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The full story is: Specialized foreign workers were brought in for repair and specialized work. Korean immigrants are able to come in on ESTA visas for 90 day

The full story is: Specialized foreign workers were brought in for repair and specialized work. Korean immigrants are able to come in on ESTA visas for 90 days. No issue there. Labor union claimed the workers were doing union non-specialized work and this broke their visa grants. Suppose that the plant made special workers do non-special work, the hammer does not fall on the workers. It falls on the plant. Yet ICE was brought in to hammer the workers. This is a big screw up in the legal procedures department. I don't criticize anyone but this administration is a hot mess. And too arrogant to admit it.

lupusreal 1y ago
> Suppose that the plant made special workers do non-special work, the hammer does not fall on the workers. Your boss telling you to violate the terms of your visa doesn't mean you get to do that. They violated their visas, so they get kicked out.
- nashashmi 1y ago
  The visa was procured by the business under the auspices of doing business. The business holds responsibility that the worker performs operation for the business in the parameters that the business visa works in. The same goes for H2B visas.
- pavlov 1y ago
  If only it were that simple. An ESTA or B1 visa lets you attend business meetings. How do you draw the line between “work” and “meeting”? A sibling comment to yours [1] describes a situation where moving office chairs from one meeting room to another was considered union work. How are Korean experts supposed to know you shouldn’t do that when attending a meeting or you risk being thrown in jail for violating your visa? That’s an extreme case, but it illustrates that this isn’t some clear-cut case of knowingly doing work that wasn’t permitted. - - [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45184501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45184501
  - CPLX 1y ago
    > An ESTA or B1 visa lets you attend business meetings. How do you draw the line between “work” and “meeting”? This is a construction site. Do you have a tool in your hand? Then you’re not in a fucking meeting. This isn’t that complicated. > A sibling comment to yours [1] describes a situation where moving office chairs from one meeting room to another was considered union work. How are Korean experts supposed to know you shouldn’t do that when attending a meeting or you risk being thrown in jail for violating your visa? How are you supposed to know the laws of any country you visit? Do you have some kind of universal rule you’re applying here? If I don’t know what kilometers are can I get away with speeding in Switzerland? > That’s an extreme case, but it illustrates that this isn’t some clear-cut case of knowingly doing work that wasn’t permitted. The details here seem to be in short supply but if they were acting as construction workers or even foreman on tourist or B1 visas what they were doing is clearly illegal. Hyundai is a multi billion dollar company they’re well capable of knowing and following US labor laws. If they can’t they have no business building a factory in the US obviously.
    - pavlov 1y ago
      What evidence do you have that the Korean Hyundai employees were construction workers or foremen? Why would Hyundai fly that kind of workers from across the world?
      - CPLX 1y ago
        The fact that many were wearing hard hats and hi-vis vests in the photos of the raid seems relevant right? They raided a construction site, not an office building. What do you think they were doing there?
        pavlov 1y ago
        An architect would wear a hard hat and vest to a construction site. Does that make them a construction worker?
        1y ago
- fragmede 1y ago
  That's incredibly shortsighted. Hyundai invested a shit ton of time and money and effort into making a plant in a shit hole of a state to make it less of a shit hole. Now, there's a group of South Koreans who have first hand experience of America being shit. They're gonna go home and tell everyone that will listen, that Americans are all shitheads, and fuck those people, and never come back. Why would Hyundai ever open another American plant if that's how their people get treated? Have you been arrested? It's humiliating. It's not that they broke the rules, it's how they're being enforced. That visa has always been fine for that. If we wanted to change how things work, a competent state department would have telegraphed changes coming down the pipeline months in advance, and spared everyone the humiliation of being abducted by ICE.
  - CPLX 1y ago
    This is an insightful comment on what is apparently a multi-billion dollar charity known as Hyundai, and their desire to improve the state of Georgia. I had mistakenly confused them with the multi-national Chaebol of the same name that is known for ruthless business competition and making decisions to maximize their own profits and shareholder wealth.
    - fragmede 1y ago
      You are forgiven. It's pretty confusing, I know. Those people with the different skin and hair color have emotions and families, even though they don't speak English.
      - CPLX 1y ago
        What do you suppose the answer to this question is: > Why would Hyundai ever open another American plant if that's how their people get treated?
        komali2 1y ago
        I've followed you through this thread and I'm really curious about your political ideology. On the one hand you've been making the stark, cynical observations I expect from leftist: analyzing the company's behavior from a lens of profit motive, discussing how corporations will outsource to other countries to skirt labor law and pay slave wages, defending unions, discussing how immigrant labor is just another form of outsourcing; on the other hand you've engaged in hard-line liberal defense of law for the sake of law: never mind that a bunch of non citizens were just subjected to violence at the hands of the state, perhaps they violated the law and therefore they're subject to whatever degredation the legal apparatus throws at them! Finally, you, perhaps inadvertently, are defending the actions of America's most right wing government it possibly has ever had, continually pulling out their own propaganda lines: "they were violating the terms of their visa and have to go!" I like meeting people like that, if you were open to sharing how you arrived at this more-complicated-than-normal political ideology, I'd be interested to know more.
argomo 1y ago
It's extremely easy to perform union with without realizing it. I was working a software deployment at a plant site where we had uncomfortable chairs, so we brought in chairs from the conference room next door. That turned out to be a union job, so we had to return the chairs and suffer until some union folks could do the same thing. And I've heard similar stories from other people, including one where union employees intentionally placed debris to obstruct a non-union worker with a cart; they lay in wait until she came along and picked up the barrier, then got her written up for it. While I support unions generally, I'm convinced that sour experiences of this variety have worked against them politically.
- conradev 1y ago
  Rippling moved into an old Spotify office in NYC and they were required to use union labor to remove the old signage. They decided to leave the signage up rather than pay the union tax.
  - CPLX 1y ago
    When they give lavish amounts of money to executives or VCs do you also call that a tax?
    - conradev 1y ago
      Nope. I was using tax in the sense of "mandatory cost enforced by the government" even though in this case the revenue goes to private entities.
      - CPLX 1y ago
        Is there any cost not enforced by the government? What stops me from killing and eating my local venture capitalists for their protein content?
        conradev 1y ago
        For you in particular, likely some moral precepts? or are you arguing that the deterrent effect of government punishment is the only thing stopping you? I don't really understand the line of argument.
sugarpimpdorsey 1y ago
> Suppose that the plant made special workers do non-special work, the hammer does not fall on the workers. It falls on the plant. Yet ICE was brought in to hammer the workers. This is a big screw up in the legal procedures department. So if hookers are working the streets, the hammer does not fall on them and will fall on their pimp instead? The cops will just let them go? The law does not work the way you think it does.
- nashashmi 1y ago
  That depends on the writing of the law. If the law forbids a person to sell an illegal service, then the seller is at fault. If the law forbids buying a service, then the buyer is at fault. It is easier to go after the seller/broker (pimp) then it is to go after the service worker, legally speaking, because the transfer of money is through the broker. Same thing happened with Trump in the hush money scandal. The guy who transferred the money (the lawyer) was at fault. The only reason by which they came after trump was that the books did not record the transfer truthfully, and did so falsely.
  - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
    Having your lawyer do something illegal on your behalf is also a crime.
    - ethbr1 1y ago
      https://m.youtube.com/shorts/p80ACpPKTHU https://m.youtube.com/shorts/p80ACpPKTHU
- Paratoner 1y ago
  And it works the way things are unfolding since the start of this year, highly knowledgeable person sir?
CPLX 1y ago
That’s not the full story at all. No argument that this administration is a disaster on hundreds of metrics but it’s not clear what’s going on here. At a glance it’s at least possible that this was a pro-US worker policy. The Asian high tech companies have a history of falsely claiming US workers just aren’t smart enough to do the job when in fact what they really want is to have their own workers come in and work triple overtime at slave wages. It was a huge issue with the TSMC build in Arizona. If they brought people in to do construction work on either tourist visas or B1 meeting type visas that’s illegal and should be and what happened here makes perfect sense. Of course enforcing pro-labor laws against multinationals isn’t exactly what this admin is known for, so it’s probably a fuck up. But until we know the details we don’t know.
- seanmcdirmid 1y ago
  > Of course enforcing pro-labor laws against multinationals isn’t exactly what this admin is known for, so it’s probably a fuck up. But until we know the details we don’t know. It is pretty obvious now that the Korean sub-contractors thought they were above board on the proper visas for the consulting work that was being contracted. Now, whether that was actually true or not will take a few years of litigation to figure out, since visa law is complicated. If they were doing custom specialized work (that is definitely allowed by ESTA/B1), then the visas were correct. If they were hammering nails into wood, then the visas were incorrect. See https://apnews.com/article/south-korea-us-georgia-raid-hyundai-24d990562f5ac20e7d3e983a77a4f7ff https://apnews.com/article/south-korea-us-georgia-raid-hyund...
  - CPLX 1y ago
    That's not obvious at all. The image in the article you're linking to shows people with hardhats and vests that say "mechanic" on them. Not only that there's a long history of asian high tech conglomerates taking shortcuts on these kinds of projects: https://prospect.org/labor/2023-06-22-tsmc-semiconductor-factory-phoenix-accidents/ https://prospect.org/labor/2023-06-22-tsmc-semiconductor-fac... Including this specific one: https://www.enr.com/articles/60802-third-fatality-recorded-at-hyundais-76b-metaplant-in-georgia https://www.enr.com/articles/60802-third-fatality-recorded-a... So maybe, maybe not. The fact that the attorneys for the accused deny it isn't exactly dispositive.
GeoAtreides 1y ago
>ESTA visas for 90 days. No issue there. Wrong. ESTA is not a visa, it's a requirement for all travelers to US. The visa-waiver program (VWP) doesn't include the right to work. You need to have an appropriate visa if you're being paid (or given material benefits) while travelling in US. Things like interviews or conferences or workshops are not included in the right to work requirement.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

lupusreal 1y ago

> Suppose that the plant made special workers do non-special work, the hammer does not fall on the workers. Your boss telling you to violate the terms of your visa doesn't mean you get to do that. They violated their visas, so they get kicked out.

nashashmi 1y ago
The visa was procured by the business under the auspices of doing business. The business holds responsibility that the worker performs operation for the business in the parameters that the business visa works in. The same goes for H2B visas.
pavlov 1y ago
If only it were that simple. An ESTA or B1 visa lets you attend business meetings. How do you draw the line between “work” and “meeting”? A sibling comment to yours [1] describes a situation where moving office chairs from one meeting room to another was considered union work. How are Korean experts supposed to know you shouldn’t do that when attending a meeting or you risk being thrown in jail for violating your visa? That’s an extreme case, but it illustrates that this isn’t some clear-cut case of knowingly doing work that wasn’t permitted. - - [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45184501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45184501
- CPLX 1y ago
  > An ESTA or B1 visa lets you attend business meetings. How do you draw the line between “work” and “meeting”? This is a construction site. Do you have a tool in your hand? Then you’re not in a fucking meeting. This isn’t that complicated. > A sibling comment to yours [1] describes a situation where moving office chairs from one meeting room to another was considered union work. How are Korean experts supposed to know you shouldn’t do that when attending a meeting or you risk being thrown in jail for violating your visa? How are you supposed to know the laws of any country you visit? Do you have some kind of universal rule you’re applying here? If I don’t know what kilometers are can I get away with speeding in Switzerland? > That’s an extreme case, but it illustrates that this isn’t some clear-cut case of knowingly doing work that wasn’t permitted. The details here seem to be in short supply but if they were acting as construction workers or even foreman on tourist or B1 visas what they were doing is clearly illegal. Hyundai is a multi billion dollar company they’re well capable of knowing and following US labor laws. If they can’t they have no business building a factory in the US obviously.
  - pavlov 1y ago
    What evidence do you have that the Korean Hyundai employees were construction workers or foremen? Why would Hyundai fly that kind of workers from across the world?
    - CPLX 1y ago
      The fact that many were wearing hard hats and hi-vis vests in the photos of the raid seems relevant right? They raided a construction site, not an office building. What do you think they were doing there?
      - pavlov 1y ago
        An architect would wear a hard hat and vest to a construction site. Does that make them a construction worker?
        1y ago
fragmede 1y ago
That's incredibly shortsighted. Hyundai invested a shit ton of time and money and effort into making a plant in a shit hole of a state to make it less of a shit hole. Now, there's a group of South Koreans who have first hand experience of America being shit. They're gonna go home and tell everyone that will listen, that Americans are all shitheads, and fuck those people, and never come back. Why would Hyundai ever open another American plant if that's how their people get treated? Have you been arrested? It's humiliating. It's not that they broke the rules, it's how they're being enforced. That visa has always been fine for that. If we wanted to change how things work, a competent state department would have telegraphed changes coming down the pipeline months in advance, and spared everyone the humiliation of being abducted by ICE.
- CPLX 1y ago
  This is an insightful comment on what is apparently a multi-billion dollar charity known as Hyundai, and their desire to improve the state of Georgia. I had mistakenly confused them with the multi-national Chaebol of the same name that is known for ruthless business competition and making decisions to maximize their own profits and shareholder wealth.
  - fragmede 1y ago
    You are forgiven. It's pretty confusing, I know. Those people with the different skin and hair color have emotions and families, even though they don't speak English.
    - CPLX 1y ago
      What do you suppose the answer to this question is: > Why would Hyundai ever open another American plant if that's how their people get treated?
      - komali2 1y ago
        I've followed you through this thread and I'm really curious about your political ideology. On the one hand you've been making the stark, cynical observations I expect from leftist: analyzing the company's behavior from a lens of profit motive, discussing how corporations will outsource to other countries to skirt labor law and pay slave wages, defending unions, discussing how immigrant labor is just another form of outsourcing; on the other hand you've engaged in hard-line liberal defense of law for the sake of law: never mind that a bunch of non citizens were just subjected to violence at the hands of the state, perhaps they violated the law and therefore they're subject to whatever degredation the legal apparatus throws at them! Finally, you, perhaps inadvertently, are defending the actions of America's most right wing government it possibly has ever had, continually pulling out their own propaganda lines: "they were violating the terms of their visa and have to go!" I like meeting people like that, if you were open to sharing how you arrived at this more-complicated-than-normal political ideology, I'd be interested to know more.

argomo 1y ago

It's extremely easy to perform union with without realizing it. I was working a software deployment at a plant site where we had uncomfortable chairs, so we brought in chairs from the conference room next door. That turned out to be a union job, so we had to return the chairs and suffer until some union folks could do the same thing. And I've heard similar stories from other people, including one where union employees intentionally placed debris to obstruct a non-union worker with a cart; they lay in wait until she came along and picked up the barrier, then got her written up for it. While I support unions generally, I'm convinced that sour experiences of this variety have worked against them politically.

conradev 1y ago
Rippling moved into an old Spotify office in NYC and they were required to use union labor to remove the old signage. They decided to leave the signage up rather than pay the union tax.
- CPLX 1y ago
  When they give lavish amounts of money to executives or VCs do you also call that a tax?
  - conradev 1y ago
    Nope. I was using tax in the sense of "mandatory cost enforced by the government" even though in this case the revenue goes to private entities.
    - CPLX 1y ago
      Is there any cost not enforced by the government? What stops me from killing and eating my local venture capitalists for their protein content?
      - conradev 1y ago
        For you in particular, likely some moral precepts? or are you arguing that the deterrent effect of government punishment is the only thing stopping you? I don't really understand the line of argument.

sugarpimpdorsey 1y ago

> Suppose that the plant made special workers do non-special work, the hammer does not fall on the workers. It falls on the plant. Yet ICE was brought in to hammer the workers. This is a big screw up in the legal procedures department. So if hookers are working the streets, the hammer does not fall on them and will fall on their pimp instead? The cops will just let them go? The law does not work the way you think it does.

nashashmi 1y ago
That depends on the writing of the law. If the law forbids a person to sell an illegal service, then the seller is at fault. If the law forbids buying a service, then the buyer is at fault. It is easier to go after the seller/broker (pimp) then it is to go after the service worker, legally speaking, because the transfer of money is through the broker. Same thing happened with Trump in the hush money scandal. The guy who transferred the money (the lawyer) was at fault. The only reason by which they came after trump was that the books did not record the transfer truthfully, and did so falsely.
- seanmcdirmid 1y ago
  Having your lawyer do something illegal on your behalf is also a crime.
  - ethbr1 1y ago
    https://m.youtube.com/shorts/p80ACpPKTHU https://m.youtube.com/shorts/p80ACpPKTHU
Paratoner 1y ago
And it works the way things are unfolding since the start of this year, highly knowledgeable person sir?

CPLX 1y ago

That’s not the full story at all. No argument that this administration is a disaster on hundreds of metrics but it’s not clear what’s going on here. At a glance it’s at least possible that this was a pro-US worker policy. The Asian high tech companies have a history of falsely claiming US workers just aren’t smart enough to do the job when in fact what they really want is to have their own workers come in and work triple overtime at slave wages. It was a huge issue with the TSMC build in Arizona. If they brought people in to do construction work on either tourist visas or B1 meeting type visas that’s illegal and should be and what happened here makes perfect sense. Of course enforcing pro-labor laws against multinationals isn’t exactly what this admin is known for, so it’s probably a fuck up. But until we know the details we don’t know.

seanmcdirmid 1y ago
> Of course enforcing pro-labor laws against multinationals isn’t exactly what this admin is known for, so it’s probably a fuck up. But until we know the details we don’t know. It is pretty obvious now that the Korean sub-contractors thought they were above board on the proper visas for the consulting work that was being contracted. Now, whether that was actually true or not will take a few years of litigation to figure out, since visa law is complicated. If they were doing custom specialized work (that is definitely allowed by ESTA/B1), then the visas were correct. If they were hammering nails into wood, then the visas were incorrect. See https://apnews.com/article/south-korea-us-georgia-raid-hyundai-24d990562f5ac20e7d3e983a77a4f7ff https://apnews.com/article/south-korea-us-georgia-raid-hyund...
- CPLX 1y ago
  That's not obvious at all. The image in the article you're linking to shows people with hardhats and vests that say "mechanic" on them. Not only that there's a long history of asian high tech conglomerates taking shortcuts on these kinds of projects: https://prospect.org/labor/2023-06-22-tsmc-semiconductor-factory-phoenix-accidents/ https://prospect.org/labor/2023-06-22-tsmc-semiconductor-fac... Including this specific one: https://www.enr.com/articles/60802-third-fatality-recorded-at-hyundais-76b-metaplant-in-georgia https://www.enr.com/articles/60802-third-fatality-recorded-a... So maybe, maybe not. The fact that the attorneys for the accused deny it isn't exactly dispositive.

GeoAtreides 1y ago

>ESTA visas for 90 days. No issue there. Wrong. ESTA is not a visa, it's a requirement for all travelers to US. The visa-waiver program (VWP) doesn't include the right to work. You need to have an appropriate visa if you're being paid (or given material benefits) while travelling in US. Things like interviews or conferences or workshops are not included in the right to work requirement.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]