[Levin]

By
Dave Jamieson
Sep 21, 2024, 08:30 AM EDT


......

Renny had come from India in 2021 to work as a nurse in a St. Louis hospital during the pandemic. Travel nurses’ pay was soaring, but she says she received just US$27 per hour — well below market rate at the time — and struggled to support her husband and two kids in an expensive and unfamiliar country. Within three months she had exhausted her savings and was slipping into debt, she told MedPro in a resignation email. She quit and moved to Texas for a job she says roughly doubled her pay.

But under the terms of her contract, Renny could be on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars in damages if she resigned before working three years. She was also bound by mandatory arbitration, which waived her right to sue the company in court. And she had agreed to cover the company’s legal fees if an arbitrator ruled against her. MedPro had sought and won an additional US$1,250 from her to pay for its attorney.


Lots more at: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/foreign-n...ccbbaf0313#

[grotesqueness]

in the old pre-requisite of US department of labor


those who do not pass US english cannot get a job nor sign a contract in US english

today USA is playing the slave law

[Levin]

I think Blin accidentally put his reply into my post.

To clarify, here's the original excerpt in my thread starting post:

Renny had come from India in 2021 to work as a nurse in a St. Louis hospital during the pandemic. Travel nurses’ pay was soaring, but she says she received just US$27 per hour — well below market rate at the time — and struggled to support her husband and two kids in an expensive and unfamiliar country. Within three months she had exhausted her savings and was slipping into debt, she told MedPro in a resignation email. She quit and moved to Texas for a job she says roughly doubled her pay.

But under the terms of her contract, Renny could be on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars in damages if she resigned before working three years. She was also bound by mandatory arbitration, which waived her right to sue the company in court. And she had agreed to cover the company’s legal fees if an arbitrator ruled against her. MedPro had sought and won an additional US$1,250 from her to pay for its attorney.

[teaserteam]

If the contract is so bad, why the other 500,000 foreign registered nurses working in the United States made no noise? About one in six registered nurses are foreign nurses in the United States.

As of 2022, there were about 500,000 immigrant nurses in the U.S., accounting for about one in six of the close to 3.2 million RNs. However, immigration remains a hot-button political issue with ongoing anti-immigrant rhetoric and recent actions and proposals to limit immigration and immigrants’ role in the workforce. These actions include the federal government extending its pause on the processing of new visa applications for international nurses in June 2024. The pause has been in place since April 2023 and, at this time, the government is only processing applications submitted on or before December 2021.

https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/the-gro...trictions/

[CHAOS]

If the contract is so bad, why the other 500,000 foreign registered nurses working in the United States made no noise? About one in six registered nurses are foreign nurses in the United States.

[url=https://ibb.co.com/PhNm0fZ]

[Levin]

If the contract is so bad,  why the other 500,000 foreign registered nurses working in the United States made no noise?  About one in six registered nurses are foreign nurses in the United States. 

Maybe not all foreign nurses are recruited by MedPro? Maybe the other recruitment companies have different contracts?

[Levin]

The agreements require workers to put in a minimum number of hours before leaving, or else they’ll have to pay back thousands of dollars the staffing firm says they owe for licensing, travel, housing and other expenses. The MedPro contracts viewed by HuffPost also include a mandatory arbitration clause.

Although MedPro says it served notice to Renny by both mail and email, Renny says she was unaware of the arbitration proceedings until they were over. She suspects the mail never reached her because of her move to Texas, and any emails about it may have landed in her spam folder.

......

under mandatory arbitration, workers aren’t on equal footing with the company, said Alexander Colvin, a professor of conflict resolution at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Instead, employers set the terms, and workers must accept those terms if they want the job. That’s why the practice is often called “forced” arbitration.

“Bilaterally negotiated arbitration works really well,” said Colvin, who has testified before Congress about the process. “The problem comes when it’s mandatory. There is no real employee choice in enacting these procedures. It’s take-it-or-leave-it.”

The use of forced arbitration in the workplace has spread thanks in part to a series of Supreme Court decisions stretching back to the 1990s. These days, more than 60 million workers could be bound by forced arbitration clauses, according to Colvin’s estimates. Of the employers who make arbitration mandatory, more than 30% also require workers to explicitly sign away their right to file class actions.

Some foreign-born nurses have challenged the legality of their contracts, countersuing after their employer took them to court. As a 2022 Bloomberg story detailed, nurses from the Philippines joined together in a proposed class action lawsuit against staffing agency Health Carousel, claiming the company had violated anti-trafficking law by enforcing its agreements. (The lawsuit was settled earlier this year.)

[Wy:Nox]

America and Canada is no longer a haven and they have a long list of things they can do to fine you back 100 times.
Heard from relatives that one rich China man retired but he did not declare his pension in China. He ended- up paying back more than $100,000. Just imagine the amount in RMB.

[Levin]

Sariga Kunnapilly, another Indian nurse hired through MedPro in 2022, says she found the American legal process overwhelming.

Kunnapilly, 42, says she ended up at a Houston health care facility earning around $35 per hour, a figure that sounded high when she converted it to Indian rupees. But she realized she was underpaid when other nurses shared their salaries over lunch one day. She struggled to support her husband and two kids, one of whom has special needs. After she quit, she says MedPro took her to arbitration.

“They were not truthful regarding expenses and the way America is,” Kunnapilly said in an interview. “They were trying to hide the reality.”