told the San Francisco Business Times.
DOL ordered Orian and Scopus to pay $84,000 in back wages along with $103,000 in fines. The firms are also barred from hiring workers with H-1B visas for a year.
Tech companies heavily recruit employees from overseas through the U.S. H-1B visa program for highly skilled workers. The H-1B visa program was created to allow companies to hire the best possible employees worldwide — often when the domestic applicant pool won’t suffice — for the sake of innovation and to stay competitive.
Tech companies have been criticized for abusing the program, hiring a disproportionate amount of employees through the program — a practice that has been criticized as being exploitative to immigrant workers and counterintuitive to the industry’s diversity efforts.
That over-reliance often translates to H-1B employees being underpaid or not paid at all and potentially illegally charged application fees by contracting firms.