DOJ Sues Cloudera For Deliberately Excluding American Workers From Tech Jobs (zerohedge.com) 84
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from ZeroHedge: The Justice Department on Tuesday sued Cloudera, accusing the enterprise data and artificial intelligence company of deliberately engineering a hiring process that excluded American workers from at least seven lucrative technology positions while the firm pursued permanent residency sponsorship for foreign workers on temporary visas. In a 14-page complaint filed with the Office of the Chief Administrative Hearing Officer, the department's Civil Rights Division alleges that Cloudera, from March 31, 2024, through at least January 28, 2025, instructed job candidates to submit applications to a dedicated email address, amerijobpostings@cloudera.com, that rejected all external messages with an automated bounce-back error. The company did not advertise the roles on its public careers website or accept applications through its standard portal, as it did for non-sponsorship positions.
Cloudera then attested to the Department of Labor that it could not locate any qualified U.S. workers for the roles, which paid between approximately $180,000 and $294,000 annually, according to the filing. The positions included a Product Manager role in Santa Clara, California, with a listed salary range of $170,186 to $190,000. The case marks one of the most detailed enforcement actions under the Justice Department's Protecting U.S. Workers Initiative, which was relaunched last year and has already produced 10 settlements targeting employers accused of discriminating against American workers in favor of temporary visa holders. "Employers cannot use the PERM sponsorship process as a backdoor for discriminating against U.S. workers," Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Civil Rights Division said in a statement. "The Division will not hesitate to sue companies who intentionally deter U.S. workers from applying to American jobs."
Cloudera then attested to the Department of Labor that it could not locate any qualified U.S. workers for the roles, which paid between approximately $180,000 and $294,000 annually, according to the filing. The positions included a Product Manager role in Santa Clara, California, with a listed salary range of $170,186 to $190,000. The case marks one of the most detailed enforcement actions under the Justice Department's Protecting U.S. Workers Initiative, which was relaunched last year and has already produced 10 settlements targeting employers accused of discriminating against American workers in favor of temporary visa holders. "Employers cannot use the PERM sponsorship process as a backdoor for discriminating against U.S. workers," Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Civil Rights Division said in a statement. "The Division will not hesitate to sue companies who intentionally deter U.S. workers from applying to American jobs."
I Wonder Why? (Score:5, Informative)
Typically the foreign worker scams are meant to hire cheap foreign labor and avoid paying domestic level wages. But for positions paying nearly $200k, what was Cloudera's goal? If not for cheap labor, why did they want foreign workers for these positions?
Re: I Wonder Why? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: I Wonder Why? (Score:4)
People earning $200k don't generally unionize either, and no company with any sanity is going to prevent employees from seeing a doctor.
Not mentioned but worth mentioning: H1B sponsorship is not free, and never has been; and employing people on temporary visas is a problem if you plan to keep skilled talent or your product will need maintaining in the long term.
None of this makes any sense, and I do wonder if, ultimately, this was a snafu and the email address was supposed to work. But... the money'd class right now is so batshit insane it's at least a little plausable.
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That wage goes down fast when corporations have control over everything in your life.
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I beg to differ:
Actually, the U.S. has one of the lowest union rates in the developed world. While the U.S. sits at about 10 percent, many "foreign" lands view union membership as a standard part of life. In places like Scandinavia, unions aren't just common; they are the primary way the economy functions.
Here is a breakdown of union density for the top ten countries compared to the U.S. based on recent OECD data:
Iceland: 91%
Denmark: 67%
Sweden: 65%
Finland: 59%
Norway: 50%
Belgium: 49%
Italy: 32%
Canada: 26%
Unit
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Re: I Wonder Why? (Score:2)
I question that number for US Union participation:
Every federal gov't worker is unionized
The majority of teachers are unionized
The majority of auto workers are unionized
Everyone in/on broadcast industry is unionized
Everyone in/on motion picture industry is unionized
A significant portion of commercial building workers (steel workers, electricians, masonry, etc) are unionized
I think it's a small percentage of the overall workforce, but 10% seems low. It may be correct, but...
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I question that number for US Union participation:
Every federal gov't worker is unionized
The majority of teachers are unionized
The majority of auto workers are unionized
Everyone in/on broadcast industry is unionized
Everyone in/on motion picture industry is unionized
A significant portion of commercial building workers (steel workers, electricians, masonry, etc) are unionized
I think it's a small percentage of the overall workforce, but 10% seems low. It may be correct, but...
Outside of government, a lot of st
Re: I Wonder Why? (Score:2)
I stand corrected, the U.S. workforce is about 10.0% unionized.
https://www.bls.gov/news.relea... [bls.gov]
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There are probably cultural throwbacks to the days of guilds and feudalism in play as well.
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..when they are told they can't take time off during the day to do things like see a doctor.
If you're paying me a $200K/year salary and acting that way, then it probably won't be long before iBob the consultant-bot determines your supervisory role is nothing more than an accounting error in need of fixing.
I should be working for a grown-ass adult professional. Not a fucking babysitter.
Re: I Wonder Why? (Score:3)
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No, H1Bs would have to have the same health benefits, and the requirements for H1Bs is that they need to get the same compensation an American would have in any case even if numerous state and national laws didn't require health insurance contributions for full time workers. If a company advertises a job as $200k plus health insurance, yearly bonuses, and a 401k, and they apply for H1Bs when they're unable to fill the role locally, the H1B worker must be given health insurance, yearly bonuses, and a 401k.
Th
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The only way to "save money" by using an H1B is to advertise, say, that you need a full stack dev for $50k in an area where 200k is what they normally earn, then try to convince the authorities that 50k is ACKSURELY the going rate, and that the reason you didn't get any qualified candidates was that Americans are dumb.
The usual way of doing that is to say, "But those $200k jobs are Software Engineer III. We're hiring for Programmer I".
Re:I Wonder Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I Wonder Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
The instances like this that I was aware of had in common that a person in the hiring process was from the same community as the chosen applicants.
It's a safe bet that a department head from China did not preselect a group of men from India for these jobs. It could happen that way, but I'd bet it didn't.
Re: I Wonder Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because they don't want to train you (Score:1, Insightful)
We were able to cut billions from the education budget and turn that directly into tax cuts for the rich.
In addition flooding the labor market with high skill labor it's always the first goal because high skill labor is expensive and you want to reduce the cost of your most expensive employees first. That's why originally w
Re: Because they don't want to train you (Score:2)
WTF are you on about?
How did we 'cut' spending on higher education?
Do you mean making less money available for student loans?
Do you mean cutting state funds to public universities, resulting in higher tuition costs?
Are you actually pretending that enrollment in higher education has gone DOWN since the year 2000?
I can't understand your claim, please explain - with citations, not just 'hand-wavy' statements.
Re:I Wonder Why? (Score:4)
So they decide to bring the best members of the outsourced team into America, since they already are familiar with the codebase, etc. This is the process that is commonly used across the country to get H1 visa holders.
It's common, advertise for the role and find a reason to reject everyone who applies for it.
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The TZ difference between India and the US is a pain. I'm in EST, so we have some overlap. But most of my team is PST, and they basically have none.
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Most likely, and this is a bit cynical, the people that own or control Cloudera are foreign born and are trying to help their own ethnic group at the exclusion of Americans.
In addition, many tech companies likes to hire H1B workers because they hire them as consultants which means no vacation time, sick time, health insurance, 401K, etc. Also, their visa status are tied to the employers so they are going nowhere—no job hopping every two years for higher pay. The H1B system is almost indentured servitude in many ways.
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And they like these aspects of American Employment Law:
1. Employment-at-will
2. Binding Arbitration
3. Non Compete Agreements
4. Little regulation of employee monitoring
5. Little regulation of paid sick time and vacation time.
Employment at will doesn't exist outside the United States (Unless in a third world country). The rest of developed world uses the "Just Cause" standard.
Binding Arbitration is only available to employers in a handful of countries outside the United States
Non competes are heavily regulated
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And the board - https://www.cloudera.com/about... [cloudera.com]
So, no. It's an American company founded and run by Americans, but unwilling to hire Americans.
Re:I Wonder Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Fundamentally you have this backwards. This process is a compliance tool, not a recruiting tool.
If you want to sponsor someone for permanent residency, you need to do this PERM process. If you're in the PERM process, you already have an employee you are happy with, who was already allowed to enter the country on some sort of visa that allows them to work, but you're essentially required to post a job opening for them to notionally demonstrate they aren't taking a job from an American -- which is broken because, to the extent they did, they already did that probably years ago. Today they have an employee that's most likely been working for them for years that they're happy with enough to be willing to sponsor them for permanent residency.
The upshot is that this job posting part of the PERM process is fundamentally adversarial. You're fundamentally competing with some employee the company is happy with -- enough to sponsor them for permanent residency. That person is already ramped up on their projects and already performing well. Practically speaking the company has every incentive to say that you don't meet some fine print ultra specific requirement that they wouldn't care about if they were truly looking to hire. (and then maybe maybe they have other positions with different requirements for which you might be a fit.)
And, if you succeed in all this? Congratulations, you've fucked over someone trying to get permanent residency, and the employer in question isn't even obligated to hire you.
Pragmatically speaking, as a job seeker, PERM is fundamentally broken. (and it is broken, again, because it is controlling the wrong end of the process. The time for this sort of test is when granting work visas, not when granting permanent residency.) The only thing these job posts are potentially useful for is giving a snapshot into parts of a company that don't necessarily have active job posts, noting that there is a bureaucratic incentive to be as specific as legally permissible regarding skillset. At that point you should engage with the company using other non adversarial avenues such as networking or just going through the "front door" normal recruiting process.
That's not a high paying job in SV (Score:2)
That said, my theory has flaws in it because EVERY top employer has an army of
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There's a shortage of labor, even with recent layoffs. There are few highly skilled engineers sitting around unemployed wishing someone would give them a chance. Most of them took shittier jobs if they didn't suck
In Silicon Valley, the recent trend (for the past 15 years) is to find a programmer you can control, rather than a programmer who is good.
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8 States and 19 countries. Hard to make claims about the salary's relative value without knowing where the jobs were.
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Re: I Wonder Why? (Score:1)
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I have personally seen bay area jobs with salaries advertised near $200K go to H1B workers at a salary of $100K or even less. Cheap is relative. Saving $100K per headcount is an incentive, even if you think $100K is not "cheap" in your world.
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Re: I Wonder Why? (Score:2)
I don't know, but I wonder:
Cloudera said it couldn't find American workers for the jobs at, say, $200K, so they had said they needed to import foreigners to fill the jobs.
OK.
But does that mean that Cloudera is obligated to offer/pay the foreign worker the same amount ($200K)?
I could easily *imagine* that Cloudera could claim, "While we couldn't find a qualified US workers at $200K, we found a qualified foreign worker that will accept $150K"...
Could that be the case?
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However- the process is not without flaws.
Notably, Visa indenture. Your visa is only valid for as long as you hold that job, or get sponsored by some other corporation.
Second, every position has its prevailing wages separated out into 4 "levels" (think, skill, experience- etc)
The majority of issued H1-Bs are for the 2 lowest prevailing wage levels for the position. (~60%)
Say you've got position X.
Position X has a set of prevailing wages ranging from $100 t
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It starts off that way but winds up with ethnic hiring practices and nepotism..
Cheap labor becomes a thing of the past.
jobs.now has a database or these postings.
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Did the Cloudera exec who implemented this policy have anything in common with the candidates who the policy DID select...?
Open borders would be better than this (Score:3, Insightful)
If the border was open then all the would-be immigrants would be competing with Americans on more or less equal terms. But H1B hires are defacto at mercy of their employer and risk of swift deportation if they try to play hardball, which means they'll gladly take lower the pay and lot worse handling than a local would that doesn't have to worry about getting displaced if they get fired or quit, would have to.
The idea that you have to have an employer sponsored work visa entirely depended on people primarily coming over to mooch off of benefits, but what fuckin' benefits are there left for non-citizens in the US?
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They might be.
Oh, they're earning, and the majority of their money gets Western Union'd back overseas to their poor, starving family, instead of into the economy here.... eventually, the family might have enough to move the five kids here, and that takes care of the tax question, and the mooching benefits part.
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Also, I pay about $60k a year in income taxes. 5 kids would knock it down to $51.5.
Also, these folks don't have SSNs. They aren't getting your cute little Trump checks. They don't qualify for most SS benefits.
And just judging from the perspective I imagine your opinion is coming from, each one of them, after the 5 kids of tax credits, are paying more in taxes every year than you pay in a decade.
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Re:Open borders would be better than this (Score:5, Insightful)
There just isn't enough space in society for that many people.
They're actually could be but it would require such a tremendous transformation in our civilization and how we view basically everything that it's completely off the table.
It wouldn't necessarily be an overall reduction in quality of life but for example you couldn't drive your SUV to your house in the suburbs with its nice pool and four or five bedrooms. You couldn't have personal parties at that nice big house you would have to use communal spaces stuff like that.
Also no joke, socially big fancy cars is how teenagers attract dates and I do not know how to replace that. I know it sounds silly but well there it is.
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Did your account get hacked? This is the second post of your in this thread that I have read that seems to be in support of protecting the American worker yet all your other posts are starkly liberal, pro immigrant, anti-business, free healthcare, free education, lavish social programs. You know, your normal progressive politics, mixed in with some Anti-trump langauge for good measure.
I'm quite sure you were all for Biden's immigration policies and yet now you really do sound like a sensible, right leaning
Don't get me wrong I want to open borders (Score:2)
You can't do Mass immigration until you do all the socialist stuff that creates a stable living environment for the existing citizens. Otherwise those existing citizens end up starving and homeless and they start to get organized by right-wing demagogues who hilariously are the ones bringing in the cheap labor that they have to compete with. Those right-wing demagogues then talk
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I can agree with you that business want cheap labor and are quite okay with exploiting the vulnerable to accomplish that goal. I'm all for jailing the business owners that have hired illegal workers.
On the other hand, MANY Democrats are all for bringing in as many foreigners as possible. We have a whole system in place that once one family member gets here, they can sponsor the rest of their entire clan to show up as well. Even people that come here illegally are still allowed to stay in Democrat run areas.
You can be in favor of whatever you want (Score:2)
You do not want to end birthright citizenship. You think you do. You do not. Once you call citizenship in the question that's it. Game over. I
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Sure, you can jail them... 15 seconds later, they make "bail" (with a check for $20million or whatever) and charges get dropped, and it's business as usual.
There is no Epstein _class_, he hung himself in prison, and over time the _verified_ people who visited his island will face a courtroom someplace.
So, which are you... pro-immigration (open the floodgates and become the United States of Every Other Country) or anti-immigration (toughen up immigration policies, and tighten the borders and ports)?
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Otherwise yes, staunchly liberal.
You may be surprised to find that peoples political opinions don't actually have to perfectly align with your caricature of them.
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Cities with lots of poor people, or lots of overpriced houses, have been doing that for centuries. You live outside the USA, you should be seeing this. France has spent 20 years turning suburban streets into no-car zones.
... is how teens evaded the servants and chaperones to have sex. As full-time servants disappeared, the need for privacy changed and a big car become a social place ("seats about 20", the B52s). You're arguing poor men didn't have girlfriends and didn't have sex and possibly, that teen
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And? (Score:2)
Try getting a seasonal job at a Trump property (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently no Americans want to work at Trump properties, so many, many foreign workers are required.
The President’s family business requested at least 184 foreign workers for Mar-a-Lago, Virginia winery and two golf clubs. [theguardian.com] This happens every year since forever. The company has been convicted of fraud and banned from doing business in New York. [ny.gov]
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So Biden was a DINO then?
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Re:Try getting a seasonal job at a Trump property (Score:4, Funny)
Apparently no Americans want to work at Trump properties, so many, many foreign workers are required.
Can you blame them? You can't even clean a bathroom in Mar-a-Lago without having Top Secret national security clearance.
The US government needs a recruiting arm (Score:3)
When someone asks for H1B's the government should have a recruiting arm that sends them a list of candidates that meet the job posting requirements. If they can't justify why they are not qualified no H1B should be issued.
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a list of candidates that meet the job posting requirements.
And how will this government screen candidates against these requirements? And the next government?
I don't really want any government gatekeeping employment.
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Then maybe you should vote for competent politicians?
This is one of the big reasons I want to see a Canadian or even British style health system introduced into the US. Not just to ensure everyone has access to it, but so that people enter the ballot box and instead of thinking "I'm going to vote for Party X, like my grandpa did" or "I'm going to vote for Party X, because the only news I watch told me Party Y is evil", they instead say "This guy's a moron, if I fall ill, the AHS puts me on a waiting list, t
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hahahaa that's a good one. I can't say I've seen to many competent politicians though I'm only 42. Maybe they existed prior to me. From my vantage point, we have an elected governing body of grifters that almost universally become rich within a few years of entering public office. As far as I can tell, this has been the status quo my entire life.
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I want to see a Canadian or even British style health system
You might see the waiting room. Hopefully, you are not there for an acute condition.
"I'll vote for the other one instead, at least she's a doctor."
Doctors are one of the biggest proponents of the waiting room. It's artificial scarcity put to the task of inflating profits. I'm voting for the one that's an independent nurse practitioner and advocates for insurance payments not hidden behind a primary care physician gatekeeper.
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It's very entertaining watching people who believe this silly piece of propaganda
The cross-border business from Canada to the U.S is very good for physicians and clinics. I see it. I live near the border.
I don't trust this DOJ (Score:3, Insightful)
The DOJ could just be using one case of a non-american worker being hired and twisting the narrative to extract money out of the company.
This administration is crooked and has been gaming the stock market, insider betting on polymarket, insider trading, giving contracts to preferred companies, and that's not even digging deep.
This DOJ is not working for the people, nor for an office of the US, they are working for Trump as an individual for his personal desires.
Re:I don't trust this DOJ (Score:5, Insightful)
Hiring Policy (Score:2)
1) Country sabotages education system and defunds projects that promote critical thinking and job skills.
2) Country sues everyone it can for having DEI programs because they don't hire what the country thinks are the most qualified people.
3) Company implements a hiring program that excludes a population of people from a country with document issues in education quality.
4) Country sues company because it doesn't have a DEI program to hire unqualified people for a job.
Yeah, over simplified but I t
Good work (Score:2)
Credit where credit is due.
This is good work. This type of abuse needs more enforcement. Penalties need to be more than a slap on the wrist, business as usual. Hopefully they at least lose their access to the program they abused.
ok but (Score:2)
I can realistically see a situation where someone actually just messed up the config on the email address and were stretched too thin to notice.
That doesn't mean DOJ don't have a case here, but I'm really curious to know how that plays out if it turns out to have been a genuine administrative mistake.
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