Sure, it's legal. Not ethical and you won't hear about it on the Major Networks.

Foreign Workers Could Be Replacing Charlotte Bank Employees
To comment on this story, e-mail Jim Bradley.

Posted: 3:26 pm EDT March 30, 2009Updated: 6:18 pm EDT March 31, 2009
CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- In the Queen City, thousands of people work at Wachovia and Bank of America, but some of them are losing their jobs to foreign workers brought in to replace them.

One Charlotte resident, who will be referred to as Jeff, said he'll lose his job at Wachovia as soon as he finishes training his replacement -- who he says was brought in from India at a lower salary.

“I don’t think it should be a cheap option for the company to truck in boatloads of workers and pay them a lot less than the local market would bear,” Jeff said.

Jeff is talking about “on-shoring”, a process designed help companies find specialized workers, like software engineers, if there aren't enough locally.

But Congresswoman Sue Myrick said it shouldn't be happening in Charlotte, where she believes layoffs have produced a surplus of qualified workers for local companies to choose from.

“They should be doing their part by hiring American workers,” Myrick said.

Myrick supported a recent law that restricts banks that accepted bailout money from hiring certain foreign workers over Americans. She thought it would prevent on-shoring.

“And we tried to cover that when we did the bill. Unfortunately, like everything else, there are loopholes,” she said.

The loophole is that a Charlotte business can use third-party consultants to find workers in other countries instead of hiring foreign workers directly. Those consultants provide foreign workers their H-1B Visas, fly them to Charlotte and pay for their apartments before sending them to work in a local job. But because the Charlotte business is paying that contractor and not the employee directly, it's not a violation of the bailout law.

Neither Wachovia nor Bank of America would tell Eyewitness News if they're still using foreign workers hired by third-party vendors, but Eyewitness News obtained internal Wachovia documents showing workers already on-shored to Charlotte. An organizational chart shows a Wachovia work group where 12 of 22 software engineers were brought to Charlotte by a technology consulting company called Synechron.

Jeff said it's common knowledge within Wachovia that Synechron brought all 12 of those workers from India to take Charlotte jobs.

“Within my department, it's mostly on-shored foreign resources, and the software we built is basically being handed over to them,” he said.

Synechron wouldn't comment on how many foreign workers it's brought to Charlotte or what they're paid.

University of North Carolina at Charlotte labor economist Ron Madsen said while federal law requires paying the "prevailing local wage” for on-shored workers, that's often not the case.

“What I've looked at suggests that we're looking at about a 25 percent discount between the total cost on-shore versus domestic,” he said.

Still, Madsen said there aren't enough on-shored workers in Charlotte -- he estimates fewer than 500 -- to significantly impact the local economy.

But Myrick believes the local workers they're replacing are significant to the community. “They're part of the community, they're volunteering, they're contributing, they're spending their money here,” she said.

And in some cases, they’re losing their jobs to foreign workers.

“I think it needs to be looked at,” Myrick said.

She said she plans to talk with Bank of America and Wachovia to find out more about who they're hiring.

Both Bank of America and Wachovia told Eyewitness News on Monday that they now have policies against on-shoring workers directly. But when reporter Jim Bradley asked about the loophole and whether they’re still working with consultants who on-shore foreign workers for local jobs, neither bank would comment further.
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