[monkeycantype]

I worked for a company that was bought by CBA, and this was happening while I was there. This would be great if: Indian workers were hired on equivalent terms, in Australia, on visas that give them a clear path to citizenship. If they were hired as individuals and not via contracing companies that force them to sign separate secret contracts that prevent them from pushing for their full legal rights under Australian labor law. Immigration has been great for Australia in countless ways. I get really upset about they way large labor firms have co-opted as immigration a lever for corporations to undermine Australian working conditions and exploit Indian workers and I really don't know what to do about.

[fennecbutt]

No, it would still not be great.

Local options should always be preferred to protect local job markets. Any company only exists because they can do business locally, so they should support local or be burnt to the ground.

I now live in the UK, when I got hired here they had to advertise my position to see if they could fill it locally before they could grant me a visa for it - this is the way.

[hombre_fatal]

Many years ago I was hired by {tech company} in {European country} (I'm from the US).

Once I worked there for a month and befriended my team, one of them showed me how they posted a fake job listing with exactly my experience, and we all laughed about it.

All of the implementations of this legislation seem trivial to rig. Even though it feels good to assume you outcompeted everyone in the UK with your leet skills and they had no option to import the heavy guns.

[fennecbutt]

I went through the process honestly. If the process was corrupted from up top, then that isn't my fault, though you're making it sound like it is, or that I was aware of it or something. Cheeky.

Everything is trivial to rig, we live in a world of apathetic morons who want fat, sugar, salt, dopamine - people who vote like political parties are sports teams, who want to pay the lowest price available even if it polluted the planet with cheap plastic crap, who care only about them and their tribe and not humanity as a whole. People who don't care about the betterment of society or accumulation of wealth so long as they get to hate the group that they've chosen to hate for mostly arbitrary evolved chemical reasons with no bearing in the modern world.

I only say hire local because I've given up. Because our species is too fucking stupid to ever have a borderless utopia. And we don't fucking deserve one either.

[FirmwareBurner]

Yep, same in my EU company, they showed me how easy it was to game the system to easily hire non-EU workers.

EU work visas are like a rubber stamp compared to US ones.

[monkeycantype]

I disagree, these are not anonymous people, but real work collegues that I enjoyed working with, who would love to be able to settle in Australia, and would make a great contribution to the country. Australia without post war migration would be a much duller place. The fact that companies use immigation as a lever against fair wages, doesn't mean that there are not also skills shortages in many areas. I don't think we should conflate that with the need to care for citizens, which I would rather we approach with fair tax systems, maybe some resource extraction royalties and using the increase tax income on vastly increased infrastructure and social spending.

Blaming immigrants instead of systematic explotation and inequality takes us down the disasterous Brexit path.

[wat10000]

Was there literally nobody in the country capable of doing what you do? Or were they just not willing to pay enough?

[bananapub]

it is extremely routine for big companies to do this - all the fangs, big banks, etc, hire everyone they can in Britain on very pleasant pay packages and then hire overseas and pay immigrants the same amount.

[wat10000]

Of course. And it's also a (deliberate, widely accepted) misunderstanding of basic economics. If you pay more you'll be able to hire more. Immigrants such as the one I'm replying to aren't typically hired because there are literally zero available locals with the skills. They're hired because they're cheaper, putting a ceiling on wages. Sometimes that ceiling can be quite high, but it's still there. "You can only bring someone into the country if you can't hire locally" is a polite fiction.

[f1shy]

>> via contracing companies that force them to sign separate secret contracts that prevent them from pushing for their full legal rights under Australian labor law

Where is the line between that and plain slavery?

[DoneWithAllThat]

Slaves are not paid wages. There’s no need to resort to hyperbole here, the practices are abhorrent enough without it.

[zdragnar]

Indentured service is often colloquially conflated with slavery, as the legal protections are removed and so too usually the freedom of association.

[f1shy]

Where is the hyperbole? Is a question: where is the line to start calling it slavery. Obviously, for you far. Not for me.

If we want to go the pedantry way, this is the definition I found: “a condition of having to work very hard without proper remuneration or appreciation.”

Emphasis in proper mine.

[monkeycantype]

I'm ont talking about anonomous people, I'm talking about remote-work collegues whose name I know. They were not slaves, they were absolutley paid wages, but not equivalent wages to local hires.