Employer’s from consulting and services companies may sign contracts with their employees only to threaten and make you work for them, but such contact has no legal standing. The contact is just to create fear or fool you into making you believe that you can't quit them and hence making you their bonded labor. If you have signed a contract to not disclose a trade/product secret or a patent across competitors companies say Microsoft/Amazon/Google that’s a different story. But if you were working for a consulting or services company, then there is no such contract for them to prevent you to go to other similar or competitors companies citing competition. Many times these companies sign you a contract making you not quite for a certain number of years or may increase the notice period to an unbelievable number of months (6 months in our case). But they can't override federal or state laws by signing a contract. In such cases, federal or state law applies, not the one you signed in the contract. If the state has 14 days' notice, then you only serve 14 days. In some states like Washington or California, employment is at will, which means you can quit anytime irrespective of what you signed in your contract. see this: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/workers/h1b
You can quit them whenever you want. This information came from the DOL(department of labor). By quitting such an employer, you break all ties. You may have to return devices provided by the employer, but you don’t have to pay for the technology or domain knowledge you gained while working for such a company. The employer is supposed to pay the salary promised as per LCA or the offer letter, which ever is higher, even if you were on the bench for all the days you worked until you quit the company or you are terminated, irrespective of what they made you sign in the contract.
Here is my personal experience:
My wife on H1b had signed a contract with several pages the employer provided just before starting her first job at the client's place. Say it excitement, fear, or trust, she just signed it. As per the contract, my wife had to provide 6 months' notice, failing to do so would forfeit the salary for those months. There were many more weird unbelievable rules like she was asked to not use the common technologies she used for the employer (c#, Ruby, JavaScript, AngularJS, etc) anywhere else. 2 years later she moved to a different employer. The previous employer pulled back the 1-month salary that was already credited to her bank account through ADP and didn’t give her last month's salary citing the contract. We tried to stop the transaction by calling the bank but weren’t successful. After the initial threatening through his lawyer, we decided to let go of 2 months' salary. But the employer started threatening us through his attorney to pay 20k more based on the contract my wife signed. We started receiving threatening emails and phone calls giving us sleepless nights and making our life miserable. My wife had worked for this employer for 2 years for a very low salary. She had even moved to a different state for 4 months leaving a child of 2 years and a husband, for which he didn’t pay anything extra. I got emotional and wanted to fight back for justice no matter how much it would cost me. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any attorneys that would take up my case. We asked for help from our friends and community. Finally, we were told by one of our friends how they had successfully tackled such an issue through WHD under DOL and it’s absolutely free.
We then approached the WHD department under DOL and filed a formal complaint.
https://webapps.dol.gov/contactwhd/Default.aspx
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/contact
They served a letter to her previous employer and were asked to not contact us directly anymore, instead the employer was asked to go through the WHD. It took them about 1-2 months to start investigating our case, but once they started it moved fast and got closed within a month or so. All we asked was for the hard-earned 2 months' salary, but at the end of the investigation, we got more than twice what we asked for. WHD asked us if we had paid the employer for the H1b to which we said yes.
1. We got the money we paid for H1b processing initially (we had proof as we paid in check) the employer argued the money was paid for training but couldn’t prove it to the DOL. We didn’t ask for this but got back based on their investigation
2. We got the salary he didn’t pay while my wife was on the bench (we didn’t ask for this. DOL had asked us to provide all the salary slips from the beginning and questioned us why was she not paid for certain months. We got to know that H1b employers are legally bound to pay salary while on the bench)
3. We also got the last 2-month salary the one which we actually requested.
4. We were provided with a copy of an investigation letter where the employer was in several violations against H1b and was asked for corrective actions. The employer had not even revoked my wife’s H1b upon termination.
A Kannada proverb ಅತಿ ಆಸೆ ಗತಿ ಕೇಡು (Ati aase gati kedu) which means "Too much greed will lead your to disaster" holds good here for her employer
We were assigned to a local DOL/WHD investigator at
Wage & Hour Division
300 Fifth Avenue, Suite 1130
Seattle, WA 98104
Please see these links provided by the DOL investigator at that time.
H-1B Workers’ Rights:
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/62i-h1b-nonproductive-time
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/workers/h1b
Rules regarding deductions from H-1B workers’ pay: http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/FactSheet62/whdfs62H.pdf
Wages: http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/FactSheet62/whdfs62G.pdf
Enforcement by U.S. DOL, Wage & Hour Division: http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/FactSheet62/whdfs62U.pdf
WHD/DOL explained us all the above laws. They also said that L1 and H1 have special protections against contracts. An employer can’t override any federal or state laws by making you sign a contract. If they don’t pay your salary by citing any contract or make your life miserable by threatening you, don’t hesitate to contact DOL.
No comments:
Post a Comment