Am I legal?

[paddys25]

Hi

I came here to USA during Mid June 2008 and till now I am not staffed to any project and hence I do not have any pay stubs. If this continues, what will happen to my legal status?

Thanks and Regards
Paddy Sundaram
(jobsforpadmanabhan@ yahoo.com. au)

[cncd1]

You are out of status at this time. This will cause great problems for you in the future. Not getting paid while on H1B is illegal.

Either complain to the DOL about your employer so that you will be paid, find a legitimate employer for which you will need to leave and re-enter the country in order to work, or go back to your home country.

You are already in a bad situation which you need to address immediately.

[paddys25]

How many months from the date of arrival to USA can I be in bench?

[delhiramanathan]

You are not supposed to be on the bench. Your employer needs to find a job for you as well as pay you. That is why he called you to USA. He is also supposed to pay you even if you are on the bench. If he is not paying, you can make a complaint to DOL as suggested by cncd1. You are out of status now.

[cncd1]

Your employer is a fraud. You must either get a real job, complain to the DOL and get paid by your current employer, or return to your home country.

Jobs are NOT guaranteed in the US. Well qualified US citizens in IT are unemployed. Thousands were laid off last month alone. If you have marginal qualifications and are not from a well known university, you will have problems. It is not a statement about you; it is just a fact of life in the US.

[cncd1]

Check IT and engineering news sites. One hi-tech company in my town let go 250+.

[cncd1]

In my job market, this is a major employer and is a significant number of employees. They aren't done yet. We are looking the areas largest employer laying off later in the year after the rearrangement of work between sites is complete. They're expecting some layoffs here and major layoffs where the work is coming from. It isn't IT though. Other non-IT layoffs in my area have been accounting type from a major service center - jobs went to South America, I believe. I personally know non-H1Bs tech types laid off within the last few months as well as people taking longer to find new jobs. I know from a family member in banking, that things are going poorly in their field.

There were reports of - as I recall - 15/16,000 IT/tech types last month. Since I don't know the companies or circumstances, I don't know how they were distributed across the country.

Most of the jobs in the US are not in the mega-companies with 10s of thousands of jobs. You hear about those downsizings all over the country. But the majority of the employers are local news events - if that. A small manufacturing company can downsize its IT department from 7 to 3 - over 50% and that won't make the news. Enough of these types of events greatly impacts the job market - especially since it is small/midsized companies that will hire outside experts to assist with major system upgrades, etc. If they cannot afford staff, they won't be upgrading software.

Some of the events are not downsizings but hiring freezes. When the universities institute a hiring freeze, it affects PhD candidates as well as current faculty hoping to move. This can really hurt the recent graduates; those hoping to go into academia are forced into post docs; when the market opens, there will be hundreds of applicants for a single job.

In all of the time I have been either in the job market or retired but still interested, this is not the worst I have felt about job prospects but is about the most pessimistic for finding a long-term "good" job at a fair salary.