IFPTE Sec-Treasurer Henson, AFL-CIO President Shuler, and Labor Talk About Pro-Worker Reform of the Highly-Flawed H-1B High-Skill Work Visa

The controversial H-1B work visa, and the abusive employer behavior and industry practices that the H-1B visa program incentivizes, was once again in the news. While billionaire policy advisors and ardent supporters of the incoming Trump Administration publicly and loudly disagreed -- sometimes voicing racist and bigoted views -- on the usefulness or abuse of the H-1B work visa, IFPTE , the AFL-CIO, the AFL-CIO Department for Professional Employees (DPE), and other labor unions have long advocated for reforms to solve the problems that are intrinsic with the H-1B work visa. 

As IFPTE's issue brief from 2024 notes [PDF]:

“The H-1B Visa Program Hurts All Workers. In the 32 years since its creation, the H-1B program has shifted bargaining power in favor of employers to the disadvantage of both U.S. STEM workers and H-1B workers. Employers’ abuse of this work visa program suppresses wages, reduces job security, disincentivizes employers from recruiting workers already in the U.S., and binds the H-1B worker to their H-1B-sponsoring employer.... The H-1B program’s annual process for allocating visas by random lottery has created an established practice where a small number of employers can game the system to secure H-1B approvals by flooding the application process with numerous petitions to increase the odds that their petitions are selected. In a given year, about half of the top 30 H-1B employers are offshore-outsourcing firms that profit from placing their H-1B employees at a secondary employer and moving work to lower wage countries.4 A recent Economic Policy Institute report titled “New Evidence of Widespread Wage Theft in the H-1B Visa Program” analyzed a 2016 internal document from foreign IT staffing firm HCL Technologies. It revealed how the lucrative offshore-outsourcing business model abuses the H-1B program to vastly underpay H-1B workers and allowed HCL to reduce labor costs by at least $95 million in just one year. This abusive practice is not an outlier – it is an industry standard for offshore-outsourcing firms to pay H-1B workers below market wages and take advantage of H-1B workers’ limited ability to seek fair wages.”

Last week, IFPTE Secretary-Treasurer Gay Henson told Politico about IFPTE's successful effort to protect members’ jobs from being outsourced and privatized by firms abusing the H-1B workers and displacing workers in the Tennessee Valley. In response to President-Elect Donald Trump taking cues from tech billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are advising the incoming administration, Henson told Politico,

“I actually met with him personally on this issue in 2020…and Trump basically said, ‘Americans need American jobs first... And what’s confusing to me is it sounds like now he’s listening to tech billionaires and tech employers on how the visa program ought to work, and saying the opposite of what he was thinking then.”

AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler also spoke to Bloomberg News about the labor movement supporting workers rights for all workers and the need for reforming the H-1B work visa program and others like it: 

In recent decades, major unions have been vocal supporters of comprehensive immigration reform proposals that would include pathways to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, while seeking to overhaul guest worker programs they argue give companies too much leverage over employees. Shuler said the AFL-CIO will continue to be vocal about the need for reform in programs like the H-1B skilled worker visa, which has been defended by Trump and Elon Musk and condemned by some of their conservative allies. “These programs are used to exploit workers to hold them hostage to corporations who just want to pay people less,” Shuler said.

Ron Hira, research associate at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and associate professor at Howard University, appeared on the Lever News podcast (transcript here) to discuss how the H-1B visa program has created "perverse incentives" for employers, resulting in an offshore-outsourcing business model that takes advantage of captive guest workers, hurts American workers, and generates billions of dollars of corporate profits as it lowers wages and labor standards.

IFPTE and our labor and coalition partners will be working with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to advance long-overdue reforms so that no worker is exploited by high-skill work visa programs. IFPTE's support for the H-1B and L-1 Visa Reform Act, sometimes referred to as the Durbin-Grassley Bill as it's sponsored by Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), dates back to the first time it was introduced in Congress in 2009. We also look forward to working with Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who renewed his call for major reforms in the H-1B program, on keeping the focus on pro-worker reforms to high-skill work visa programs.

For more information on how employers abuse the H-1B visa program, read EPI's research here.

For information on how employers abuse the H-1B visa to rip off and exploit a captive H-1B workforce, fail to recruit workers already in the U.S., and make massive profits at the expense of working people, see IFPTE’s statement from 2021: EPI Report on Massive Wage Theft from H-1B Workers and Preferential Hiring Highlights the Urgent Need for Oversight, Enforcement, and Reform of H-1B Visa Program.