Instead, document everything happening to you with evidence, speak with HR about incidents as they arise, and if they don't take action, seek legal counsel.
Doing anything else will paint you in a bad light.
Me now thinks only winning move is to suck it up while finding a new gig. For H1B prisoners like this OP, well, it's tough to win a rigged game.
The core problem, IMHO, is not having a baseline model for what good management looks like.
In my 30s, I finally stumbled into a high mutual trust situation. It was heaven. We got so much done, had so much fun.
Once you get a taste of trust, it's hard to suspend disbelief, kinda ruins you for future relationships.
After earning my PhD in failure, I'm still no wiser, have no prescriptive advice.
The only "skill" I got was tuning my spidey sense.
One is burned after experiencing what work could be like. But what to do - I have so no idea.
An immigrant non-citizen employee who is harmed by an employer has just as much of a right to sue the employer as a citizen employee.
And then there's the bigger picture: living in a country knowing that the only legal basis for your presence here is a visa tied to you being employed by your current employer, and now considering whether or not to launch legal action against that employer.
p.s. I'm a former H1B immigrant, Green Card holder, and now US Citizen.
Obviously there's a chance but this is literally like taking on Oceania from 1984 - Apple's apple-isms and the famous reality distortion field really do make the comparison slightly alarming, thinking about it.
Go to HR? Are you kidding me? First, HR is not your friend. They're there to protect the company. Perhaps sometimes your interests align with the company but that's just an accident. Second, there is no way these people are engaging in abusive behavior without HR having their backs so going to HR just risks exposing HR to accusations of abuse so now you've got an even bigger target on your back.
The documentation is your "plan B" which HR doesn't need to know about.
It's easy to armchair quarterback these situations and talk about hypothetically lawyering up, but what's the endgame? Suing your company won't suddenly convert a toxic job into a happy job, regardless of the outcome. Settlements, if they ever arrive, are rarely significant enough to make a financial difference unless someone has a truly home-run protected class harassment case with hard evidence (not just verbal conversations recited from memory).
Good lawyers won't take cases that don't appear winnable from the start. However, there are plenty of bad lawyers who will happily give people false hope about their chances and then bill as much as they can get away with before the client gives up.
"Plan B" should always be to find another job ASAP, if possible. (Not easy in the author's case).
Very false. Generally, the difference between a good lawyer and a bad lawyer is that the good lawyer will counsel the client about the chances of not winning the case, especially after discovery has concluded, while a bad lawyer won't.
If the the winnability of a case was apparent at the start, there wouldn't be a case as the parties would settle before a formal lawsuit was filed. This happens very frequently, especially for labor cases where the employee has documented instances of harassment.
A lot of cases that appear to be "winnable" at the beginning turn out not to be winnable based on evidence that becomes available during discovery, and a lot of cases that didn't appear to be winnable turn out to be slam dunks after discovery. Most of the landmark cases today were cases that didn't appear "winnable" at the start (see, e.g., the DuPont and Erin Brokovich cases).
Moreover, for most cases of this type (and generally for almost all civil cases involving individual torts), lawyers work on a contingency basis for plaintiffs, so they only get paid if they win. The only lawyers that won't handle civil torts for individual clients on a contingency basis are the bad ones who don't expect to win, or the truly amazing ones that charge fixed or hourly fees because they're so good that they can resolve the case without doing the amount of work that would justify a 30% or 40% fee.
At some point or another, a lawyer must start putting their name on the line for the cases they take. If a client arrives without a shred of usable evidence or a blatantly unbelievable story (happens frequently) then a good lawyer is not going to throw their reputation on the line to see if it pans out.
The legal world isn't as big as you might think, and lawyers can expect to run into a lot of the same other lawyers, judges, and so on for decades of their career. Taking obviously unwinnable cases is a quick way to get yourself branded as a toxic lawyer.
This Medium article is a good example of a case that would be challenging from the start. Much of what the author claims comes from unrecorded meetings, in-person interactions, and other situations that lack any usable evidence. However, the author also goes on record admitting that they were struggling to finish their work and other such performance issues (Yes, I know it's from the company's abuse, but think in terms of evidence here). If anything, publishing this Medium article has done the author far more harm than good.
You're talking to a lawyer who used to do litigation. The legal world is a lot bigger than you think it is. My friends that still do litigation have never come up against the same lawyers twice in their careers. But we practice in a big city. If you're in Hoboken or Fargo, your experiences will obviously differ.
Taking obviously unwinnable cases is a quick way to get yourself branded as a toxic lawyer.
You're assessing cases as "unwillable" before actually knowing if they are winnable. There are very few cases that are "obviously unwillable" at the onset and with extremely rare exceptions, that "obvious" part is due to procedural defects in the case, like an expiring statute of limitation that precludes a lawsuit. And in those cases, if your client wants to keep fighting after being advised that the case is procedurally unwinnable, you pursue all appropriate legal avenues still available to your client (or even ones that are now precluded but could be granted at judicial discretion), because that is precisely what lawyers are paid to do, and other lawyers understand that and do not hold that against them.
Moreover, no case is "obviously unwinnable" on the factual merits before discovery. Hell, it's even possible to take a case that is "obviously unwinnable" after discovery and still win (and indeed, I got my first trial one month after the bar exam because my boss thought the case was "unwinnable" but would be good for experience. That client is walking around free right now because I won an "unwinnable" case.)
As for "toxic reputation", your behavior in court and in dealings is what gets you branded as toxic, not the cases you take, and that is true whether or not your cases are winnable.
For cases where the client is paying the billable hour rate, lawyers will take just about any case as long as it isn't totally unethical and could get you in hot water with the bar.
Voting with your feet is usually the best policy, but people with visa issues have an especially hard time with that. Sadly, asking our representatives for visa reforms to avoid putting people in indentured positions doesn't seem to accomplish much.
And some people will choose to demand justice even when it isn't the best move for their career or personal lives. I don't think it's right to admonish that.
Where I live, employment is "at-will," so it would be good to establish acting in good faith first--taking an issue to HR--before taking legal action.
The purpose of going to HR is so that the employee's attorney can later show that the company (1) had actual knowledge of the abuse and (2) subsequently did nothing.
This is absolutely correct.
However the next sentence reveals a curious mis-alignment in our culture at large:
> Perhaps sometimes your interests align with the company but that's just an accident.
It is absolutely in the interest of the company to not treat people like shit, from multiple vantage points ranging from selfishly not wanting to be embarrassed by their own misconduct, to more altruistic moral obligation. If the company does not believe that, they are mistaken and foolish, prioritizing perceived short term gain over the right thing to do. Unfortunately, this particular brand of short-sightedness is the norm and our cultural expectation.
Nowhere in the above list I did mention anything about workplace happiness or positive energy or anything. That is not up to HR, and if a "situation" arises it's too late anyways. Good interpersonal conditions are up to all persons and especially management. HR is just there as an executive, to sweep up the broken cutlery and make things look nice and tidy.
It isn't that an HR department doesn't want good working conditions. They are just in no position to impose them, only management is.
> I was worried and I scheduled a meeting with HR and described what had happened.
It's easy to armchair quarterback these accounts from the internet, but let's not pretend it's as simple as walking over to HR and then calling up a lawyer who will take your case for free. These cases are much harder to win than the internet would suggest, especially when much of the claimed harassment (threatening to punch the author, joking about deportation threats) occurred verbally.
It is not necessary for a plaintiff to be a U.S. resident for a lawsuit to proceed in a U.S court.
I'm not an expert on immigration law, but if a foreign resident needs to appear as a witness at trial in a U.S. court, then they can usually enter on a tourist visa or some other visa.
If you have anywhere near a solid case they will probably settle for a handsome amount.
Only thing they didn't do was seek legal council, but that's probably a hard step to take when you're on a work visa - especially when Apple is your legal opponent.
If the facts are on the employee's side, then many lawyers would take such a case on contingency because Apple (or any large, successful company) has very deep pockets to pay a judgment or settlement.
Conversely, finding a lawyer to sue a small employer on contingency would be more difficult because the small employer could declare bankruptcy, making collecting a judgment difficult or impossible.
This is probably true in a lot of cases. So, whether or not suing is worth it will depend on the specific facts of a case.
> ...the employee in trying to legally defend themselves have now permanently ruined their career prospects.
I agree this is a significant issue.
This is also why many immigrants on H1b and OPT visas at FAANGM companies (often their first job) bow down to abuse, get their work done, and do their time until they receive a Green Card so they can freely roam the job market.
Criticizing them is the exact type of navel gazing commentary I hate about this place. You must think you’re oh so intelligent. You read a Reddit comment that said to make sure to document and email everything and now you’ll pompously make that comment under anything. You’re not actually helping.
“You see Oedipus, if you had only asked that man if he was Laius before killing them for attacking you, none of this would have ever happened.” Tragedy is about empathy and shared experience, not an instructional guide for how to live life.