A loophole in immigration law is costing thousands of American jobs

That's what has happened to hundreds of information technology employees at Southern California Edison. Since last summer, Edison, which serves nearly 14 million customers, has been firing its domestic IT workers and replacing them with outsourced employees from India.

In doing so, the utility is exploiting a gaping loophole in immigration law, which Congress has failed to close despite years of warnings that it's costing thousands of American jobs.

The Indian workers are brought in on H-1B visas, which are temporary work permits for "specialty occupations" — those requiring "highly specialized knowledge" and a bachelor's degree.

The purpose is to allow employers to fill slots for which adequately trained Americans aren't available, not to replace existing workers with cheap foreign labor. That's why employers such as Google and Microsoft, which say they're short of highly trained software engineers, have lobbied hard to expand the program beyond the 65,000 visas available annually. These high-tech companies say they can't meet their needs from the pool of U.S. graduates in STEM specialties — science, technology, engineering and math.

But Edison is using the program for a different purpose — to cut its wage costs, possibly by as much as 40%, according to data compiled by Ron Hira, a public policy expert at Howard University.

The pay for Edison's domestic IT specialists is about $80,000 to $160,000 not including benefits, with the average at about $120,000 for experienced personnel, according to records Edison submitted to the state Public Utilities Commission. The two Indian outsourcing firms providing workers to Edison, Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys, pay their recruits an average of about $65,000 to $71,000, according to their federal filings.

"They told us they could replace one of us with three, four, or five Indian personnel and still save money," one laid-off Edison worker told me, recounting a group meeting with supervisors last year. "They said, 'We can get four Indian guys for cheaper than the price of you.' You could hear a pin drop in the room."

This worker and the half-dozen others I interviewed asked to remain anonymous because their severance packages forbid them to speak disparagingly about the company.

These employees perform the crucial work of installing, maintaining and managing Edison's computer hardware and software for functions as varied as payroll and billing, dispatching and electrical load management across Edison's vast power generating and electric transmission network. The workers I interviewed are in their 50s or 60s and have spent decades serving as loyal Edison employees.

They're not the sort of uniquely creative engineering aces that high-tech companies say they need H-1B visas to hire from abroad, or foreign students with master's degrees or doctorates from U.S. universities who also can be employed under the H-1B program. They're experienced systems analysts and technicians for whom these jobs have been stairways from the working class to five- or six-figure middle-class incomes. Many got their training at technical institutes or from Edison itself.

Some laid-off Edison employees say the transition is not going well.

'We can get four Indian guys for cheaper than the price of you,' laid-off Edison worker says bosses told him.

Link:  http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-20150222-column.html#page=1

Sound familiar?