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Disney Replaces Longtime IT Staff With H-1B Workers
Lucas123 writes: Disney CEO Bob Iger is one of eight co-chairs of the Partnership for a New American Economy, a leading group advocating for an increase in the H-1B visa cap. Last Friday, the partnership was a sponsor of an H-1B briefing at the U.S. Capitol for congressional staffers. The briefing was closed to the press. One of the briefing documents obtained after the meeting stated, "H-1B workers complement — instead of displace — U.S. Workers." Last October, however, Disney laid off at least 135 IT staff (though employees say it was hundreds more), many of them longtime workers. Disney then replaced them with H-1B contractors that company said could better "focus on future innovation and new capabilities." The fired workers believe the primary motivation behind Disney's action was cost-cutting. "Some of these folks were literally flown in the day before to take over the exact same job I was doing," one former employee said. Disney officials promised new job opportunities as a result of the restructuring, but the former staff interviewed by Computerworld said they knew of few co-workers who had landed one of the new jobs. Use of visa workers in a layoff is a public policy issue, particularly for Disney. Ten U.S. senators are currently seeking a federal investigation into displacement of IT workers by H-1B-using contractors. Kim Berry, president of the Programmer's Guild, said Congress should protect American workers by mandating that positions can only be filled by H-1B workers when no qualified American — at any wage — can be found to fill the position."
IAAL. Learned in a stint at an immigration law firm, that H1B means you write a job description that only your candidate can fill. For example, if I wanted an airplane engineer who knew jumbo jets, I could get a thousand Americans for the job. If I needed a jumbo jet guy who also could work on Bleriot biplanes, that might be a lot less. If I also said he needed to be fluent in Mandarin and Farsi, I've just written an H1-B for my candidate. The key to success is making sure that only your guy can meet the job description that YOU create. Had a friend who was H1-B, even though he was raised in the states...he never bothered for the green card, took the easy way through school, etc. Had a falling out with his boss, and the H1-B went "poof". This essentially American had to relocate to Europe, and when he didn't self deport, was excluded for five years. H1-B means your employer owns your ass. Sadly, it is now a means to "on shore" a docile labor force.
Bro, calm the rhetoric, America exited the recession by the end of 2009. (If 'recession is not what you meant, the use a word that means what you meant).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It was not designed to be a welfare program for big companies.
You haven't been paying attention.
Everyone is expendable, from the CEO to the janitor.
I suggest that you leave your parent's basement and visit the real world some time. in the real world everyone is expendable except for the CEO and their cronies.
Look at all the big US companies after the 2008 crash. No CEOs, C-anything-O or boards of director were out and out fired. A very few CEOs (for example the head of Bank of America) were "retired", but given their fat golden parachutes they still ended up outrageously wealthy. There is no negative penalty, even for complete failure, for anyone at the top.
Corporations only have one goal: making the upper management as rich as possible. They will throw anyone under the bus to achieve that end: employees, stockholders, customers. If it's ever a choice between stockholders and management, stockholders get screwed.
For example: Deep Misalignment Between Corporate Economic Performance, Shareholder Return and Executive Compensation
What universe are you from? How can you make a statement that is so clearly false? Did someone pay to say that, or are you a free lance idiot?
Why is Snark Required?
I agree.
If you follow the second order links down to what Disney actually did, they outsourced their IT to a contracting agency.
When they did this, they laid off 125 full time employees in the process, and between three of the contracting agencies providing the services to replace them, there were apparent;y 65 H1-B applications in the last 3 years. Presumably, not all 65 went to Disney, because the contracting agencies contract services out to companies other than Disney. In fact, a vast number of dark data center porn and shopping sites are located in that area of the country, down by Los Angeles, where the majority of that kind of content is produced.
What this story is actually about, is complaining that the full time workers were replaced with contractors, some of whom were probably in the U.S. working for the contracting agencies on either H1 or L1 visas.
The summary is a gross misrepresentation of the facts here, and going with a contracting agency is a valid mechanism for ensuring "Just In Time" capability, without over-employing in order to handle upsurges in workloads. It's how janitorial and security services are handled (when you have a large company event, you have the contracted agencies put on more security people for the event itself, and added janitorial people post-event to clean up afterward.
That said, the usual route a decent company will follow when out-sourcing to a local agency, as opposed to off-shoring the work entirely, is to require that the contracting agency hire a certain percentage of the workers that are being laid off to replace them with contractors. This has the effect of ensuring continuity of service, providing a built-in mentoring capability to the contracting agency for the processes and procedures being contracted out, and in general providing continuity of employment for at least some of their existing staff.
It falls under the category of "Not Being Dickish About Switching Over To Contractors".
But the idea that they should not be switching over to contractors at all, for something like IT services, which are generally modular, replicable, and have uniformly applicable skill sets, if what you are spending your time doing is pulling wires, spinning up VMs, installing system software on replacement desktop/laptop machines, and so on, is patently absurd. These are "cog jobs", where any sufficiently skilled cog can replace any other sufficiently skilled cog in the machine, and you probably won't lose a marching step over the replacement.
That, and surge scalability, make them rather ideal for out-sourcing.
Frankly, I'm surprised companies like RackSpace are renting out their IT people, rather than forcing everyone to live on RackSpace racks; it's a pretty ideal scenario for them, in terms of profit per employee, and gives them buffer for their own internal surge scalability issues. They get borrowable capacity, and other people pay to maintain that capacity at a certain level.
Add the fact that a lot of deployment is on OpenStack with standard deployment tools, no matter if you're working on your cloud or working on someone else's cloud: all the tools are the same, so all the skills are pretty much transferrable.
This is kind of what happens when you sufficiently commoditize an industry through standardization.
There are E1 and E2 immigrant visas for your case. I.e.:
E1 1: Persons with extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics. Applicants in this category must have extensive documentation showing sustained national or international acclaim and recognition in their fields of expertise.
E1 2: Outstanding professors and researchers with at least three years experience in teaching or research, who are recognized internationally.
E2 1: Professionals holding an advanced degree (beyond a baccalaureate degree), or a baccalaureate degree and at least five years progressive experience in the profession.
E2 2: Persons with exceptional ability in the sciences, arts, or business. Exceptional ability means having a degree of expertise significantly above that ordinarily encountered in the sciences, arts, or business.
If you or your employer can't meet E1/E2 requirements, sorry, maybe there is nothing so special about your skills.
H1B or L temporary worker visas are fraud and abuse most of the time, that can't be controlled and should end completely. They destroy any incentive for US persons to pursue career in IT or in STEM in general.