I feel like everywhere I work, we have this term, and it’s become increasingly more common over the past decade as the USA becomes more and more hateful and aggressive towards the working class people… The offshore team. I really, really hate hearing about the offshore team. It’s from a certain country in Asia that starts with I But I have nothing against those people that come from that country, it’s simply out of concern for my well-being and my survival that it bothers me…
You look at a country like Germany, and how they have a workers council, and a country like France that has proper retirement, then you see the USA and how We have millions of computer science grads who struggle to find work, can’t get a job, universities churning out new students in the tens of thousands per year… We shouldn’t have an offshore team, at a company that makes billions of dollars, led by people that have so much money amassed up that they could survive for a thousand years spending millions.
It’s just embarrassing, that as a society, we are so horrible to each other.
It’s similar in nursing. They keep bringing over nurses from the Philippines, Nigeria, Ghana, and Jamaica (to keep the list short) and they’re great coworkers but a lot of their contracts would actually count as human trafficking on the same questionnaires our ERs use to screen patients. They’re working in conditions that were misrepresented or straight up lied about with monetary and legal penalties for breaking the contract such as tens of thousands of dollars or loss of their green card.
The employers are doing this to get employees who will be too afraid to report unsafe working conditions for both them and their patients. In psych I see a lot of international nurses who did not realize how utterly violent the average US homeless substance abusing psych patient can get (well except for a few who did high acuity psych back overseas; we had a Nigerian coming from forensics who knew what was up). A lot of them come from other specialties like onc or renal and wind up in psych because it’s an easy in and wind up waaay out of their depth with no easy way out.
The fact that this abuse exists to depress my wages at the expense of everyone involved (them, me, AND the patients) is just… Idk. I almost want out but it’s what I’m most skilled at and I can’t imagine doing any other kind of work but the conditions and pay have just steadily worsened the longer I work.
Since it isn’t happening to you personally I guess it would be hard to back up with evidence but is there not somewhere you could anonymously report these abuses and concerns to? Any government department? At the very least the misrepresented conditions seem like they must be a violation of something . If it’s anonymous hopefully you’d be shielded and you don’t personal face the same risks to your well being. If there’s anything that is actionable it could result in better conditions all round.
Your tip might be a piece of information that they can add to any other such information to trigger an investigation maybe. Here in Australia at least, the government does at least sometimes act on abusive labour practices, they’ve swooped in on farmers employing fruit pickers who are almost entirely foreign and who suffered absolutely blatant wage theft and abuse and other high profile instances such as foreign embassy staff being treated as slaves.
I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of it is legal, and most of the borderline cases I personally encountered were years ago when I worked for the state. It was less prevalent when I worked for a major university hospital but they had really good HR that were offsite (not buddies with department managers) and well trained in the legal aspects so whatever nonsense they were pulling was always above board. The most egregious ones though, and the ones you’ll read about when they make the news, are the nursing homes, which is work I’ve never had the stomach to do. Now I’m working in a small inner-city hospital, so most of their staff abuse is just against local poor people who aren’t going to find anywhere that pays more.