I thought the idea was 0% H-1B labor? You can't replace an American job with H-1B?
The requirements seem very stringent in writing but apparently utterly useless and ineffective in practice, or clearly both executives for Abott and Wipro would be facing criminal prosecution. You should not be able to circumvent the restrictions by a single layer of contract work.
The goal of the system is to use the guest worker program to augment your current workers with talent that you are unable to find and staff here in the US. The requirement is not at 40 - 60% of the cost you pay your US employees, but in skills that you cannot find or fill with US domestic workers.
These "scarce" skills and requirements are trivially gamed on a regular basis. Large numbers of positions that are eventually filled by H-1Bs don't, in truth, require skills and experience that you simply can't find domestically.
Sure, every once in a while you need a nuclear engineer or some other domain expert in a very, very narrow domain, and you may have a genuine shortage of talent. But for general-purpose IT and commodity development, these skill are not in short supply domestically if you're willing to pay market salaries.
The requirements seem very stringent in writing but apparently utterly useless and ineffective in practice, or clearly both executives for Abott and Wipro would be facing criminal prosecution. You should not be able to circumvent the restrictions by a single layer of contract work.