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Disney Making Laid-Off US Tech Workers Train Foreign H1-B Replacements
WheezyJoe writes: The NY Times brings us a story on the Disney Corporation laying off U.S. tech workers and replacing them with immigrants visiting the country under H1-B visas. The twist is that the immigrant workers are not your nice local visiting foreign guy from the university who wants to stick around 'cause he likes the people here... they are employees of foreign-based consulting companies in the business of collecting H1-B visas and "import[ing] workers for large contracts to take over entire in-house technology units." The other twist? The U.S. tech workers are required to train their replacements before vacating their jobs, or risk losing severance benefits (excerpts of the Disney's layoff notice are included in the article).
...just what you'd expct from Disney
Just about ALL of corporate America that can get away with it will do it - defense contractors cannot.
And the difference in pay goes to CEO bonuses for doing a "great" job. Why you could write a Python script called CEO.py to do their job. The algorithm is just:
Lower costs by canning people,sending work overseas or hiring H1-bs. Selling off under performing divisions. Concentrating on more profitable businesses.
Please, we don't need to offshore CEOs; just automate them with scripts.
It IS how a lot of fairy tales begin; with evil villains causing unjust and misery.
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If Disney wants to boost profitablity, they should bring in an H1-B replacement for Robert Iger. I'm sure they could find lots of qualified candidates from India or China who have experience managing an organization the size of Disney and who would be willing to do the job for less than 46.5 million dollars per year. Replacing this one employee would have a larger savings effect than replacing the entire IT staff, while allowing the IT staff to continue innovating and making Disney run smoothly. As a gesture of corporate good will, Disney could allow Mr. Iger to continue working at a theme park as a cast member, preferrably wearing the Goofy costume.
Where are the dead parents? That's what I want to know...
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?