Harley-Davidson executives meet Donald Trump at White House amid H-1B Visa debacle

Los Angeles : Harley-Davidson executives on Friday rolled out at the South Lawn of the White House to meet President Donald Trump and discuss their stand.

The company has long proudly manufactured its heavyweight motorcycles in factories across the United States.

According to White House spokesman Sean Spicer, “The event was a meeting and listening session. We want to make it easier for business to create more jobs and more factories to be made in the U.S. and you’re a great example of that.”

This move is a step ahead by Trump in meeting domestic automakers as he is promising to return lost manufacturing jobs to the U.S. He has so far visited the heads of Dow Chemical Co., Whirlpool Corp., Lockheed Martin Corp. and U.S. Steel Corp. all in his first two weeks in office.

Other executives who joined Trump for the Harley meeting were CEO Matthew Levatich and union officials representing workers at the Milwaukee-based company. 

This election, Harley’s home state of Wisconsin surprised some pollsters when it awarded its 10 electoral votes to Trump. 

However, Trump is missing a point here that Harley-Davidson has also outsourced a different type of work — information technology by signing an agreement with Infosys in 2012 to take over parts of its IT department. 

In fact, after Infosys opened a new facility in Milwaukee, where Harley-Davidson is based, nearly 125 positions were eliminated and workers who applied for a job at the Infosys facility claimed they were discriminated against in favor of South Asian employees.

Infosys is one of the major companies that relied heavily on workers with H-1B visas, raking the issue of exploitation of American workers. Infosys so far has declined to comment.