In an email sent to employees after Monday’s announcement of another round of layoffs, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said the terminations were necessary to “ensure the right people” were in the “right roles” and that leadership would do “everything we can to make certain” more job cutbacks would not be needed.
It would appear, according to state filings obtained by the San Jose Mercury News, that everything includes increasing the number of foreign workers while showing American workers the door, including the 350 employees let go this week.
Some cutbacks might have been warranted as a result of the company reporting a record $5.2 billion net earnings loss in August. But firing more than 1,000 employees over a ten-week period while also doubling the number of H-1B visa workers in management, marketing, and tech positions is neither warranted, nor justified.
According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) data, so far this year, Uber got federal government approval for 299 new H-1B visas, compared to the 152 in 2018 and 158 in 2017. In addition to laying off hundreds of employees, Uber management has asked an undisclosed number of employees to relocate in order to cut costs, according to Monday’s email.
Putting the bottom line above worker pay and satisfaction is not a new growth model for Uber. In fact, their drive to meet investor, not employee, expectations is what led to drivers striking earlier this year.
As noted by Recode, Uber conceded its pursuit of cost savings would lead to even more dissatisfaction among its workforce. According to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Uber stated that as it aims “to reduce driver incentives to improve our financial performance, we expect driver dissatisfaction will generally increase.”
Uber prides itself on catering to its immigrant workers by hosting “regular Visa with Chai Samosa sessions” and having “lawyers from Uber’s legal partnership and experts from Uber’s immigration team to provide updates” for its members. But some immigration experts believe its hiring practices might run afoul of U.S. labor laws.
“Every company promises on its H-1B applications that it will not harm the wages and working conditions of similarly employed US workers. Being laid off would harm your wages and working conditions, wouldn’t they? Where’s DOL Wage & Hour Division?” asked Ron Hira, a labor law expert at the Economic Policy Institute, in a recent tweet.
As important as it is for the Department of Labor to act, it is equally critical for action to be taken to prevent a further expansion of the foreign labor workforce by Congress. On Thursday, Apple CEO Tim Cook took to Twitter to lobby for the passage of the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act, which would eliminate the per-country cap on immigrant work visas to the benefit of Indian and Chinese workers.
Thankfully, efforts in the Senate to pass that legislation and another bill to increase the number of employment visas issued each year were defeated. But that is little consolation to the former Uber employees and all of the other American workers who’ve been told they are not the “right” people for the job.
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Uber LOST $5.2 Billion? Gee, I guess the biz model of running an unregulated taxi service wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, eh?
Utah GOP Senator Mike Lee is obeying his corporate masters and trying again to pass the Fairness For High Skilled Immigrants Act by “unanimous consent”. This little bit of chicanery involves passing bills without each Senator having to actually vote for it. If one Senator objects, and, tellingly, there is only one now, then there has to be a vote on the record. If you ever needed to be cynical about how for sale our Congress is, this is one reason. A lot of Senators ran on “protecting American jobs” and now it’s a different story.
Case in point, Arkansas GOP Senator Tom Cotton who ran in 2016 on such a platform and now makes no objection to this bill. Senator Lee calls opposition to it “discrimination”, but he and the others apparently have no problem that American citizens are booted from jobs for the cheaper replacements that big business loves. I guess it’s all some big huge coincidence that Apple CEO Tim Cook is pushing this. No, the reason is greed by these companies. Senator Lee in fact urged Indian visa workers to flood Congress with support for the bill. Not Americans, but Indians. Another for sale globalist politician, who doesn’t give a damn about this country and all doing the bidding of corporations.
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