It's a visa program that allows employers to sponsor foreign talent. Those employees can basically stay in the country as long as they maintain employment with the sponsoring business. It's been an important program for industries that don't have a big enough domestic talent pool, and for businesses that require niche talent that's not always available from the domestic talent pool. Technology companies and biotech companies tend to use the program the most.
Discussion
Great for when US companies don't want to pay the going rate for American workers. They can import cheaper foreign workers, who will work longer hours for less pay and not complain.
If the company pairs this employment contract with a nice long non-compete, the company gets a super loyal employee. If the employee tried to switch they wouldn't be able to, as the visa would expire before the non-compete.
Now the controversy becomes clearer. Thanks for providing further info
Tesla (and all the other big Techs) would have to pay 30% more for American Workers, which would eat into corporate profit margins.
The cost of Labor in the EU is to high. To much tax and destruktive minimal vages. Just get rid of everything and live free.
I was talking about the US and also talking about skilled and high paid workers for which the H1B targets.
Most of these hires are devs getting paid 100s of thousands, very far away from the minimum wage.
They create immense value for the tech companies they work for probably on the order of millions per employee, for which the tech companies will try to share as little as possible with the worker.
Across all employees tech giants generate $1-2m in revenue per employee but a large number of those employees will be lower wage lower impact employees, so the high impact devs will be generating much more than the overall average in terms of revenue per high impact devs.
While very opaque to outside observers (and even the employees), the tech firms have all the data to calculate with reasonable accuracy the revenue impact per employee. Unless that employee is very aware of their value to the company, it will be challenging for them to argue for more salary or make viable and effective threats to leave if they don't raise their salary.
Very often absolute highest impact employees for tech giants will be getting screwed the most as a percentage, in spite of getting paid huge salaries in the millions.
That's not my experience with it. The people who are typically given the waiver are tech and science workers, and their salaries are in line with what anyone else would be paid in those positions. It functions more like a stopgap to fill positions they're unable to fill with the current domestic labor pool than as some money saving measure. But I'm sure there are cases that reflect what you're saying. I'm just speaking on my own firsthand experience.
It is also super hard to know if you are being underpaid or not, a lot of US workers get underpaid too.
It can also manifest in the H1B workers not getting pay raises or extra discretionary pay. When it comes time to raise salaries companies will almost do it on the basis of whether or not that person will leave to a competitor. The H1B employees have a much harder time leaving to a competitor.
Big companies will even collude to stop their employees leaving between each other, so that they can keep all of their wages now and avoid competition on salaries.
I've worked for two companies that used H1B visa workers, and I knew what they were being paid. Their salaries were in line with domestic workers in their positions. Now, my experience is based on a small sample size, but in talking with those employees about the H1B and their related experiences, I didn't come away with the feeling that these employees were being underpaid. But again, that's just based on my personal experience and what I've been told by employees in that program.