DOJ Sues Cloudera For Deliberately Excluding American Workers From Tech Jobs (zerohedge.com)
- Reference: 0183068922
- News link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/04/30/0533223/doj-sues-cloudera-for-deliberately-excluding-american-workers-from-tech-jobs
- Source link: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/doj-sues-cloudera-deliberately-excluding-american-workers-high-paying-tech-jobs
> The Justice Department on Tuesday [2]sued Cloudera, accusing the enterprise data and artificial intelligence company of [3]deliberately engineering a hiring process that excluded American workers from at least seven lucrative technology positions while the firm pursued permanent residency sponsorship for foreign workers on temporary visas. In a [4]14-page complaint filed with the Office of the Chief Administrative Hearing Officer, the department's Civil Rights Division alleges that Cloudera, from March 31, 2024, through at least January 28, 2025, instructed job candidates to submit applications to a dedicated email address, [5]amerijobpostings@cloudera.com , that rejected all external messages with an automated bounce-back error. The company did not advertise the roles on its public careers website or accept applications through its standard portal, as it did for non-sponsorship positions.
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> Cloudera then attested to the Department of Labor that it could not locate any qualified U.S. workers for the roles, which paid between approximately $180,000 and $294,000 annually, according to the filing. The positions included a Product Manager role in Santa Clara, California, with a listed salary range of $170,186 to $190,000. The case marks one of the most detailed enforcement actions under the Justice Department's Protecting U.S. Workers Initiative, which was relaunched last year and has already produced 10 settlements targeting employers accused of discriminating against American workers in favor of temporary visa holders. "Employers cannot use the PERM sponsorship process as a backdoor for discriminating against U.S. workers," Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Civil Rights Division said in a statement. "The Division will not hesitate to sue companies who intentionally deter U.S. workers from applying to American jobs."
[1] https://slashdot.org/~schwit1
[2] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/civil-rights-division-sues-cloudera-excluding-us-workers-applying-high-paying-technology
[3] https://www.zerohedge.com/political/doj-sues-cloudera-deliberately-excluding-american-workers-high-paying-tech-jobs
[4] https://www.justice.gov/crt/media/1438366/dl?inline
[5] mailto:amerijobpostings@cloudera.com
Open borders would be better than this (Score:3, Insightful)
If the border was open then all the would-be immigrants would be competing with Americans on more or less equal terms. But H1B hires are defacto at mercy of their employer and risk of swift deportation if they try to play hardball, which means they'll gladly take lower the pay and lot worse handling than a local would that doesn't have to worry about getting displaced if they get fired or quit, would have to.
The idea that you have to have an employer sponsored work visa entirely depended on people primarily coming over to mooch off of benefits, but what fuckin' benefits are there left for non-citizens in the US?
Re: (Score:2)
" sponsored work visa entirely depended on people primarily coming over to mooch off of benefits ". I'm not American, but that sentence doesn't make much sense to me. If they're working, they're earning and contributing tax, right?
Re: (Score:3)
You can't really open borders when you have 6 billion people living in desperate poverty.
There just isn't enough space in society for that many people.
They're actually could be but it would require such a tremendous transformation in our civilization and how we view basically everything that it's completely off the table.
It wouldn't necessarily be an overall reduction in quality of life but for example you couldn't drive your SUV to your house in the suburbs with its nice pool and four or five b
And? (Score:2)
What did they expect would happen? This is why Channel Partner discounts exist. This is why TAC is offshored so they can hire foreign workers in and lock out the locals. Same thing is happening in Australia. TAC went offshore to Bangalore and China and now we have a desperate "Skills shortage" and are running infinity migration. Corporate HR loves it. They pick up any women they can get their hands on and then trumpet about how diverse they are while the locals get worthless uni degrees and $40,000 debt. In
Try getting a seasonal job at a Trump property (Score:5, Informative)
> Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Civil Rights Division said in a statement. "The Division will not hesitate to sue companies who intentionally deter U.S. workers from applying to American jobs."
Apparently no Americans want to work at Trump properties, so many, many foreign workers are required.
The President’s family business [1]requested at least 184 foreign workers for Mar-a-Lago, Virginia winery and two golf clubs. [theguardian.com] This happens every year since forever. The company has been [2]convicted of fraud and banned from doing business in New York. [ny.gov]
> It was also the fifth time in 10 years that Trump had sought to bring in more than 100 overseas workers for seasonal jobs at Mar-a-Lago, according to [3]data seen by the Palm Beach Post.. [palmbeachpost.com]"
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/13/trump-organization-foreign-workers-visas
[2] https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/tto_release_properties_addendum_-_final.pdf
[3] https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/local/2025/09/23/as-mar-a-lago-visa-use-grows-what-is-the-future-of-h-2b-program/86295192007/
The US government needs a recruiting arm (Score:3)
When someone asks for H1B's the government should have a recruiting arm that sends them a list of candidates that meet the job posting requirements. If they can't justify why they are not qualified no H1B should be issued.
Re: (Score:2)
> a list of candidates that meet the job posting requirements.
And how will this government screen candidates against these requirements? And the next government?
I don't really want any government gatekeeping employment.
Re: (Score:2)
Then maybe you should vote for competent politicians?
This is one of the big reasons I want to see a Canadian or even British style health system introduced into the US. Not just to ensure everyone has access to it, but so that people enter the ballot box and instead of thinking "I'm going to vote for Party X, like my grandpa did" or "I'm going to vote for Party X, because the only news I watch told me Party Y is evil", they instead say "This guy's a moron, if I fall ill, the AHS puts me on a waiting list, t
I don't trust this DOJ (Score:3, Insightful)
The DOJ could just be using one case of a non-american worker being hired and twisting the narrative to extract money out of the company.
This administration is crooked and has been gaming the stock market, insider betting on polymarket, insider trading, giving contracts to preferred companies, and that's not even digging deep.
This DOJ is not working for the people, nor for an office of the US, they are working for Trump as an individual for his personal desires.
Re: (Score:2)
The DOJ will drop the suit as soon as Cloudera ponies up a bribe - er, donation to the president's "library."
Hiring Policy (Score:2)
Steps:
1) Country sabotages education system and defunds projects that promote critical thinking and job skills.
2) Country sues everyone it can for having DEI programs because they don't hire what the country thinks are the most qualified people.
3) Company implements a hiring program that excludes a population of people from a country with document issues in education quality.
4) Country sues company because it doesn't have a DEI program to hire unqualified people for a job.
Yeah, over simplified but I t
I Wonder Why? (Score:4, Informative)
Typically the foreign worker scams are meant to hire cheap foreign labor and avoid paying domestic level wages. But for positions paying nearly $200k, what was Cloudera's goal? If not for cheap labor, why did they want foreign workers for these positions?
Re: I Wonder Why? (Score:4, Informative)
Foreigners don't unionize. Nor do they complain when they are told they can't take time off during the day to do things like see a doctor.
Re: (Score:2)
People earning $200k don't generally unionize either, and no company with any sanity is going to prevent employees from seeing a doctor.
Not mentioned but worth mentioning: H1B sponsorship is not free, and never has been; and employing people on temporary visas is a problem if you plan to keep skilled talent or your product will need maintaining in the long term.
None of this makes any sense, and I do wonder if, ultimately, this was a snafu and the email address was supposed to work. But... the money'd class
Re: (Score:2)
For all we know, they are bringing them over, holding their passport or holding their visa over their head, and charging them for room/board/ 100k price requirement Trump put in place, etc...
That wage goes down fast when corporations have control over everything in your life.
Re: I Wonder Why? (Score:2)
Also is that 200k all in? Because an American would cost much more than that if you factor in health benefits etc.
Re: (Score:2)
No, H1Bs would have to have the same health benefits, and the requirements for H1Bs is that they need to get the same compensation an American would have in any case even if numerous state and national laws didn't require health insurance contributions for full time workers. If a company advertises a job as $200k plus health insurance, yearly bonuses, and a 401k, and they apply for H1Bs when they're unable to fill the role locally, the H1B worker must be given health insurance, yearly bonuses, and a 401k.
Th
Re: (Score:3)
That's a mid to low salary in BayBucks. Also, they are visa slaves with their H1Bs tied to the employer, ripe for exploitation.
Re:I Wonder Why? (Score:4, Informative)
The instances like this that I was aware of had in common that a person in the hiring process was from the same community as the chosen applicants.
It's a safe bet that a department head from China did not preselect a group of men from India for these jobs. It could happen that way, but I'd bet it didn't.
Re: I Wonder Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Reasons vary. I know someone working in HR at a famous Japanese company. Rotating employees to offices around the world generally falls into 3 categories- 1. Giving experience, or rewarding good workers the company would like to develop into management. 2. Temporarily getting rid of useless or unliked employees without needing to fire them, which is very difficult in Japan. 3. Specialists for specific projects where hiring US citizens would be too much of a hassle. Employees in category 2 tend to be assigned to developing or undesirable countries, but some do come to the US too.
Because they don't want to train you (Score:4, Insightful)
It is not a coincidence that we started to slash higher education funding in the year 2000 at the exact same time that India came online as a reliable source for high skill labor.
We were able to cut billions from the education budget and turn that directly into tax cuts for the rich.
In addition flooding the labor market with high skill labor it's always the first goal because high skill labor is expensive and you want to reduce the cost of your most expensive employees first. That's why originally we went after automating factory work because those were union jobs paying well.
And speaking of automation that's the reason this is being allowed to happen. Ordinarily someone would just throw some brides around to shut this down but because of AI the Federal reserve has data showing half a million programmer jobs just don't exist. Technically they aren't job losses because it's a lack of new jobs instead of deleting old jobs but the point is the people in charge don't feel like they need to worry about importing cheap labor as much anymore.
Re:I Wonder Why? (Score:4)
Sometimes companies outsource development to India to save money. That doesn't work well, because of communication issues and such.
So they decide to bring the best members of the outsourced team into America, since they already are familiar with the codebase, etc. This is the process that is commonly used across the country to get H1 visa holders.
It's common, advertise for the role and find a reason to reject everyone who applies for it.
Re: (Score:2)
It's super obvious. It's discrimination.
Re: (Score:3)
Most likely, and this is a bit cynical, the people that own or control Cloudera are foreign born and are trying to help their own ethnic group at the exclusion of Americans.
Re: (Score:2)
> Most likely, and this is a bit cynical, the people that own or control Cloudera are foreign born and are trying to help their own ethnic group at the exclusion of Americans.
In addition, many tech companies likes to hire H1B workers because they hire them as consultants which means no vacation time, sick time, health insurance, 401K, etc. Also, their visa status are tied to the employers so they are going nowhere—no job hopping every two years for higher pay. The H1B system is almost indentured servitude in many ways.
Re:I Wonder Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
Fundamentally you have this backwards. This process is a compliance tool, not a recruiting tool.
If you want to sponsor someone for permanent residency, you need to do this PERM process. If you're in the PERM process, you already have an employee you are happy with, who was already allowed to enter the country on some sort of visa that allows them to work, but you're essentially required to post a job opening for them to notionally demonstrate they aren't taking a job from an American -- which is broken because, to the extent they did, they already did that probably years ago. Today they have an employee that's most likely been working for them for years that they're happy with enough to be willing to sponsor them for permanent residency.
The upshot is that this job posting part of the PERM process is fundamentally adversarial. You're fundamentally competing with some employee the company is happy with -- enough to sponsor them for permanent residency. That person is already ramped up on their projects and already performing well. Practically speaking the company has every incentive to say that you don't meet some fine print ultra specific requirement that they wouldn't care about if they were truly looking to hire. (and then maybe maybe they have other positions with different requirements for which you might be a fit.)
And, if you succeed in all this? Congratulations, you've fucked over someone trying to get permanent residency, and the employer in question isn't even obligated to hire you.
Pragmatically speaking, as a job seeker, PERM is fundamentally broken. (and it is broken, again, because it is controlling the wrong end of the process. The time for this sort of test is when granting work visas, not when granting permanent residency.) The only thing these job posts are potentially useful for is giving a snapshot into parts of a company that don't necessarily have active job posts, noting that there is a bureaucratic incentive to be as specific as legally permissible regarding skillset. At that point you should engage with the company using other non adversarial avenues such as networking or just going through the "front door" normal recruiting process.
That's not a high paying job in SV (Score:2)
That's our world. If you're any good, you can get twice that at a rival firm. That said, the H1B could also get a lot more at a rival firm, so my best guess is it's a strategy to increase the odds you'll stay as you upskill. You hire someone at 200k, they get really good at the job and 4 years later, you're paying them 250k...the top employers can poach them for those 400k jobs your candidate wasn't qualified for 4 years ago.
That said, my theory has flaws in it because EVERY top employer has an army of