Boeing’s Use of Nonimmigrant Labor

A U.S. company wants to save money. It decides to let go of senior employees who command high salaries and require generous benefits. It outsources the work to a third-party vendor. That vendor, in turn, hires noncitizens, lawfully present in the United States on nonimmigrant visas (typically H1Bs) to do the work that was formerly done by the U.S.-citizen employees.

As I’ve explored before, this is a common story. Southern California Edison and Disney both received a fair amount of unwanted press when they followed this playbook. And so it should come as no surprise that another big American company has recently been unmasked as following these same moves: Boeing.

Attention came to Boeing in the wake of it’s problems with the 737 Max.

Blooomberg ran a story with this eye popping headline: Boeing’s 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers. The article highlights how Boeing has let go of senior engineers and replaced them with employees supplied by its vendors, HCL Technologies (the same company that replaced Disney’s IT workers back in 2015) and Cyient as well as true outsourcing to overseas facilities in Moscow. The article is replete with complaints that coding was not done properly either by HCL or the Moscovian engineers.

Despite the headline, the Bloomberg article acknowledges Boeing’s statement that it did not rely on engineers from HCL or Cyient in the development of its Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, which is said to be what caused the two Max 737 crashes.

HCL issued a similar public statement indicating that while “HCL does not comment on specific work we do for our customers. HCL is not associated with any ongoing issues with 737 Max.”

Regardless of who worked on what portion of Boeing’s technology, it took these crashes to shed light on Boeing’s use of nonimmigrant labor. Use that parallels what other U.S. companies have done. But conduct that continues to court controversy.

-KitJ