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http://us.rediff.com/money/2004/feb/05us.htm

Wipro, TCS, Infy abusing L-1 visas: US unions

T V Parasuram in Washington | February 05, 2004 14:24 IST

Amid growing resentment in the United States against outsourcing,
labour organisations in the US have accused Indian IT majors Wipro,
Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys Technologies of "abusing" the
L-1 visa programme to bring in cheap manpower to take over American
jobs.


These companies were acting as "bodyshops",  bringing in foreign
workers through the L-1 system and then subcontracting them out to
other businesses, Michael W Gildea, executive director of the
Department for Professional Employees, AFL-CIO, America's largest
labour federation, told the House International Relations Committee on
Wednesday.

Some of these firms and others like them had a "troubled history"
under the H-1B visa programme. "Yet, these firms are now among the
biggest users of the L-1 programme supplying Indian IT talent to a
who's who of the Fortune 500 corporations," he said.

The L-1 visa programme is designed to bring management executives and
experts to companies owned by their employers with operations in the
US.

L-1 visas are for "intra-company transferees" and L-2 visas are
granted to their spouses and dependent children.

Dan Stein, executive director for American Immigration Reform, told
the committee that unlike applicants for other categories of temporary
employment visas, L-1 visa holders need not maintain a legal intent to
return home.

This makes it easier for them to get on track to petition for
permanent resident status "and makes something of a mockery of the
idea that this is a temporary visa programme," he said.

Quoting a Business Week report last year, Stein said Siemens
Technologies laid off a dozen hightech workers in their Lake Mary,
Florida, office and replaced them with foreign workers supplied by TCS
working on L-1 visas.

These foreign workers, on an average, are paid about one-third of what
the laid-off Americans earned, he claimed.

Sun Microsystems has said it does not give American workers preference
in its hiring and layoff decisions, and large banks, like Bank of
America, have been quite open about their use of this programme to
employ less expensive foreign workers, Stein added.

Gildea said that according to the San Francisco Chronicle, TCS
acknowledged it paid some of the replacement programmers "only $36,000
a year - below the average local range of $37,794 to 69,000 for a
basic programmer."

This was "well below the compensation levels paid to those US
employees who were laid off as a result of their deal with Tata
Consultancy Services," he added.

India-born Sona Shah, who came to the US at the age of three and is an
American citizen, told the committee that the L-1 prograamme replaces
American workers like her with lower paid visa-holders and they too
were victimised.

"In countries like India, the opportunities for abuse written into
these visa programmes have given rise to a cottage industry called
visa brokerage."

"Indian visa brokers either take money up front and/or force the
potential L-1 (visa holder) into unlawful contracts. By reforming
these visa programmes you can prevent exploitation of both US citizens
and guest workers," she added.