Previous week, two Indo –US firms in the Silicon Valley were ordered to pay fines of around $1,03,000 to the federal government of the US.
The two staffing firms were engaged in bringing in workers from India and other nations on the H-1B visa to provide them job of software engineers at the Silicon Valley companies like Apple, e-bay and Cisco.
According to the official release, during the investigations, the US labour department find that the two firms violated the H-1B rules of Immigration and Nationality Act by misrepresenting the wage level on the LCA.
According to the director for the wage and hour division, Susana Blanco, some of the nation’s most popular and successful organizations benefit from the underpaid H-1B employees. H-1B employees should be paid the local prevailing wages, and they will not permit firms to undercut the wages and hurt the US employees and businesses who paid their employees fairly.
According to the immigration lawyer based In Mumbai, Poorvi Chothani, the US employers is grateful to provide the employee under H-1B a copy of the LCA which contains all the information regarding obligation of the employer and the salary they should receive.
Employees who visit the US on this H-1B visa shall make sure that they are being correctly paid their existing wages all the time, even if the firms has no work for them. It is the sponsoring firm’s duty to pay the current wage.
She also said that if the firm is found to be delinquent, and that the worker is not in agreement with them with the view to deceive the government, it is only the firm that would be penalized. The government would not enforce fine on employees until they had violated the regulation themselves.
