Apple’s $95M Settlement
This Apple Settlement illustrates the reason why big tech keeps steamrolling through the proletariat. $95M for a privacy dispute affecting nearly every Apple user?! That's a joke, especially given the affected must make a claim to collect. History shows that, on average, about 8% of claims for such lawsuits are filed.
Even if, by some miracle, 100% of claims are filed, $95M is less than the rounding error on Apple's taxes. Apple's market cap is something over $3T. They don't care about $95M; it's a drop in the bucket. This settlement is nonsense and lacks any punitive touch. Plaintiffs contended that Apple could be liable for $1.5B if the matter went to trial. I believe even $1.5B is marginal compared to what the ad damnum should be.
When an impoverished man steals a loaf of bread to feed his family, he can face up to 25 years in prison, while Tim Cook can go into your home and invade your privacy for over a decade with impunity. There need to be real penalties for misuse of data and abuse of access. These data and access are given freely under the auspices of reasonable custodianship. When a breach of that trust occurs, the penalties should be severe.
If you read the End User License Agreement (EULA) for any software-based tech product, you will see page-after-page of legalese protecting the developer and distributor. You will see little-to-nothing protecting the user. The fix is simple: add a clause saying something substantially of the form “In the event of a data or privacy breach, the collective users of the software will be entitled to 5% of the average of the vendor’s last 3 years of revenue”. That’s real skin in the game.
For Apple, we would have ‘22, ‘23, ‘24 revenues of $394B, $383B, $391B. This would give us a payout of about $19.4B for a breach of trust such as this. I think this is acceptable, and if it is contractually obligated through EULA, the Court proceedings after a breach would be simplified. If there are no real consequences, the behaviour does not end. By putting a de facto price tag (such as $95M) on such a breach, we are letting companies of sufficient size know they can do whatever they want with limited issue.
We are smarter and stronger than this, America. Stand up and fight.
H1B Visas
The United States Visa system affects my everyday life. I am a bona fide Tech Bro who deals with personnel throughout the globe. The recent comments from Mr. Ramaswamy have sparked a great debate regarding these Visas, and if the system is failing or meeting its mark. I intend to characterize how this operates in industry today herein.
What is it?
An H1B Visa is defined under 8 USC 1101. It must be noted that the program in part has been held unconstitutional (Quito-Guachichulca v. Garland, 122 F.4th 732 (8th Cir. 2024)), but this is not directly on point for the current discussion. The jist is that a person who works in a “specialty occupation” and is coming “temporarily” to the US can be granted a special Visa to work in that “specialty occupation,” given no US citizen is available to fill the position. It really is that simple at a high level. However, things do get tricky in practice.
We will take on, in no particular order, “specialty occupation”, “temporarily”, and “no US citizen is available”.
How special does a “specialty occupation” need to be?
This is complicated. It is defined in 8 USC 1184(i). The quick and dirty is that a person works in a specialty occupation if the field is a “body of highly specialized knowledge” and the jobs require “a bachelor's or higher degree”. There is also a separate requirement for occupations that require full State licensure, but I do not work in such a field, so I will leave the treatment of that to someone more qualified.
Here is where all the loopholes can come in and industries can exploit foreign workers for cheap labour. The definition of “body of highly specialized knowledge” is, from what I can tell, equivalent to “most of Congress’ eyes gloss over when the topic is broached”. There is no board of experts determining this for each job that requests it. Believe me, if there were such a board, there would be few positions meeting the mark in tech. The same goes for requiring a degree. Any HR rep can put “Bachelor’s degree on higher required” on a job description without actually checking resumes for those credentials. This gives the appearance of college degree level employment when it could really be performed by any random person you pick up off the street and put through an 8-week training. Again, since Congress cannot discern the difficulty or education level of a position, they fail to properly review any such case.
The answer to the query would then be: “The specialty occupation need not be very special”. In tech we see this a lot. Tech is lousy with a Visa headcount that could be filled by Americans. What gives?
How are there no US Citizens available?
People work very hard in America. This is shown by the minimal amount of vacation time we take in aggregate when compared to other similarly situated nations. The hard work appears to be the first thing that immigrants pick up on, and they perform well. There are certain positions that are very highly specialized for which there are more seats than Americans qualified to fill them. We can move directly past these for the purpose of this discussion because the debate does not center around these workers. There are other situations where the system is abused.
There exists a litany of what I refer to as meat-market consultancies: companies that find random persons in a bad position, put them through minimal training (nothing like a degree program), and sell their time in the US for bottom dollar. These companies usually charge somewhere between $30 and $80 per hour for their people and give the worker around 1/4 or 1/3 of the take with little or no benefits at all. They have teams of attorneys and compliance officers to navigate the ever-shifting Visa landscape. All the client company needs to do is keep paying the meat-market and a steady flow of workers comes through the doors. The business model is nearly all up-side.
Given the nature of the business, couldn’t the huge number of Americans graduating from code boot camps and online coding institutes fill the need? After all, the Visa program requires that no US citizen be able to fill the position, correct? Yes, and no. The client corporations know the going rate for the work they need done; they undervalue the work making it hard to find US candidates. Further, the actual work positions at the meat-markets are so low-paid that someone can literally do almost anything else and still make the same amount: why do a harder job for the same pay? We have three conflating issues:
There are not enough Americans to fill positions at the top; positions for which the meat-market workers are woefully underqualified. This protects Americans in high-paying positions.
The jobs at the middle and bottom are so undervalued that Americans do not need to take them to make the same amount of money.
The jobs at the bottom are filled by the meat-market, there is no need to publicize they exist, so Americans rarely know they can be applied for.
Since the lower-education jobs that pay the same as low-to-mid-tier tech jobs cannot be filled by Visa holders (not specialized; not degree-bound) Americans can work those and leave a hole in the tech industry. Further, because the meat-market workers are not qualified to work at the top, the pay for those jobs has to be competitive. The tech wealth gap is an increasingly widening proposition as a result of the terribly constructed, nonsense-backed Visa program. The way things are, people at the top get better and more secure in our positions while the less-qualified workers get squeezed into a tighter, and tighter market rife with underpayment and hardship. People have freedom in this nation; we cannot force tech degree holders to take low-paying jobs they do not want. Finally, since the jobs are rarely publicized, it is very difficult for an American to find out about them ahead of the meat-markets that have connections at the highest level in every major corporation.
If this is for temporary employment, how can it be that bad?
Temporary is only defined once in the section and it has nothing to do with the working Visas of which we speak. In that case it is defined as no more than 15 months; otherwise, it is undefined. First and foremost, H1B visas are “nonimmigrant” visas. The definition of nonimmigrant is well-defined (…using as many words as possible…) in 8 USC 1101, but the short version for this very specific purpose is someone who has a residence abroad that he or she “has no intention of abandoning”.
For an H1B worker, an employer must fill out an I-129 Petition. On the Petition, there is an item “dates of intended employment“ which the employer must fill in. The end date is required. There is no limit to the number of renewals one can seek, assuming the paperwork is filled out properly and timely. This is quite possibly the worst definition of “temporary” with respect to human factors I have ever read. Effectively, as long as the employer (remember from the section above: usually a meat-market) continues to renew the paperwork and the foreign residence is maintained, the Visa holder is considered temporary.
What’s more is they are not immigrants, so they are not subject to the same practice and policy that governs immigrants. This is not necessarily a bad thing; it is to protect everyone involved, including the employer. The problems arise when this is all taken together:
Congress with their heads in the clouds
Meat-market style exploitation
Low-skill work plenty of Americans can do
So-called temporary Visas with unlimited renewals
We have created a system ripe for exploitation and refuse to fix it. The Left doesn’t want to change how easy it is to get here, even if the exploitation is so much in our faces. The Right wants to shut some of these systems down and rebuild, which would leave us with unfilled positions of national security interest (imagine a world where we lost some of our top tech talent and allowed China to replace us as the dominant technology power).
What can be done?
This is simple (not easy, just simple). If we enforced the “specialty occupation” and “need for a bachelor’s degree or better” clauses, this could be mostly solved. Of course, no system of humans can be perfect, but perfection is not the goal: reasonableness is the goal. As a pilot, we could take 10,000 unemployed Americans, put them through code boot camps, and employ them in these easy tech jobs. This would prove the H1B system is being exploited to provide cheap unskilled labor, not impossible-to-find specialty labor. If true, we could drive out of businesses numerous exploitative companies, reduce the unemployment rate, and give much-needed relief to many who are trying their hardest to get their foot in the door but just cannot work it out. The cost of such a program would be in the low millions.
To be clear, the positions that I claim are being taken by and through exploitative H1B programs would give unskilled Americans access to jobs that pay from $30K-$70K yearly and provide full benefits. This would represent a significant improvement in many of their lives. I am not referring to the jobs that are truly highly-skilled and specialized for which the pay is in the top 5%.
Further, we would free up the current low-level H1B holders in their home nations and provide multi-national opportunities for American-based companies. We need to ensure our companies have global offices for the US to remain a global power—we can’t do that without a global workforce. All that’s left is to make some common-sense adjustments to the process, and we could be off to the races.