Top US Companies Are Paying Less To H-1B

A majority of H-1B employers including major US technology firms such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Walmart, and Microsoft, use the program to pay migrant workers below-market wages, a new report has claimed.

"All of them take advantage of program rules to legally pay many of their H-1B workers below the local median wage for the jobs they fill," said the report released by the Economic Policy Institute.

Authored by Daniel Costa and Ron Hira, the report titled "H-1B visas and prevailing wage levels" says 60% of H-1B positions certified by the US Department of Labor (DOL) are assigned wage levels well below the local median wage for the occupation.

While the H-1B program rules allow this, DOL has the authority to change it, but has not, it said.

Approximately 53,000 employers used the H-1B program in 2019, the top 30 H-1B employers accounted for more than one in four of all 389,000 H-1B petitions approved by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services in 2019, it said.

The report alleged that major US-based technology firms that hire H-1B workers directly, rather than contract them out to third-party employers, had significant shares of their certified H-1B positions assigned as Level 1 or Level 2, the two lowest wage levels in fiscal 2019, both of which are below the local median wage.

These direct-hire firms also hire many H-1B workers on a contract basis through outsourcing firms, it added.

Microsoft, the 7th-largest H-1B employer in 2019, assigned 35% of its positions on Labor Condition Applications (LCAs) as Level 1 and 42% as Level 2.

According to the report, Amazon.com Services assigned 34% of its H-1B positions as Level 1 and 51% as Level 2, for a total of 86% of all positions certified.

Amazon Web Services assigned 47% of its H-1B workers as Level 1 and 36% as Level 2. Combined, Amazon.com Services and Amazon Web Services had 12,428 positions certified at Level 1 or 2, for a total of 85 percent certified at a wage level below the median, it said.

Apple, eleventh on the list, assigned 558 of its H-1B positions (2%) as Level 1 and 32 percent as Level 2, for a combined total of 34% at Levels 1 and 2. Apple assigned 32% as Level 3 and 34 percent as Level 4.

Google, ranked the 5th-largest H-1B employer, had 9,085 H-1B positions certified by DOL in fiscal 2019. It assigned less than half of one percent of its certified H-1B jobs as Level 1 and 54 percent as Level 2. Only 37 percent of Google's jobs were certified at or above the median wage, the report said.

The report claims that the top 30 H-1B employers are hiring H-1B workers to fill a very large number of routine (Levels 1 and 2) positions that require relatively little experience and ordinary skills.