The Misfortune 500

Hello and welcome to the final chapter of the Bodyshop Report! We have finally hit our goal and proudly present to you the Misfortune 500. The Misfortune 500 is a list we have compiled of the worst H1B bodyshops in America, ranked in order from most worst to least worst according to our scoring system.

Please note this is not an exhaustive list and there are thousands of other bodyshops. Our goal was not to collect them all, instead we aimed to perform a representative sampling of companies that would draw awareness to the issue of bodyshopping and shine a spotlight on some of the most egregious violators.

In terms of politics, we have seen significant progress being made towards H1B reform, which is encouraging to see after 30 years of expansion and unchecked abuses. Regardless of the outcome of the presidential election, I think some of these reforms will stay in place and benefit American workers and visa workers alike. Rising wages benefit everyone as long as the wage increases are not being confiscated by middlemen, which as we have seen is a major problem.

Now for some analysis. As you can see in our final top ten list, half of the companies are located in New Jersey. This is not an accident. New Jersey is bodyshop central. If I were in a position of authority, I might be inclined to launch an investigation into New Jersey bodyshop owners and their connections to Telangana state, similar to the investigations into the Italian mafia that resulted in multiple takedowns. The power structure in both cases is similar. The Italian mafia had the 5 families. With the Indian mafia, there are also several families / castes that dominate bodyshop ownership.

When we discuss the organized crime aspect of bodyshops, one thing we have to look at is similarity to pyramid schemes. Layers of bodyshops are illegal but for whatever reason end clients and the United States government seem to tolerate it. So when you read a pro-business industry news article crowing about highly skilled workers making more than American workers, think about what the actual wage is being made by that worker after their gig company and assorted other middlemen take out their cut. They are effectively making less than a wage level 1 salary even though they appear on paper to be wage level 4. Huh?

And that is just one of the many crimes bodyshops are committing daily. Think about that. These places are breaking multiple laws with impunity. Charge for visas? All of them do. Bench without pay? Yes. Payroll running? Yes, that is an integral part of benching. I could go on and on but I don’t want to bore you since that’s probably not what you came here for.

So who is the worst bodyshop in America? According to our scoring system, it’s Collabera.

#1. Collabera – Basking Ridge, NJ; Gujarat

Collabera Inc started in 1991 as GCI (Global Consultants Inc) and has steadily grown through acquisitions to become the $500 million company with 17,000 employees they are today. Collabera is used by YouTube to perform content moderation which has gotten them into trouble similar to fellow bodyshopper Cognizant. Collabera and was sued two months ago by an employee who was not provided with mental health training or support and was made to watch graphic videos including beheadings for longer than the 4 hour maximum set by YouTube.

How did Collabera get to #1 on our list? One reason is their 263 one star reviews in Glassdoor. That’s twenty seven pages of one star reviews for anyone who wants to travel through a portal into human misery. I only made it through two pages where I found the reviews below, so you can imagine what kind of horrific reviews are in the other two dozen pages:

Next, let’s talk about recruiters. Collabera has almost two thousand of them (1,942), tops among companies we have looked at. To be fair, there are American owned companies such as TekSystems that have with more recruiters, but those companies are also not H1B dependent, therefore I did not include them.

In our checkbox categories, Collabera almost swept all five categories. They have bad reviews on Goolti.com, show up on other lists of bad bodyshops, have a Hyderabad office, and are one of the top abusers of STEM OPT. I think we can safely say they have earned their #1 ranking. Just imagine how many careers are being ruined by each of their thousands of recruiters. A single recruiter ruins lives every day, multiply that by two thousand and you have epic amounts of misfortune.

Well, we have come to the end. This has certainly been an interesting journey, thanks for coming along for the ride and I hope both of us learned something along the way. You can always come back and view our spreadsheet later, so feel free to bookmark and save it off for future reference or search for it using the hashtag #Misfortune500.

If anyone wants to complain about a bodyshop, our online tip system is there for you.

Namaste readers. Peace out.