Tesla replaced some of its laid-off U. S. staff in a giant wave of layoffs earlier this year with H-1B visas for foreign staff, which CEO Elon Musk is now campaigning to increase.
Over the past week, Elon Musk has promoted the expansion of H-1B visas, which are used to bring foreigners to the United States for “specialty occupations. “
Qualified foreign workers need to be sponsored by a company to get the visa, which lasts three years, extendable to six years, after which the holder needs to reapply.
The visa holder will need to have employment with the visa sponsor to obtain their painting visa. The painter must leave the country if his employment ends for any reason. This has raised some complaints because it provides enormous strength to the employer and can lead to a fashionable version of indentured servitude.
While there are obvious benefits to bringing skilled workers into the US, people are divided on the issue because those workers are often paid less than US workers, putting negative pressure on compensation, especially in the tech industry, on top of the moral questions about holding visas over the heads of foreign workers.
That is why the United States Congress has imposed a limit of 65,000 visas, restricting the number of H-1B visas that can be issued during the fiscal year, plus another 20,000 for foreigners who graduate from graduate systems at American universities.
Tesla is a large user of these visas and its CEO, Elon Musk, is its new political influence to announce the expansion of the H-1B visa limit. He has received strong complaints from his new friends on the right side of the American political spectrum, who believe that the visa is used to borrow American jobs.
He is quite passionate about the issue, to say the least:
To be fair, Musk came to the United States on an H-1B visa. He arrived on a student visa and then his own brother admitted that they were illegal immigrants in the early stages of launching his startup Zip2 in the United States.
In recent days, several current and former Tesla employees reached out to Electrek to reveal that Tesla has stepped up its use of H-1B visas to update U. S. employees they laid off earlier this year.
We reported that roughly US 15,000 employees were let go at Tesla around April 2024. Every department was affected, but the layoffs were concentrated in Texas and California, where Tesla has more workers than anywhere else.
Current and former Tesla staff said many laid-off U. S. employees were replaced through H-1B visas for foreign personnel.
These claims are backed by US Department of Labor data, which show that Tesla requested over 2,000 H-1B visas during the time it was laying off US workers (via Reddit):
Again, there’s a limit of 65,000 visas per year for the entire United States, and Tesla has attempted to offload more than 3% of that amount.
Tesla said many of the laid-off staff were more experienced engineers on higher salaries and were replaced by young engineers from foreign countries on lower salaries.
To be clear, I’m not taking a stance on H-1B here. It seems like there should be good uses for this visa, but it certainly can be abused. My goal is to share more information that could explain why Elon would want more of this visa for his businesses, and maybe not for the right reasons.
Basically, other people see the challenge of hiring staff from other countries willing to work for less than American staff, taking jobs away from Americans and putting pressure on overall pay in the United States.
There’s certainly value to the argument. Elon’s counterargument is that the US doesn’t have enough skilled workers, and he needs to hire people from other countries to compensate.
This argument also has some value, especially for specific sectors, like manufacturing engineering, which has become less popular in the US.
However, at Tesla and Elon, things go much deeper than that.
The challenge comes from the employer’s weight on staff as sponsors of their visas. Elon is known for being difficult with staff and doesn’t like the classic 40-hour work week. It forces Tesla employees to work 60 to 80 hours a week.
Fortunately, many Tesla workers have been doing this for years, and the number one motivation has been confidence in Tesla’s project to drive the arrival of electric transportation to curb climate change.
Some other people still believe in this mission, but Elon has eroded it in recent years by focusing more on autonomous driving and advocating for eliminating incentives for electric cars in the United States. It’s increasingly difficult to make people believe that Tesla’s main goal is to drive the arrival of electric vehicles when its CEO talks more about Tesla becoming “the most valuable company in the world” than about its effect on change. climatic. And let’s not say that he has spent a lot of effort and money over the last year to elect those who deny the human effect on climate change.
But he has found another effective way to motivate workers to work harder and for longer hours: hold a visa over their head.
H1B visas are, above all, a means for American corporations to access tough jobs abroad that are less expensive and have reduced protection. H1B personnel still live at risk of deportation if they lose their jobs, forcing them to be more compliant to their corporate executives while they remain here. If we really cared about improving the technological capabilities of the American workforce, we would simply spend money on education and educating American citizens.
The nature of the H-1B visa for your employer puts enormous pressure on workers.
In addition, Tesla, like many other companies with H-1B visas, tends to rent in countries where longer work weeks are already the norm. For example, India already has a 6-day painting week.
I don’t like it when Tesla workers commit suicide by running 80 hours a week, but if they do it with passion, by choice, for what they consider a wonderful mission, it’s hard to object. It’s your choice.
But if they do it because they need the “American dream” and are afraid that their layoff will end or reduce their chances of immigrating because they are in the country on an H-1B visa, that strikes me as exploitation.
Fred is an editor and senior editor at Electrek.
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