âI know it when I see it.â These are the famous words of Justice Potter Stewart defining legal obscenity in his concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964).
I feel the same way about a hostile work environment. For a hostile work environment to be actionable, it must (among other factors) be objectivity hostile. What does this mean? Itâs hard to define, but I know it when I see it.
For example, consider the case of Curtis Anthony, an African-American quality inspector for Boeing at its North Charleston, South Carolina, plant, sued his employer for allowing a racially hostile work environment.
According to ABC News, his allegations include white co-workers urinating in his seat and on his desk, leaving signs with the ân-wordâ near his workspace, and ultimately leaving a noose above his workspace. Boeing, for its part denies the allegations, stating that Boeing spokesperson wrote, that Anthony âis a valued Boeing South Carolina teammate, [and] there is no validity to his allegations.â
Bingo. Hostile work environment. I canât necessarily define it, but I know it when I see it.
Regardless of whether an employee can hold you legally responsible for, letâs say, another employee peeing on his desk, why would let this misconduct go unchecked? Even if you think itâs just horseplay, you canât ignore it.
If an employee complains about misconduct, your reaction should never be, âWell, I understand, but itâs not that bad, or at least not bad enough for you to sue us; now go back to work.â Your obligations as an employer-recipient of a complaint of workplace harassment never changes. Investigate and take prompt remedial action to reasonably ensure that the harassment stops and does not repeat.
Otherwise, you are setting yourself up for a very difficult and expensive lawsuit. In other words, urine trouble (sorry ⌠not sorry).
When a client calls me to ask for advice about firing an employee, the first question I always ask is, âWhat does the employeeâs file look like?â
I want to know if there exists a documented history of performance issues to justify the termination, and whether said issues are known and understood by the employee.
I ask these questions for two reasons:
Can the employer objectively prove the misconduct to a judge or jury? Fact-finders want to see documentation, and if itâs lacking, they are more likely to believe that the misconduct was not bad enough to warrant documentation, or worse, that it did not occur. In either case, a judge or jury reaching this conclusion is bad news for an employer defending the termination in a lawsuit.
Surprises cause bad feelings, which lead to lawsuits. If an employee has notice of the reasons causing the discharge, the employee is much less likely to sue. Sandbagged employees become angry ex-employees. You do not want angry ex-employees going to lawyers, especially when you lack the documentation to support the termination.
Jason Anderson, African-American, claimed that GCRTA discriminated against him because of his race by denying him a promotion, issuing excessive discipline and ultimately terminating him. He lost. Why? Because his employer had a long and documented history of his performance and discipline issues.
On April 17, 2012, Anderson received a coaching for being involved in a preventable motor vehicle accident in an unmarked RTA Transit Police Vehicle.
On March 5, 2013, Anderson received a coaching for making disrespectful and unprofessional comments about a fellow officer over the police radio.
On August 14, 2014, Anderson received a coaching for failing to report to work for an overtime shift that Anderson had volunteered to work.
On January 1, 2015, Anderson received a coaching for neglecting his responsibilities as a first responder after witnessing a motor vehicle accident involving an RTA coach. Anderson continued driving rather than stopping to provide assistance to injured passengers.
On August 5, 2016, Anderson received a coaching for allowing a person to ride without proof of payment purchase or validation of fare and failing to take any enforcement action.
On August 5, 2016, Anderson received a First Written Warning for a disruptive, disrespectful and unprofessional outburst directed at Andersonâs supervising officer during the Republican National Convention. He yelled, among other things, âYou disgust me. The very thought of you is disgusting to me and your presence sickens me.â
On January 25, 2017, Anderson received a coaching for failing to address the resistive and disorderly behavior of a fare violater at the Tower City Rapid Station.
On April 12, 2017, Anderson received a coaching for failing to attend to scheduled court appearances.
On May 30, 2017, Anderson received another First Written Reminder for violation of Employee Performance Code for failing to maintain control of a suspect following an investigative detention.
On June 13, 2017, Anderson was charged with multiple misdemeanors following an off-duty incident with his girlfriend during which he allegedly assaulted her while he had his loaded service weapon unsecured in their hotel room.
Based on this history, the court had little difficulty dismissing Andersonâs claims:
Plaintiff was issued three (3) First Written Warnings and (2) two non-disciplinary coachings, each based on a particular circumstance of Plaintiffâs problematic or violative conduct. Plaintiff provides no direct evidence to support a finding that his discipline or termination were made because of his race. Plaintiff also fails to demonstrate how any similarly situated employee received more favorable treatment. The record does however support a finding that GCRTAâs actions against Plaintiff were made for legitimate, non-discriminatory reasons following Plaintiffâs unlawful conduct the morning of May 26, 2017 at the Double Tree Hotel.
This employer gave this employee a very long leash before ultimately terminating his employment. Your leash may not, and likely need not, be this long.
However, no matter the length of your leash, you must ensure it’s documented and communicated to the employee each step of the way. Otherwise, you are asking for a lawsuit and issues in said lawsuit post-termination.
Hailing a ride. Delivering takeout. Tidying up the house.
They all fall under the growing list of services offered in the gig economy. Many of us have made such conveniences staples in our personal lives.
More businesses have started using gig economy services through online labor platforms. Think of the platforms as Uber-style portals that connect companies with on-demand talent. While the gig economy as a whole is not growing as fast as headlines would indicate, the labor platforms that help fuel them are.
Why have these matchmaker platforms gained steam in corporate America?
The reasons vary, though most boil down to the challenges associated with todayâs tight labor market. Rising labor costs and a dwindling number of available workers have compelled companies to seek new options when it comes to recruiting.
And as a sign of their growing popularity, the companies that use platforms to tap gig workers extend well beyond small businesses and niche start-ups. Today, large legacy companies count platforms as key tools in their staffing toolkits.
Here are four ways businesses are integrating gig-style platforms into their talent acquisition strategies.
Hiring Blue-Collar Workers
Who would have ever thought? These days, companies have more difficulty recruiting blue-collar workers than white-collar workers.
Young adults are shying away from the trades and manual work and instead are flocking to white-collar work. And at the same time, those who perform much of Americaâs blue-collar work â baby boomers â continue retiring in droves.
Blue-collar shortages will persist for at least another decade in sectors including hospitality, transportation, manufacturing and retail. Without a sufficient pool of available workers, companies will have to offer higher wages and absorb weakened corporate profits as a result.
Consider Coca-Cola, which uses the platform Wonolo to hire merchandise delivery drivers for restocking shelves in between scheduled deliveries. For fast-moving consumer-goods companies like Coke, hiring drivers on demand can mean avoiding âout of stocksâ and salvaging billions of dollars in revenue missed due to empty shelves.
Developing Talent Marketplaces In-House
Rather than rely on outside third-party platforms, some companies are creating their own. Internal freelance platforms can offer many benefits: workers who are a better cultural fit, distilled onboarding so they can hit the ground running, and reduced compliance and IP risks.
PwC has developed its own platform and talent network. While initially focusing on alumni and its current community of contractors, it also accepts external independent professionals to bid on projects. And then thereâs The Washington Post. Its internal platform streamlines the process of hiring freelance journalists from anywhere to cover almost any subject, allowing them to more effectively report breaking news.
These in-house labor platforms, with their hand-picked talent pools and direct connections to internal projects and teams, encourage ongoing relationships between companies and independent contractors. As such, both parties benefit.
Hiring On-Demand Teams
The conventional thinking is that online gigs work best for one-off tasks or discrete projects that can be completed by an individual. Think of driving from point A to point B, designing a new company logo or tagging website images.
But rather than focus on individual freelancers, companies can now turn to âflash organizations.â Such groups comprise teams that are assembled on demand and then disband after they finish the project. In much the same way that a Hollywood film is created â by hiring a director, producer, and actors, all with predefined roles â a flash organization fills a predefined hierarchy of temporary roles. But it does so dynamically, using algorithms that source talent from online labor platforms.
IBM and Mastercard have used Gigsterâs AI-driven platform to hire on-demand software development teams. Using these teams, the companies designed and created programs in a matter of days or weeks, compared to months of planning and sourcing using legacy hierarchies.
Achieving Innovation Through Crowdsourcing
To accelerate innovation, some companies are leveraging not teams but, rather, the power of the crowd. General Electric uses various crowdsourcing platforms, including its own GeniusLink and Fuse, to find solutions to tough engineering problems and innovate new products. For example, in one crowdsourced competition, an Indonesian engineer solved the companyâs challenge to increase airplane fuel efficiency by reducing the weight of a single part by 84 percent.
The scope of services being offered through on-demand workforce platforms is widening. Expect online labor platforms â especially those outside of transportation â to continue innovating on the types and modes of work that independent contractors can complete. As such, labor platforms will intensify their offerings of enterprise solutions so that more businesses can use them for taking their talent efforts up a notch.
If you have more than a handful of employees chances are they are using some kind of internal communication platform.
Maybe they are among the 10 million people who use Slack every day, or maybe youâve deployed Microsoft Teams, Yammer, Workplace by Facebook, or some other internal chat tool.
The key is, your employees have a place to collaborate, plan projects, brainstorm and share ideas. But are you sure that is all they are doing?
If a company has a communication culture where sexist jokes are casually exchanged, or employees think itâs OK to share client information via chat, itâs a just a matter of time before a crisis occurs. With that kind of risk simmering in the background, companies canât just assume employees are following all the data-privacy rules and social protocols when using these internal platforms.
Unless HR is paying attention, these seemingly valuable collaboration platforms can quickly become problematic, said Jeff Schumann, CEO of Aware, a provider of monitoring software for collaboration platforms.
âA large company might have thousands of different public chat groups going at any given time,â he said. Thousands more employees will be exchanging private messages with other individuals or small groups. âItâs important to know what they are saying.â
Chances are employees are sharing information or communicating in a way that HR should be worried about. Columbus, Ohio-based Awareâs âHuman Behavior Risk Analysisâ report found that 1 in 50 private messages on these platforms contains sensitive information, including passwords and client data, and 1 in 90 are ânegative in nature.â They also found that 1 in every 250 public messages â those shared with a large group â contain confidential information.
The challenge is how to monitor these conversations and respond without scaring people away. Smaller companies can mitigate these risks through human monitoring â assigning an HR person or team leader to keep track of the conversations and to address any issues that arise. But in big companies such oversight is impossible.
Instead, many firms are utilizing monitoring software with artificial intelligence and natural language processing to constantly read messages and alert HR if a problem arises. These platforms can be often customized to look for certain types of information, or conversations that might indicate a regulatory risk (sharing client data), or suggest cultural concerns, or forms of harassment.
Taking a proactive approach gives companies the information they need to prevent data breaches and to respond to bullying, racism or other negative exchanges, said Linda Pophal, founder of Strategic Communications, an employee communications consulting firm.
âIf itâs a small issue, managers can address the issue privately,â Pophal said. But if the exchange represents a bigger systemic problem or it puts the company at risk, HR should be ready to step in. In these cases, a response may involve deleting the post, reprimanding the people involved and sending out a companywide reminder about appropriate use of these chat tools.
Pophal also urged HR leaders to post a follow-up message about how the situation was resolved. âYou canât just take something down and assume no one will notice,â she said. âUse these situations as an opportunity to communicate whatâs happened, and to change the direction of the conversation.â
Pulse of the Workforce
She noted that monitoring isnât only useful to uncover communication mistakes. HR leaders can also use monitoring as a way to gauge employee sentiment. âIf something is going on at the company people are talking about it,â Pophal said. Monitoring these platforms lets you know what they are saying. Maybe they are mad about hikes in health insurance costs or confused about the new paid time off program. âHR can track these conversations and respond when necessary.â
They can also see when people are excited about a new program and to identify who are the communication influencers and who is opting out of the conversation, added Laura Hamill, chief people officer of Limeade, an employee experience software company. Hamill also is chief science officer of Limeade Institute, which researches employee well-being, engagement and other workplace issues. âMonitoring gives you a sense of whether people feel engaged,â she said.
These platforms provide employees with a virtual community that becomes inherent to the workplace culture. âMonitoring wonât solve your communication problems,â she said. But when HR pays attention to how people communicate, and sets the tone for appropriate behavior, it will ensure that everyone feels safe, included, and connected.
âItâs 2019. All of our employees have been on Facebook for years. Many are also on Twitter, and Instagram, and ⌠We donât need to do any social media training.â
If youâve had these thoughts or internal conversations, allow me to offer Exhibit 1 as to why you are wrong.
Texas district votes to fire teacher who tried to report undocumented students to Trump on Twitter.
A Texas school board unanimously voted to fire a teacher who tried to report undocumented students in her school district to President Donald Trump through a series of public tweets â that she thought were private messages to the president.
If youâre keeping score at home, the employee believed that her very public tweets were actually private conversation between her and President Trump.
I promise that you almost certainly have at least one employee who thinks that their social media posts are private.
Unless you want to be in position of having to fire that employee at some point in the future after he or she screws up by posting something offensive online (and he or she will screw up and post something offensive), do yourself a favor and schedule some social media training for your employees.
I might even know someone who can do it for you (nudge nudge, wink wink).
âIf one man can destroy everything, why canât one girl change it?â â Malala Yousafzai
Women in India constitute 48.4 percent as compared to 51.6 percent of men in the total Indian population of 1.37 billion people.
A good ratio, right? Moreover, according to international non-governmental organization Catalyst, Indian women access higher education at the same rates as men at 27 percent.
But the ratios are not in favor of women when it comes to their participation in the workplace. Research by Catalyst notes that âonly about 29 percent of Indian women work compared to 82 percent of Indian men.â
Indian women are in order first and foremost supposed to be a devoted wife, a doting mother and then a working professional. Women in India are expected to conform to traditional and societal norms.
Family always has to come before work. Women in India also have to be present and represent every ritual and cultural function conducted. And the older a female gets in India, the more she is bound in a âdouble burden syndromeâ â balancing home and work.
But even women who get to join the workforce are not free of facing stereotypes and harassment. Women are rarely offered C-suite roles and similarly lofty positions.
Thereâs a lot that people hold against women in the workplace. Itâs time to shatter the myths associated with women in the workplace and help increase their workplace participation.
Myth:Women Canât Negotiate
The gender wage gap is the highest in India, according to Indian English-language daily Business Standard. Women in India are paid 34 percent less than what an Indian man is paid in the workplace, according to a research conducted by the International Labour Organization.
The prevailing explanation as to why women donât earn as much as men is that âwomen arenât aggressive enough.â People say that women donât push their employers hard enough to give them a raise or that they canât negotiate.
Thatâs not true. Women are as assertive as men when asking for salary appraisal. More and more studies in 2019 are showing that the rate of women and men asking for salary is the same. But, the conversion rates still favor male employees over women.
Myth: Too Emotional or Too Cold
In higher-level managerial positions, women often face a double bind. When they portray female characteristics, they are termed as emotional or sensitive. But when they follow traditional leadership roles, they are perceived as too difficult or too cold.
Lisa Feldman Barrett, the director of Northeastern University’s Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory, said that emotions are not something that we are born with but are rather created according to circumstances. And in India, women are groomed to be delicate, fragile and sensitive to situations. Therefore, it can be said that portraying high emotional intelligence is not biological but rather a social construct.
Myth: Women Donât Belong in STEM
According to UNESCO, only 30 percent of women in India participate in STEM-related fields in higher education. Whatâs more disheartening is that the dropout rate among women in technology is even higher in junior to midlevel positions. Across Asia, the dropout rate is 29 percent.
Another reason why women continue to remain underrepresented in STEM fields begins very early in childhood.
Women are associated with arts and languages and men with math and science. When given a mathematical examination, women are under a lot more pressure to succeed than men. When applying this institutional fear toward a workplace full of men, it adversely
Myth: Women Are Only Good at Soft Skills
This is a judgment held against women, especially in the engineering field. Soft skills involve communication, creativity, adaptability, flexibility and teamwork. These are skills that every individual who works with other people needs to possess irrespective of profession and gender. To be a successful engineer, one needs to have both technical as well as soft skills.
Myth: Sexual Harassment Is a Womanâs Issue
The number of registered cases against sexual harassment in the workplace increased 54 percent from 371 cases in 2014 to 570 in 2017, according to the independent Indian English-language news site Scroll.in. But, as it is in most cases, the majority of these reported cases were from women. Due to maximum cases being reported by women, people assume that women are subject to harassment and therefore itâs âtheir issueâ and they should resolve it on their own.
Sexual harassment doesnât limit itself to a gender. While itâs important to understand that, itâs also important for people to stand by each other when such cases are reported. Men and women should be allies when someone reports against a âhigher-upâ or report when they have witnessed something.
Instead of holding their social conditioning against them, letâs all try to build a workplace in India where everyone has the same opportunities and treatment irrespective of their gender.
Thereâs a difference between how people behave in their personal life and how they behave professionally. But businesses can learn something from the tactics people use to repair personal relationships, according to therapist and author Esther Perel.
One of the speakers at the Unleash 2019 conference in Las Vegas in May, Perel has extensive experience counseling couples. She consults organizations on conflict resolution as well.
âAs couplesâ therapists, we have wide familiarity working with polarized systems,â Perel said. âI know [how] to work with relationships where one person doesnât believe a word the other person is saying. Thatâs what couples who are arguing do. So we actually have an enormous amount of experience helping companies.â
Her session at Unleash focused on how organizations can use some of the tenets of couples counseling in their workplace when it comes to working on the relationship between the employer and the employee. She also spoke after the session to answer more questions on relationships in the workplace.
Perel prefers the term ârelational intelligenceâ over the oft-used term âemotional intelligence.â Thatâs because itâs not a self-referential concept, she said. Rather, itâs knowing how to deal with other people and become in tune with the needs of other.
This skill set is especially important after #MeToo, she said. Now, she added, âthereâs tremendous anxiety and restlessness in the workplace about how we relate to each other, how we establish boundaries and how we deal with disagreements breaches of trust.â
People carry narratives about relationships that influence their expectations from an interaction and their interpretations of the situation theyâre in. Perel calls this their ârelationship resume.â People come to work with this past. Were they raised to be trusting or suspicious? Did they grow up in a household where they were taught to ask for help or figure things out on their own? Do they prefer to work collaboratively or alone?
Answers to questions like this help explain what kind of team member a person will be, Perel said. Thatâs a missing set of questions that employers donât consider when they hire.
Understanding boundaries is another key relational intelligence skill useful in both personal and professional relationships.
âThese days we have narrowed the definition of boundary and we have sexualized it,â Perel said. But really the term âboundaryâ refers to a much broader scope of situations. Boundaries in sexual situations are just a small piece of it.
In the workplace, boundaries exist in any team. This can show itself in many ways. Itâs the difference between an employee whoâs involved in everyoneâs business and the employee who hardly interacts with any colleagues. Itâs the difference between teams that act like a secret society and teams with more âporousâ boundaries.
There are several key boundary questions that exist in a team. They include, Whoâs involved in this project? Who needs to say what to whom? What needs to be shared, and what can be kept to oneself? How much can you be absent for three days without anyone noticing? What is private versus what is shared? And what are decisions you make alone versus decisions for which you need to ask your manager permission?
The specifics of how to use polarity thinking warrants its own article. Looking at it more broadly, though, Perel explained some of the key tenets behind it. Before you tell someone what theyâre doing wrong you tell them what theyâre doing right. Also, you acknowledge that you know what losses someone will face by doing something different.
âBefore you go directly from here to here and say, âThis is wrong, you need to do that,â you first address the loss. Every change comes with loss,â Perel said.
Well Donna, thereâs no need to terminate these laws; they are already dead. I hear it all the time from clients. âArenât we an at-will employer? We paid you for that handbook that says so. Why canât we fire this employee. This is *!%#*!â
Yes, your employees are at-will. And that and a hill of beans will get you sued.
Employment at-will is dead. Do you have the right to fire an employee for no reason? Absolutely. Yet, if that employee is African-American, Other-American, a woman (or a man), pregnant or recently pregnant, suffering from a medical condition (or related to someone with a medical condition, or you think has a medical condition but doesnât), on a medical leave or returning from a leave, injured, religious, older (i.e., age 40 or above), LGBTQ, serving in the military or a veteran, or a whistleblower or otherwise a complainer, the law protects their employment. Which means that if you fire them, you better have done so for a good reason.
If you look at those categories, most of your employees fall under one of more of them. In other words, while you are an âat-will employer,â that doesnât really mean anything anymore. Employees just have too many protections.
So, how do I suggest you respond? Follow the Platinum Rule of Employee Relations. Treat your employees as they would want to be treated. If you treat your employees as they would want to be treated (or as you would want your wife, kids, parents, etc. to be treated), most employment cases would never be filed, and most that are filed would end in the employerâs favor. Juries are comprised of many more employees than employers, and if jurors feel that the plaintiff was treated the same way the jurors would expect to be treated, the jury will be much less likely to find in the employeeâs favor.
What does this mean for your poor performing employees? Does they understand the performance problems? Were they given sufficient counseling and warnings before termination? And, most importantly, can you prove it via contemporaneous documentation? If so, there is no reason to give poor performance a pass just because of the risk of a lawsuit. Otherwise? Iâd think long and hard before firing.
So letâs all raise a glass and toast employment at-will. It had a good ride.
I spent way too much of a recent Saturday morning at the local department of motor vehicles. My plates were expiring and I had forgotten to take advantage of online registration.
So there I found myself at 10 a.m. waiting in line. To be fair, it was the âexpressâ line, designated for registration renewals only. My experience, however, was less than express, thanks to the patron two spots ahead of me.
On her turn, the clerk asked for information stored in some account on her phone. She did not, however, remember the necessary password. She then removed an inch-thick flipbook of Post-it notes, each containing a login and password to a different account.
I watched her rifle through the stack. Ten minutes of life that I will never regain, with my frustration mirrored on the faces of everyone else in line.
One of the top cybersecurity tips is to maintain proper password security. Storing passwords on a notepad or stack of sticky notes does not qualify as secure. What does?
⢠Using passwords with differing types of characters.
⢠Avoiding the most common passwords (like âPa$Sw0rDâ).
⢠Setting a regular schedule to change passwords (although some research shows that most people use near identical passwords when forced to switch).
Four issues warrant additional discussion.
First, do not reuse the same passwords across multiple accounts. If one account is hacked, youâve exposed every other account for which youâve used the same password.
Recently, for example, Intuit disclosed that its TurboTax product had suffered just such an attack. The criminal accessed TurboTax user accounts by taking usernames and passwords it had stolen from a non-Intuit source to attempt TurboTax logins.
For those with which it was successful, the criminal was able to obtain sensitive tax return information. (If you want to know if one or more of your online accounts has been compromised, check out haveibeenpwned.com.)
If you are not going to reuse the same password across multiple accounts, how will you generate and remember hundreds of different and complex passwords? The answer brings us to point number two. Use a password manager.
A password manager is an online service that stores all of your passwords (encrypted on their end). All you need to do to unlock the password for any given account is to recall the lone master password you have chosen for your password manager of choice. Passwords are also synced across devices.
The top competitors offer variations on the same service. Compare and contrast pricing, what each offers and pick one. The money you spend on an annual subscription pales exponentially to what you will spend undoing the damage caused by an account compromised by a weak password.
The question I get most often regarding password managers? âArenât you worried about them being hacked?â
Technically yes, but functionally no. At least one has been hacked without the exposure of even a single user password because all of the stored data is highly encrypted.
If you are comparing the security of reusing passwords or using different password but storing them in a notebook or sticky-note flipbook versus a password manager, the security choice is clear.
Third, check your URLs and only input account information on sites that use HTTPS web encryption.
HTTPS provides an encrypted online session between you and whichever site you are visiting. With a non-HTTPS site, everything you send is visible to anyone on the same network. Even safer, use a Virtual Private Network, or VPN, to create a secure channel between your computer and the internet.
Finally, use two-factor authentication for any account that offers it.
Two-factor authentication, or 2FA, requires a user to input a unique code sent to a device of choice (usually by text message) any time they log in to an account from a new device. 2FA is not foolproof.
For example, it does not take much skill for even a low-level cybercriminal to steal a phone number and intercept the code. More complexly, criminals can use social engineering to ape oneâs identity and trick a mobile company to send a new SIM card to the attacker, diverting all 2FA text messages to the criminalâs mobile device.
Thus, while one should not rely on 2FA as the only method to secure oneâs account, itâs added layer of security certainly canât hurt.
No one is immune from being hacked. However, taking a few simple (albeit mildly inconvenient) steps to secure your passwords and accounts will go a long way to mitigating against this very serious and costly risk.
Last month President Donald Trump announced his desire to implement a new merit-based immigration system.
He did not put forward a detailed proposal, but instead described his proposal in broad strokes. The president emphasized that his goal is to change the make-up of U.S. immigrants, envisioning a points system that would provide more green cards to highly skilled, highly educated and younger immigrants, and reducing immigration based on family relationships.
While he did not mention many specifics, the presidentâs proposal bears a striking similarity to the RAISE Act, an immigration bill introduced into the Senate in 2017 by Sens. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas, and David Perdue, R-Geaorgia. Trump praised the RAISE Act when it was initially introduced in the Senate, but the bill died in Congress.
The RAISE Act would have reduced total U.S. immigration by approximately half and included a points-based permanent immigration system which placed high numeric values on advanced education and extraordinary achievement.
According to the system proposed in the RAISE Act, although an immigrant would score more points with a U.S. job offer, U.S. employers would not be able to sponsor new hires or existing employees for green cards. The point value would be the ultimate determinant in whether a person would be able to secure permanent residence in the U.S.
In light of the presidentâs emphasis on increasing immigration of highly skilled workers, one might assume that his plan envisions higher numbers of temporary work visas for educated and highly skilled foreign nationals. However, neither the presidentâs recent proposal nor the RAISE Act included any discussion of temporary work visas such as H-1B or L-1 visas.
Further, the president laid out his proposal as just that: a proposal. The changes he would like to make are significant and such a radical departure from current law that most of them would have to be implemented in new immigration legislation. This is not likely to occur anytime soon as it would require bipartisan consensus.
In light of the fact that Congress would need to pass new immigration legislation to implement the presidentâs immigration vision, recruiters and hiring managers who rely on foreign talent to fill open requisitions should not expect to see increases to the H-1B visa numbers in the near term.
Further, since Trump has taken office, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services denials and requests for additional evidence in H-1B visa cases have risen significantly, reflecting the presidentâs desire to protect the American workforce, as spelled out in his April 2017 Executive Order, âBuy American, Hire American.â
Employers sponsoring H-1B visas should be prepared for the possibility of longer processing times between filing and ultimate approval of petitions, and should budget for potential additional legal fees.
But even women who get to join the workforce are not free of facing stereotypes and harassment. Women are rarely offered C-suite roles and similarly lofty positions.
