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> disposable foreign workers are brought over to get exploited "exploited" is a matter of perspective. To an onlooker who has lived their whole life in a firs

> disposable foreign workers are brought over to get exploited "exploited" is a matter of perspective. To an onlooker who has lived their whole life in a first world country, seeing people work for $x - (less-significantlyLess) [where $x is what is "typical" for the job] can be seen as bad/wrong/sad etc... I have spent time working in very poor parts of Mexico and Manila. Crime is rampant, I feared for my life at times. Polution/open sewage made my eyes burn. By the end of my job there (helping doing on site server data migration for a financial institution) I was willing to pay/do anything to get out. We take many things for granted that foreign workers might consider "Perks of the job". $1 has far more buying power in Manila than a place like the Bay area, but I would live in the Bay over Manila, essentially taking a wage cut. This does not condone the wage discrepancy btwn foreign/domestic workers, but offers a potential explanation why a person would happily take an apparent "pay cut", and even be better off.

dominotw 10y ago
I am an immigrant living in the united states. I still can't believe my luck that I get to live in this paradise on earth called USA. I also feel guilty that got this incredible opportunity while much of my extended family and friends rot in third world hell holes waiting for their lives to be over quickly so they can be put out of their misery. One of my uncle works as day laborer in dubai. He works 14 hr days of hard labor in extreme heat and lives in a some shanty where he has to share a bathroom( hole in the ground) with 14-20 other people. His passport got confiscated by his "owners" as soon as he landed there and was put under some sort of draconian "contract" where they get to work him to death, work place deaths are extremely common and no one cares if its an immigrant. In native's eyes they are basically slaves with no rights. You can see videos online where the 'owners' beat the shit out of them for real or imagined slights. I went to a restaurant once in Dubai with my uncle, all the immigrants were separated out into a different room with no air conditioning and that is where immigrants were supposed to sit you could never eat with locals. I've also heard of many second-hand stories where women who go there to be be domestic help get sexually and physically abused for years. And shocking part is that he does all this voluntarily for the most part even though he never gets to see his family and kids and gets to have sex only when he goes back every 4-5 yrs. We had houses on the our street referred to as 'dubai houses' meaning houses build with money made in dubai, you can feel the eerie sadness when you look at a house. I can go on forever but I think you get the idea. Seeing yourself as an individual and as a human being is privilege inaccessible to most people in countries like mine. Even Our philosophical frameworks and belief systems are designed to explain away and make sense of unbearable misery of life with concepts like karma and preordination.
- sangnoir 10y ago
  > I also feel guilty that got this incredible opportunity while much of my extended family and friends rot in third world hell holes waiting for their lives to be over quickly so they can be put out of their misery Goodness - I know it's probably hyperbole, but what kind of fucked-up country do you come from?
  - mschuster91 10y ago
    Probably India or Pakistan, common sources of Dubai slave labor.
    - JorgeGT 10y ago
      I'm guessing India because of the karma comment. What here in HN is a number on your profile, there it is a promise of a better future (but maybe in the next life).
      - shoo 10y ago
        Karma is also an explanation/justification of why your current life isn't so good - you're making amends for something bad you did in a previous life.
        tamana 10y ago
        A rationalization.
      - tamana 10y ago
        A false promise.
  - yourapostasy 10y ago
    India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are common labor pools that many Mid East nations draw upon for physical laborers. It isn't just Dubai, though they are among the most egregious; you'll see these arrangements in nations like Saudi Arabia as well, even though it is not nearly as well-publicized.
HelloMcFly 10y ago
> "exploited" is a matter of perspective. Yes, of course. But that doesn't change the fact that companies are systematically exploiting their life context in order to pay them below a fair market wage (in many cases), and in doing so is also exploiting the rest of the workforce to pay them less. Just because someone is happy doesn't mean they aren't being taken advantage of in a systematic, identifiable, and preventable way.
- _audakel 10y ago
  How do you define "fair" in fair market wage? If foreign talent = domestic talent and foreign wage = domestic wage; is there a compelling reason to hire foreign? And if being hired = increase worker happiness, than equal pay will decrease foreign worker happiness. If all people are equal than whos happiness should we optimize for?
  - CamperBob2 10y ago
    How do you define "fair" in fair market wage? It eventually has to come down to, "I'm an American, so I'm entitled to get paid more than everybody else on the planet for doing a given job." I find that attitude pretty disgusting, but that's just me. The same people who complain endlessly about H1Bs, outsourcing, and cheap foreign labor will then cheerfully drive to Wal-Mart and buy a new DVD player for $12. It will never, ever occur to them that there are two sides to every transaction, and that Mother Nature abhors an arbitrage opportunity even more than she abhors a vacuum.
    - Clubber 10y ago
      Yes, but US labor and citizens fought generations for those wages. Revolutionary War, Civil War, World Wars, company / labor riots, taxes to subsidize industry, taxes for infrastructure, taxes for education, legal systems, all that. US taxpayers paid for our economy through blood and toil. You don't think high wages just happen because companies feel generous do you?
      - 10y ago
eli_gottlieb 10y ago
>"exploited" is a matter of perspective. No, not really. If the bosses and investors are taking the surplus value, defined as the gap between wages+capital costs and actual revenues, then the worker is exploited.
- sokoloff 10y ago
  That is technically correct (the best kind of correct). Just as I exploit electricity to provide light in my house, or exploit Exxon/Mobil when I derive $5 of utility from a gallon of gas that I swindled them into selling me for $2.50 or exploit Apple when I'd be willing to pay 50% more (or more) for my Macbook than they actually charge, because I use it to make money. As applied to labor, "exploited" generally means something much stronger than "employed to a productive end".
  - ajmurmann 10y ago
    The market in this case is being kept artificially inefficient to benefit corporations to the direct detriment of foreign workers and indirect detriment of local workers.
  - tim333 10y ago
    It's technically correct if you are a Marxist as Marx used the term that way. Otherwise the dictionary has "The action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work."
    - sokoloff 10y ago
      I agree with you (at least assume strongly that I do), but I couldn't find a dictionary with that as the first definition. Most of the first definitions were more along the lines of "make full use of and derive benefit from (a resource)", making GP technically correct.
      - tim333 10y ago
        That one was from http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/exploitation http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/exploit... I guess people use the term in different ways.
awinder 10y ago
These companies depress wages for the people that live & work in the US though, not just for the people they displace. The downstream effects on the places impacted mean this is a consequence that ripples through communities of people who live in and support their nation of residence.
- _audakel 10y ago
  Foreign workers (fw) who work for less $ than the Domestic worker (dw) drive down wages. In this case fw is benefited by making more than they would in native country, while dw makes less than the old rate. Paying old rate generally means dw keeps old rate, while fw makes nothing. This is the inverse where the dw is benefited at the expense of the fw. If all people are equal who should recieve the benift?
  - awinder 10y ago
    What's the utility to people in dw society of providing benefits to fw? This has happened across broad industries and dw through their governments have signed trade deals that usually include retraining for the workers affected. Otherwise, dw and their governments end up subsidizing the costs of corporations making bank which has so little social benefit that it's really not normal to allow it to go on. It's not a free for all in places like India to allow fw to displace their dw or drive down their dw salaries. The US is getting taken for a ride with these policies.
    - Hondor 10y ago
      dw's society can produce goods at lower cost than without fw. But really there doesn't need to be any benefit to dw's society unless dw's people consider themselves privileged and deserving a better life than the world's poor simply because they happened to be born into it.
  - invalidOrTaken 10y ago
    >If all people are equal who should receive the benefit? The million dollar question is: which ones are you entrusted to represent?
warcher 10y ago
I've had some experience with the H1B staffing mills, and yeah, I'd say exploited is pretty fair, if you compare the work they could be doing vs the work they are doing. I would imagine most of those people would call it a fair trade to be in America, but I really think it's a lose lose scenario for the country (which could be benefitting from the full measure of their productivity) and the worker (because they're wasting their precious time).
tdyen 10y ago
What your missing missing out is the societal destruction of the USA inherit in highly polarized wealth in a society. Crime increases with wealth inequality and it's because of companies exploiting visa's like the H1B. You've seen this crime yourself why would you want to make America crap like the Phillipines?

dominotw 10y ago

I am an immigrant living in the united states. I still can't believe my luck that I get to live in this paradise on earth called USA. I also feel guilty that got this incredible opportunity while much of my extended family and friends rot in third world hell holes waiting for their lives to be over quickly so they can be put out of their misery. One of my uncle works as day laborer in dubai. He works 14 hr days of hard labor in extreme heat and lives in a some shanty where he has to share a bathroom( hole in the ground) with 14-20 other people. His passport got confiscated by his "owners" as soon as he landed there and was put under some sort of draconian "contract" where they get to work him to death, work place deaths are extremely common and no one cares if its an immigrant. In native's eyes they are basically slaves with no rights. You can see videos online where the 'owners' beat the shit out of them for real or imagined slights. I went to a restaurant once in Dubai with my uncle, all the immigrants were separated out into a different room with no air conditioning and that is where immigrants were supposed to sit you could never eat with locals. I've also heard of many second-hand stories where women who go there to be be domestic help get sexually and physically abused for years. And shocking part is that he does all this voluntarily for the most part even though he never gets to see his family and kids and gets to have sex only when he goes back every 4-5 yrs. We had houses on the our street referred to as 'dubai houses' meaning houses build with money made in dubai, you can feel the eerie sadness when you look at a house. I can go on forever but I think you get the idea. Seeing yourself as an individual and as a human being is privilege inaccessible to most people in countries like mine. Even Our philosophical frameworks and belief systems are designed to explain away and make sense of unbearable misery of life with concepts like karma and preordination.

sangnoir 10y ago
> I also feel guilty that got this incredible opportunity while much of my extended family and friends rot in third world hell holes waiting for their lives to be over quickly so they can be put out of their misery Goodness - I know it's probably hyperbole, but what kind of fucked-up country do you come from?
- mschuster91 10y ago
  Probably India or Pakistan, common sources of Dubai slave labor.
  - JorgeGT 10y ago
    I'm guessing India because of the karma comment. What here in HN is a number on your profile, there it is a promise of a better future (but maybe in the next life).
    - shoo 10y ago
      Karma is also an explanation/justification of why your current life isn't so good - you're making amends for something bad you did in a previous life.
      - tamana 10y ago
        A rationalization.
    - tamana 10y ago
      A false promise.
- yourapostasy 10y ago
  India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are common labor pools that many Mid East nations draw upon for physical laborers. It isn't just Dubai, though they are among the most egregious; you'll see these arrangements in nations like Saudi Arabia as well, even though it is not nearly as well-publicized.

HelloMcFly 10y ago

> "exploited" is a matter of perspective. Yes, of course. But that doesn't change the fact that companies are systematically exploiting their life context in order to pay them below a fair market wage (in many cases), and in doing so is also exploiting the rest of the workforce to pay them less. Just because someone is happy doesn't mean they aren't being taken advantage of in a systematic, identifiable, and preventable way.

_audakel 10y ago
How do you define "fair" in fair market wage? If foreign talent = domestic talent and foreign wage = domestic wage; is there a compelling reason to hire foreign? And if being hired = increase worker happiness, than equal pay will decrease foreign worker happiness. If all people are equal than whos happiness should we optimize for?
- CamperBob2 10y ago
  How do you define "fair" in fair market wage? It eventually has to come down to, "I'm an American, so I'm entitled to get paid more than everybody else on the planet for doing a given job." I find that attitude pretty disgusting, but that's just me. The same people who complain endlessly about H1Bs, outsourcing, and cheap foreign labor will then cheerfully drive to Wal-Mart and buy a new DVD player for $12. It will never, ever occur to them that there are two sides to every transaction, and that Mother Nature abhors an arbitrage opportunity even more than she abhors a vacuum.
  - Clubber 10y ago
    Yes, but US labor and citizens fought generations for those wages. Revolutionary War, Civil War, World Wars, company / labor riots, taxes to subsidize industry, taxes for infrastructure, taxes for education, legal systems, all that. US taxpayers paid for our economy through blood and toil. You don't think high wages just happen because companies feel generous do you?
    - 10y ago

eli_gottlieb 10y ago

>"exploited" is a matter of perspective. No, not really. If the bosses and investors are taking the surplus value, defined as the gap between wages+capital costs and actual revenues, then the worker is exploited.

sokoloff 10y ago
That is technically correct (the best kind of correct). Just as I exploit electricity to provide light in my house, or exploit Exxon/Mobil when I derive $5 of utility from a gallon of gas that I swindled them into selling me for $2.50 or exploit Apple when I'd be willing to pay 50% more (or more) for my Macbook than they actually charge, because I use it to make money. As applied to labor, "exploited" generally means something much stronger than "employed to a productive end".
- ajmurmann 10y ago
  The market in this case is being kept artificially inefficient to benefit corporations to the direct detriment of foreign workers and indirect detriment of local workers.
- tim333 10y ago
  It's technically correct if you are a Marxist as Marx used the term that way. Otherwise the dictionary has "The action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work."
  - sokoloff 10y ago
    I agree with you (at least assume strongly that I do), but I couldn't find a dictionary with that as the first definition. Most of the first definitions were more along the lines of "make full use of and derive benefit from (a resource)", making GP technically correct.
    - tim333 10y ago
      That one was from http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/exploitation http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/exploit... I guess people use the term in different ways.

awinder 10y ago

These companies depress wages for the people that live & work in the US though, not just for the people they displace. The downstream effects on the places impacted mean this is a consequence that ripples through communities of people who live in and support their nation of residence.

_audakel 10y ago
Foreign workers (fw) who work for less $ than the Domestic worker (dw) drive down wages. In this case fw is benefited by making more than they would in native country, while dw makes less than the old rate. Paying old rate generally means dw keeps old rate, while fw makes nothing. This is the inverse where the dw is benefited at the expense of the fw. If all people are equal who should recieve the benift?
- awinder 10y ago
  What's the utility to people in dw society of providing benefits to fw? This has happened across broad industries and dw through their governments have signed trade deals that usually include retraining for the workers affected. Otherwise, dw and their governments end up subsidizing the costs of corporations making bank which has so little social benefit that it's really not normal to allow it to go on. It's not a free for all in places like India to allow fw to displace their dw or drive down their dw salaries. The US is getting taken for a ride with these policies.
  - Hondor 10y ago
    dw's society can produce goods at lower cost than without fw. But really there doesn't need to be any benefit to dw's society unless dw's people consider themselves privileged and deserving a better life than the world's poor simply because they happened to be born into it.
- invalidOrTaken 10y ago
  >If all people are equal who should receive the benefit? The million dollar question is: which ones are you entrusted to represent?

warcher 10y ago

I've had some experience with the H1B staffing mills, and yeah, I'd say exploited is pretty fair, if you compare the work they could be doing vs the work they are doing. I would imagine most of those people would call it a fair trade to be in America, but I really think it's a lose lose scenario for the country (which could be benefitting from the full measure of their productivity) and the worker (because they're wasting their precious time).

tdyen 10y ago

What your missing missing out is the societal destruction of the USA inherit in highly polarized wealth in a society. Crime increases with wealth inequality and it's because of companies exploiting visa's like the H1B. You've seen this crime yourself why would you want to make America crap like the Phillipines?