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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).
Very obviously whoever made this smart decision never had to do a hostile takeover of an internal project. You get all the information you ask for, not one word more. You don't know what questions to ask? Wow, sucks to be you.
I really doubt it will be any different in this case. They will give them all the information they have to relay to ensure they cannot be considered hostile, while leaving out everything that "they assumed that the new guy already had to know". It's just common sense, ya know? Everyone knows that. Ask around in the office, everyone will tell you that this is something you really don't have to spell out simply because it's OBVIOUS. It's not to your new hire? Gee, maybe you should have hired someone who knows his trade? Ok, I'll make sure the new tech will learn everything from now on and explain it all to him. Ok. Look, new guy. This here we call a hammer...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Do any of my fellow IT workers see 200k more IT jobs than domestic workers can fill?
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How is Disney worse? I think Disney only fired about 130 Americans.
US tech companies hire tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of guest workers. Often making American workers train their H1B replacements. At best displacing US workers.
In 2009 Bill Gates sat before the US congress, and explained that the tech industry was suffering from huge shortages, and desperately needed more foreign guest workers. At the same time, Microsoft was laying off thousands of US workers.
You can pretend to know something about me if you want, but actually I'm only part of the problem for people who are afraid of competition. And no, I don't get paid less than the employees - I get paid more. Always. Because I'm good.
How nice for you. I guess we should all just become superstar consultants and we wouldn't have a problem. Can everyone be in the top 5%? I'm thinking that's not possible.
You come off as pretty arrogant; basically telling people that if they didn't suck so much and were more awesome like yourself, they wouldn't care if people were trying to undercut their wages by making them compete with desperate people willing to settle for much less, because companies would just throw money at their awesomeness. I'm glad companies throw money at your awesomeness, but you seem to have an advanced or rare skill set making your example inapplicable to many other situations.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)