Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Walmart Seeking Foreign Guest Workers To Fill U.S. Tech Jobs, AFL-CIO Finds

By Dave Jamieson, Huffington Post
April 1, 2015

Walmart is famous for keeping labor costs down inside its more than 5,000 brick-and-mortar U.S. stores. According to a new report from the AFL-CIO, the world's largest retailer may have found a way to save money on its tech workers in the U.S., too.

Researchers at the labor federation found that Walmart has been submitting a growing number of applications for H-1B visas with the federal government. Such visas let U.S. companies employ foreign workers here temporarily, often in high-tech capacities and at lower wages than their American counterparts would typically fetch.

According to the research paper, Walmart filed 1,800 petitions for H-1B visas over the last eight years, with the annual number increasing from 79 in 2007 up to 513 in 2014. Over the same period, offshore outsourcing firms have filed nearly 15,000 such petitions for work in Bentonville, Arkansas, Walmart's corporate home. That includes companies such as Infosys and Cognizant, IT service firms that are among the top H-1B users.[...]

Read the full article:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/01/walmart-h-1b_n_6987200.html

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