Pete Bennett - founder of
Nomoreh1b appeared on TV
and Media with Mike Emmons. By 2010 his son was dead, by witnesses in
Bennett's long battle with police were dead but then they killed his nephews.
Bennett dealing with potential fracture vertebra
James Powell former Longs Drugs POS System Manager
Son of Pete Bennett after Bennett appeared on TV, Radio and
Print.
His father went up against Siemens on Lou Dobbs Outsourcing America.
The Family of Pete Bennett and his relatives relentlessly attacked,
murdered and destroyed.
Roommate of Bennett - father involved in Target POS Rollouts at NCR
Jared and Heidi Tucker
The American Killed in Barcelona
Brandon Marshall
One of Five Class Action Litigants
Apple, Oracle, Google
Shot Dead in Santa Clara
Rylan Fuchs
Grade School Friend of sons of Pete Bennett
Harve and Kieko Ringheim
Customers of Mainframe Designs Cabinets and Fixture
Brutally Murdered in their Dublin CA home
1986
Pittsburg Police Department
Officer Ray Giacomelli
Fatal Police Shooting of Bernard Bynum
employed at Mainframe Designs Cabinets and Fixtures
Susan Kennedy, brutally murdered in Concord CA, long time friends of
Frank and Fredrick Howard
This is a family member related to my brother, his wife and but also many from
Mountain Lakes NJ as basically we're all from New Jersey.
The unknown connection to Pete Bennett former resident of Danville and Alex
Bennett (brother) is the stolen trust investigation where Contra Costa District
Attorney Mark Peterson, his underlings and the
Walnut Creek Police Department repeated actions of blocking police reports lead to the deaths of Bennett
once removed relatives.
The other connection is going to upset several former 49ers located in the Bay
Area. There is a straight path to Mormons from Alamo 1st leading to stolen legal
papers that occurred during December 2004.
Published 4:00 am, Sunday, May 25, 2003
An obscure work visa known as the L-1 has become the center of a bitter
controversy in the technology industry.
Much like the H-1B before it -- an equally obscure visa that rose to prominence
when American workers complained they were being displaced by its recipients --
the L-1 is catching the ire of tech workers and the eye of government regulators
who disagree on whether the visa is being used legally.
In the middle of the spat are Indian firms that undertake tech projects for U.S.
companies, including many in the Bay Area, on a contract basis.
The L-1 visa was originally intended for multinational companies that need to
transfer key employees to U.S. divisions. But in recent years, outsourcing firms
such as Wipro Technologies,
Infosys
Technologies and Tata Consultancy Services have stepped up their use of the L-1
visa to bring programmers and other professionals from India to work at the
offices of U.S. clients.
In the Bay Area, the firms' clients include Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, Visa
International, ChevronTexaco and Sun Microsystems.
Some U.S. tech workers, frustrated by growing unemployment, say the L-1, like
the H-1B before it, creates unfair competition and eliminates jobs of American
workers. In fact, the workers like the L-1 even less than the H-1B because L-1
lacks the abuse-prevention clauses and annual limit that H-1B has.
A bill introduced by a Florida congressman last week seeks to ban the visa's use
in outsourcing.
But the outsourcing companies, multimillion-dollar concerns with thousands of
employees in the United States and abroad, say their use of the visa is legal
and appropriate.
The companies make no secret of their visa use. Wipro and Infosys, both listed
on U.S. stock exchanges, disclose the number of L-1 and H-1B visas they get in
financial filings.
U.S. worker groups, including the AFL-CIO's Department for Professional
Employees and the Seattle technology union
WashTech, say outsourcers are using L-1 to get around what they call the minimal worker
protections attached to H- 1B visas.
"We think it's the secret stealth visa," said
Marcus Courtney, president of WashTech.
L-1s "seem to be sprouting up all over the Bay Area, and they're totally off the
radar screen," said
Peter Bennett, a former computer programmer who works as a mortgage broker in Danville.
Because he runs a Web site protesting the H-1B visa program (
www.nomoreh1b.com), Bennett gets 50 to 500 e-mails a day from tech professionals who are out of
work or fear losing their jobs. An increasing number of them complain that L-1
workers have shown up in their offices.
Restrictions that apply to H-1B, but not L-1, include an annual limit on the
number of visas issued and a requirement that the visa applicant have a
bachelor's degree or higher. H-1B visa applicants have to pay a $1,000 fee
toward training American workers; L-1 applicants don't.
Visa law also requires workers with H-1Bs to be paid the prevailing wage in the
region where they work, although the Department of Labor does not routinely
check up on this.
The L-1 visa carries no salary requirements, theoretically allowing a foreign
worker to continue drawing the salary he was paid at home while working
side-by-side with or replacing Americans earning two or three times as much.
PROGRAMMERS EARN LESS
Outsourcing firms say they pay their L-1 workers wages comparable to what
American workers earn. But Tata acknowledges that when it took over a project at
Siemens Information and Communication Networks in Lake Mary, Fla., it paid some
programmers only $36,000 a year -- below the average local range of $37, 794 to
$69,638 for a basic programmer (determined by Department of Labor surveys) and
far below the $98,000 that one U.S. programmer there said she was paid.
Tata spokesman
Tom Conway
said taxes,
Social Security
and other withholding bring the salaries up to the average range.
After
Tata took over the project,
Siemens let a dozen employees go, said spokeswoman
Paula Davis.
Some of those employees were outraged that they could be replaced by foreigners.
It especially stung that they were asked to train Tata's workers before they
left, a procedure that Tata calls knowledge transfer.
"This is what they call outsourcing. I call it insourcing. Import foreign
workers, mandate your American workers to train them, then lay off your
Americans," said
Michael Emmons, who left Siemens last fall just before his job there was to end. Emmons had
worked as a contract computer programmer for the company for six years, first
in San Jose, then in Florida.
Davis said Emmons and other workers were not directly replaced by foreign
workers. "We actually outsourced a function. It wasn't replacing this employee
with that employee," she said.
What happened in Florida follows the general pattern of how Indian outsourcing
firms use L-1 visas: The Indian firms take over a project, such as software
maintenance, at low rates for an American client and send in a team of visa
holders to learn the company's procedures. As much of the work as possible is
then transferred to the company's headquarters in India, where wages are much
lower. But some visa holders continue working at the client's office.
INTERPRETATIONS VARY
Whether this is a legal use of the L-1 visa is a matter of interpretation. An
official at the
Department of Homeland Security, now responsible for immigration, said this kind of use is fraudulent because
the L-1 is designated to let workers move from one office to another within a
company -- not from a company to a client.
"If an L-1 comes into the United States to work, they're coming to work for
their specific company that petitioned for them, not for another company that
they're being contracted out to. That would be a fraudulent use of an L-1 visa,
" said
Christopher Bentley, spokesman for the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services, a division
of the Department of
Homeland Security
that replaced
Immigration and Naturalization Services. The bureau is assessing the L-1 and other visa programs for fraud, he
said.
The companies say they would never risk using the visas if officials had not
assured them it is legal. Wipro immigration attorney
Terry Helbush
said she is puzzled by Homeland Security's statement. "The L-1 visas are all
approved by the consulate or by the INS. In our submissions, we're very clear
that . . . some of the employees are on site at the client."
Tata also said it complies with visa law. Infosys declined to comment because it
is in a quiet period before a financial transaction.
The way the outsourcers see it, they are complying with the law because their
employees are ultimately working for them, whether sitting in a cubicle in
Silicon Valley or sitting in one in Bangalore.
Tata and Wipro both strive to differentiate themselves from what they call body
shoppers, firms that provide nothing more than inexpensive workers for
clients.
Wipro Chief Operating Officer
Lakshman Badiga
said it is precisely because the company has moved from just bringing in workers
to running complex global projects that it has increased its use of L-1 visas.
The State Department says the outsourcers are within the law.
"The fact that someone is on the site of (a client) does not make them
ineligible for an L-1 as long as . . . the company they actually work for is
truly functioning as their employer in terms of how they're paid and who has the
right to fire them," said Stuart Patt, spokesman for the State Department's
Consular Affairs Bureau.
ATTORNEYS CAN'T AGREE
Not even immigration attorneys who specialize in procuring work visas can agree.
Memphis immigration lawyer Gregory Siskind said, "It's largely inappropriate for
companies to be using the L-1 to bring in workers that are being contracted out
to other companies. I would be very surprised if it continues for very much
longer without a crackdown."
If using L-1s for outsourcing is legal now, it won't be under legislation
introduced last week by Rep.
John Mica, R-Fla. Calling L-1 "a back door to cheap labor," Mica said his bill would ban
L-1 visa holders from being transferred to client companies.
It's not clear whether the legislation would actually ban Wipro, Tata and others
from using the visas just as they have been because the companies say the
workers are their employees even when they are doing work for clients.
L-1 visas have been used in relative obscurity since 1970. But during the past
two years, an increasing number of the visas are going to workers from a single
country: India. Thirty-three percent of the 32,416 L-1 visas issued so far in
2003 went to Indians, up from 20 percent in 2001.
At Wipro and Infosys, L-1 visa use rose considerably during the same time.
Wipro, for example, had 624 H-1B employees in 2000 but only 289 L-1 workers.
Since then, its L-1 count has soared to 1,157, while the number of H-1B
employees has increased to 705.
The limit on that other contentious tech visa, the H-1B, is scheduled to go from
195,000 to 65,000 in the fall unless Congress intervenes. Worker groups are
gearing up to fight industry lobbyists to make sure the limit is lowered.
Some say the L-1 visa could make the H-1B limit irrelevant.
"If the H-1B becomes more difficult to get, (companies) will just adapt and go
to L-1s," said
Ron Hira, a volunteer on workforce policy issues at the Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers-USA. Hira is also a Columbia
University researcher on
science and technology policy.
Fredrick Howard
