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Disney IT Workers Prepare To Sue Over Foreign Replacements (computerworld.com)
JustAnotherOldGuy writes: At least 23 former Disney IT workers have filed complaints with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) over the loss of their jobs to foreign replacements. This federal filing is a first step to filing a lawsuit alleging discrimination. These employees are arguing that they are victims of national origin discrimination, a complaint increasingly raised by U.S. workers who have lost their jobs to foreign workers on H-1B and other temporary visas. Disney's layoff last January followed agreements with IT services contractors that use foreign labor, mostly from India. Some former Disney workers have begun to go public (video) over the displacement process
I guess they're hoping that Disney will settle, but suing Disney for anything short of death or dismemberment seems like a fools errand.
Racking up lawyers fees while out of work is probably a bad idea.
They are the ones who are abusing the H-1B system. Disney is just subbing the work out.
THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY REPORTS FOURTH QUARTER AND FULL YEAR EARNINGS FOR FISCAL 2015
Revenues for the year increased 7% to a record $52.5 billion.
Net income for the year increased 12% to a record $8.4 billion.
EPS for the year increased 15% to a record $4.90.
So why try to save a few bucks outsourcing? I don't get it, the money saved is literally insignificant to them.
National origin discrimination means given other equal qualities, one is denied the job based on nationality.
In this case, the foreign replacements ask for less pay. This is the quality that determines the employment opportunity. There's no basis for discrimination lawsuit.
You gotta fight
for your right
to wooooooork
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
The employees should publish every bit of data they have access to and them wipe every system on the network.
And then blame it on North Korea.
Wait a second, wouldnt it be nation discrimination if a company hired Americans instead of Indians because of visa hassles a company has to go thorough when hiring from India?
Capitalism is where is from at am I rught? Get ouy're h1b and go to India and try there. Hm?
Mickey Mouse Alma Mater 2.0
Now it's time to say goodbye
to all our company.
M-I-C
Spoken:
see you in Court real soon
K-E-Y
Spoken:
why? because we're replacing. you
M-O-U-S-E.
By the way, I own stock, but it doesn't mean I am for every type of corporate abuse that makes the company a few extra bucks.
So as a shareholder what are you doing about it? Are you attending shareholder meetings? Are you putting forth proposals? Are you voting on the board of directors? Are you doing these things even if they are unlikely to make much difference?
Just so we're clear I agree with you, but if you are a shareholder and you say nothing then the blood is on your hands too. If you own stock then you are an owner of the company and you are tacitly condoning any actions you don't speak out against.
Technically anytime a company hires an H1B1, and you believe you have the qualifications for that job, you can raise hell. Hell, maybe you could even sue for lost wages. Because that is not supposed to happen. Period. To actually get fired over a H1B1 is completely ridiculous, and in this case the company has no recourse to saying that they looked for qualified professionals in America, but could not find one. The case is cut and dry, the company brazenly lied to the government, and the government rubber stamped the H1B1, like always. Like how Google, et al, got a non-competitive business practice suit brought against them for agreeing to not snipe each others employees. Americans need to come together and launch a major lawsuit against H1B1 users and their government lackeys.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I just love how companies that do stuff like this always like to have a list of "Core Values" of the company and they always list something like "Our People Are Our Strength". Ha!
Liberal demoncraps tell the proletariat that they are entitled to keep their jobs while ushering in untold numbers of H1Bs in the same breath. They hate everyone and will not stop until we are all reduced to a "living wage" so that we dare not question our liberal demoncrap masters, lest they withhold the subsidies that make our meager existences possible. They hate you and want you to be out of work and to need them to keep from dying in the street. They want to own you. Because they hate you.
I was replaced by a consulting company that was 100% made up of H1bs. They slept 6 people in a 2 bedroom apartment and shared a car. I had to train them to do my job and when I was done, I was let go.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Their priorities are shareholders, executive board members, customers then finally their employees. They probably just did this to give the illusion that they'll save money so shareholders will think the margins will increase, but the reality is is that quality will falter and customers will run away from their products and the bottom line will suffer. But whatever, these large companies that outsource everything slowly but surely fail and will be replaced with smaller, more innovative companies that are driven by customers and employees.
Does it bother anyone else that these laid off employees gave an interview to Disney owned ABC? The news story really spun the story towards how STEM degrees are worthless rather than suggest any regulations on outsourcing jobs.
Are you sick of millions of non-whites flooding into every white country on Earth? Why are they here? Why don't they want to live around their own kind, in their own countries? If they don't want to live around their own kind, why should white people want to live around them?
Not all shares are voting shares. What you suggest just isn't realistic for shares owned through mutual funds and the like.
Holding shares in a mutual fund is a choice. Holding voting versus non voting shares is a choice. Nobody forced you to buy those shares. If you are fine with holding non-voting shares and letting someone else speak for you then that is fine but understand and own your actions.
A law is just some sheet of paper, you need people to actually enforce it.
the false premise here is that any of the actions mentioned will make a difference.
The only thing guaranteed to not make a difference is to do nothing. Unlikely does not equal impossible.
And here's the bitch of it, if you didn't secure a job while you were training the H1-bs or have some very unique in demand skills, you have some tough times coming.
You are now unemployed and therefore, damaged goods because the attitude in IT - that includes development, administration, architecture, you name it - is that if you're any good, you'd have a job: out of work, no good.
When you start seeing H1-bs or Indians or Eastern Europeans coming in, get your resume ready and bolt ASAP. Because when the reorg happens, you're going to be in line with the rest of your department or division that's looking for work. It sucks when you go for an interview and you see some of your ex-coworkers coming out or waiting in the lobby when you come out.
And the REAL sucky part is that more and more programming and engineering jobs are being off-shored or outsourced to foreign cheap companies. STEM shortage my ass!
And the thing that is infuriating is that because of this, the foreign workers end up with the most up to date skills. I just talked to someone who just hired what says was an ex-H1-b because he was the only one that answered the interview questions correctly. So, it's becoming a self fulfilling prophecy: Americans don't have the skills because they aren't getting hired to begin with. And when I hear shit like the CEO of GE saying (Charlie Rose, June 2015) that they are just recruiting in India, I just have to ask what is a sharp American kid gonna do? They all can't go to med school.
The news you'll never see on ABC (owned by Disney).
https://www.flickr.com/photos/crashsymbols/17133820939/
Look, I get it - our H1B policy is not good for 98% of Americans. It's bad policy and an example of the politicians we vote into office not voting in our best interests. The same can be seen for proposed "immigration reform" and the pandering there. It is simply not in the American citizen's best interests to have effectively open borders with much poorer neighbors, and there exists no valid argument that makes it so.
_But_ this should be thrown out of court. It's not discrimination because the reason for hiring them isn't national origin, it's pay. It's like applying for a job and asking for $1 (pinky in mouth) million and then complaining when someone who will do the job for $50k gets the job.
Disney workers are willing to fight against the H1B bullshit. Minimum wage workers are willing to fight for a higher minimum.
US IT workers perpetually whine, and pass links to articles back and forth.
US IT have been hit far worse than Disney workers. With Disney it's been a few hundred workers and just once. IT workers have been stomped for decades.
US IT workers could change the situation if they wanted to do so. But that would require actually doing something.
That is akin to "the law already protects the innocent citizen, no need for a lawyer to dip his beak into the citizen's money bag."
A law is just some sheet of paper, you need people to actually enforce it.
You sir, sounded like a perfect union shill. Unions are the cancerous cells in in the free market today. We are not living in 1930s when, a handful of people could dictate what the workers will get as compensation for the work done. Especially not in the IT sector. And don't make me laugh insinuating unions being the enforcers of the law. They are more like Mafia enforcers than anything else. You know collect "protection money" and get fat without doing nothing other than scaring you. Now, go peddle your crap to other, less educated people. IT industry will be better off without your kind hanging around.
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
That is akin to "the law already protects the innocent citizen, no need for a lawyer to dip his beak into the citizen's money bag."
A law is just some sheet of paper, you need people to actually enforce it.
The difference being that aside from a small retainer fee, a lawyer doesn't charge you unless he actually does something. A Union, meanwhile, is more than happy to siphon your paycheck for decades without doing a damn thing.
Also, if there's a law protecting your job, you don't need a Union to enforce it, just a lawyer. If you have a Union, plus a law protecting your job, now you pay the Union, then they go hire the lawyers on top of that. Unions are primarily useful in situations where there is NOT a law protecting the workers.
It's called corruption.
It's happened in every society before us, and will likely continue to until we get some currency-less "everyone gets everything they need" replicator-based non-economy a-la United Federation of Planets.
And even then, Disney will still figure out how to rent-seek by asserting copyright on replicator patterns. This is where the life of the author's grandchildren copyright term comes in: as health care lets people live an order of magnitude longer, Disney can make an order of magnitude more money off the same work.
I've been working in IT for 20 years now and have been through a couple of these outsourcing/offshoring exercises. The truth is this - there is no way to convince executives that IT is a strategic investment opportunity unless the company's only business is IT. Therefore, outsourcing will happen in most big companies the first time the MBA's spreadsheets show a big enough paper cost savings. And in Disney's case, it's not the money -- I have 2 little kids. Disney could fill several of Scrooge McDuck's money bins with just the daily cash flow from their parks. They must carry all the cash out of Disney World in dump trucks. So, there's proof that they're not doing it for cost savings.
The thing that needs to be attacked is the IT service providers' use of H-1B and offshore labor for inappropriate tasks. Go after Cognizant, Tata Consulting Services, Accenture, IBM, HP, Infosys, Tech Mahindra, Xerox, etc. for bringing in H-1B labor for purposes that don't meet the original intention of the program. H-1B was designed to import specific high-end skill sets for a limited time to fill in actual gaps in education/experience. These service companies use the H-1B to bring in "job shadowers" who train the offshore teams, and low-level DBAs, developers and other roles that could easily be had locally without the communications or quality issues. The problem is that this will never get popular support until the vast majority of white collar workers are out of a job or underemployed. IT is still seen as a hot field, and we are all still considered well paid, so we don't get any political attention.
Do I think outsourcing is a good idea? No, I think companies need to have some FTEs who at least have a connection to the company. When you go down the service provider route, the provider has to make money at the rate they bill you. The only way they can do this is reduce labor costs and reduce service levels to the absolute minimum to keep you from invoking breach of contract clauses.
I have no idea how it will work out for Disney, but I've worked on both sides of the outsourcing fence. In the company doing the outsourcing, the FTEs left behind are stuck in a stagnant IT department behind a wall of change management process, 2 AM conference calls and incompetent newbie offshore guys that keep rotating. The outsourcing company is forced to cut so many corners that being an on-site employee of the company is not a fun job -- you get to tell people why they can't have things, why projects are late, etc.
Disney's IT is atrociously expensive (take a look at what rolling out RFID + fingerprint scanners cost them, it was in the several billion dollar range).
It's not how much money it costs as much as how much money the company saves when CMs no longer have to key in lengthy passwords all the time.
And you sound like the perfect corporate shill. Tell you what, you want to negotiate with me personally rather than a selected representative? Fine, get every single one of your shareholders in a room and I'll negotiate with them. What? "Collective bargaining" is good when it's your side? You get a representative and I don't?
Even McDonald's tries to make the workplace at least slightly palatable.
Thats a lie, or the free employee lunch would be sent out for.
Ever wonder why McDonald's menu has become so much more diverse than it was in the days of "Big Mac, McDLT, a Quarter Pounder with some cheese"? It's not only to bring in more business but also so that McDonald's can improve employee lunch without having to send out for it.
And you, sir, sound like a perfect "I didn't actually read the thread I was responding to". If you had, you'd realize that Sique was simply arguing against the notion that "the law says X, therefore we don't need people to enforce the law, it will magically enforce itself". They weren't arguing in favor of unions, they were arguing against the specific logic being used to disparage them. Yes there is a difference.
How often is that person from the third world country going to fly his family over to Disney World, pay the 100 dollars a person entrance, the hotels and meals for the time, then fly them all back home?
Probably not WDW Florida and not immediately. But after companies have started to hire skilled workers in the export sector of a particular country's economy, workers in the export sector will be earning more than the workers in non-export sectors. This means two things: the country's currency will become more valuable to international buyers of its services, and employers in non-export sectors will have to gradually raise wages to retain workers. As the rising tide of the Balassa-Samuelson effect continues to lift all boats, people in a particular region may eventually become rich enough to visit a regional Disney park.
In many other countries foreigners can ONLY take jobs if there are no qualified citizens to fill that position which is obviously a good thing when the real unemployment rate is still quite high and illegal immigration is making the problem worse not to mention the massive amounts of cash we are spending on social programs to keep them afloat. All the while we have many grads making $25K/year and living with their parents.
BTW phuck Tata and every one of the politicians they bought off.
This is the result of mostly federal politicians, albeit some state level politicians, lining their pockets for personal gain, amassing power and increasing their voter base to perpetuate the cycle. Unequal application of law, criminal activities, unconstitutional policies, unchecked judicial activism, blah blah blah... What could possibly go wrong?!? Thank you, Obama, for "fundamentally" changing America.
If I can get someone from (or in) India to do something about 80% as well for 50% of the cost of an American worker, then why wouldn't I do it?
Because of the cost of locally fixing that other 20 percent.
We go online to buy items to avoid salestax.
And then, more often than not, break the law by not declaring use tax on your annual individual income tax return.
Or because Amazon sells it $10 cheaper than the local store, which employees people
My local store sells on Amazon, which employs people.
and keeps your property values higher
Does everyone want high property values? Unless you're in the business of flipping houses, rising property values tend to raise your rent, meaning you may have to settle for inferior food, clothing, or entertainment.
If corporations didn't make profit, they wouldn't have been created and they wouldn't continue to exist because no one would invest in them to start with.
That or there would be more not-for-profit public benefit corporations, whose earnings stay in the company's foundation. You might remember one that was created out of the BUCK FETA scandal on Slashdot: SoylentNews.
Anonymous Coward wrote:
The news you'll never see on ABC (owned by Disney)
But will you see it on other TV outlets (owned by Disney's colleagues in the MPAA)? NBC is Universal, CNN is Warner Bros., CBS is Paramount (through National Amusements), and Fox is, well, Fox.
Are you sick of millions of non-whites flooding into every white country on Earth?
And some are sick of whites flooding into Indian country. ("Indian" here refers not to India but to Mescalero Inde, meaning "the people".) Others are sick of whites flooding into Aboriginal country.
"Go back to..."
"I'll help you pack."
So how many IT workers will pay to see Star Wars? That's voting with your dollars to support this abuse.
If Americans were willing to vote with their dollars, Disney revenue would have dropped after the 1998 copyright term extension.
Free market? In IT? The existence of the H1-b program proves that is incorrect. The H1-b program is a perfect example of government meddling for the benefit of corporate America at the expense of workers. Compensation has declined significantly since the late 90s and one of the reasons is the H1-b program.
The Middle Class is being decimated because of crony capitalism in the USA.
IT compensation has declined significantly since the late 90s.
As a result, I've had to cut back. I don't buy any iThingy or Android thing for that matter. I don't go to movies. I don't have cable because it's too expensive.
My wife and I cook our own meals and we don't go out. And I do my own car and home repair.
My TV is years old and I just have a $30 DVD player I got years ago. My Netflix streaming and over the air TV is my entertainment. Go to the movies? Only if I'm given a gift certificate.
I live worse than my Dad did back in the early 70s when he supported a family of 5, a house and two cars on one engineer's salary. Mom didn't work.
My grandpa supported a family of 7, a house and a car on just a machinist's pay - 50s and 60s.
Try to do that in 2015.
Go to Disney? For an American Middle Class family it's out of reach. It costs a family of 4 thousands of dollars for just a week.
We are spiraling to the bottom and there's plenty of evidence for it.
There are 7.2 billion people with a net increase of about 65 million every year on the World. And unless you're a super model or some extraordinary sports star or entertainer, anyone can be replaced - I don't care how smart you are. Brains are a commodity.
What nobody is talking over here is that the world is fast growing and companies are becoming global. If companies go global, they have to compete with the global market. If there is someone else who does the same job for less, then obviously the company will get them. Its a simple way to cut down costs. Let's trythinking different for a minute: Why do Americans always think they deserve more money for the same position when a H1B worker can work for less. I don't think one can say that the H1B pays are atrocious by any means but still the american worker is not willing to take up the job because it pays less. This is the root of the problem. Americans are now competing in a global economy. If an american wants to work in a global economy, he has to know his worth. This needs some serious thinking.
That is akin to "the law already protects the innocent citizen, no need for a lawyer to dip his beak into the citizen's money bag."
A law is just some sheet of paper, you need people to actually enforce it.
The difference being that aside from a small retainer fee, a lawyer doesn't charge you unless he actually does something. A Union, meanwhile, is more than happy to siphon your paycheck for decades without doing a damn thing.
Also, if there's a law protecting your job, you don't need a Union to enforce it, just a lawyer. If you have a Union, plus a law protecting your job, now you pay the Union, then they go hire the lawyers on top of that. Unions are primarily useful in situations where there is NOT a law protecting the workers.
You make a good point. I particularly agree with "Unions are primarily useful in situations where there is NOT a law protecting the workers."
I wonder when is it better to write laws concerning worker-employee relations or when would it be better in some cases to let the market handle it? That is, use corporation-vs-union negotiations settle disputes rather than getting a new law written.
Keep in mind that unions are part of a free-market economy. And, like poorly run corporations, poorly run unions contain the elements of their own demise.
Laws are like nails without heads - once you get them in it is almost impossible to get them out.
And yes, that's true of unions as well.
Why did you post as AC? You should be modded up to the stratosphere for this post.
The difference being that aside from a small retainer fee, a lawyer doesn't charge you unless he actually does something.
Unless, of course, the lawyer is receiving a large fee for doing nothing. They're not that different from labor unions.
A law is just some sheet of paper, you need people to actually enforce it.
Unions don't enforce laws.
A federal judge can see to it that the law is followed, which is why the IT workers are suing.
Unions are great in theory, but in practice their usefulness to employees and society in general is questionable at best. I have a family member who is part of a union and he'd happily lose them. They extract a significant amount of money from his paychecks and provide little if any meaningful service. During a contract dispute a few years back they asked their union for some assistance, the unions response was to tell them they were going to charge them hundreds of dollars an hour and thousands in travel expenses. The only service they really seem to want to provide is legal services for employees facing termination even if that termination is justified (negligence, misconduct, etc).
Sadly, replacing Americans with H-1B workers IS perfectly legal. It is not because the government has failed to enforce the law. IT IS THE LAW. Folks should read the book Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are Screwing America's Best & Brightest Workers. http://www.amazon.com/Sold-Out... It is shocking and busts many of the myths about H-1B visas. I was tearing my hair out when I read it. I never realized things are so bad and that the news media simply does not report on them.
There's a whole lot of people that want to take the US down a peg, sanitizing it in the name of some sports term called "global competitiveness". They just want to see the US have to be the nation of people desperate for any port in a storm, even if it's the worst in jobs. In the McCarthy era, they would have been rightfully removed and replaced with citizens that properly value citizens as assets - not problems.
The US citizen's worth and way of life shall not be challenged by such low-freedom internationals. Besides, the worst citizen can be trained to be above the level of the average "body shop" guest worker.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Attempting to justify hate for Americans through that Godwin corollary, only reduces your argument to: "I hate the US and want to see it brought low".
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Disney should just fire them all. IT employees are literally a dime a dozen. Allowing them to earn more pay by training others was a GOOD thing they were doing for these crybabies. Disney should cut that off and any benefits they may have negotiated too. Cut these labor types off at the knees, it's the only way to deal with them. Otherwise before you know it they are turning the computer industry into the car industry and silicon valley will be the next detroit.
It is not the law. H1B Visas are not meant to replace US worker force but to supplement the the workforce. It also expressly forbids paying workers lower wages. Look it up sometime. The problem is enforcement and the companies that game the system.
I won't argue that the H1-B visas don't have potential value. However, it is clearly obvious that the system is broken, and not in favor of the workers. There are two simple adjustments to the program that I believe would re-balance the program, in ways that allows it to serve its intended purpose as well as protect our own workers and jobs.
1) All jobs filled by H1-B workers should be considered open reqs that HR must be actively continuing to try to fill with American citizens. If any American applies for the job and meets the qualifications, they should be required by law to replace the H1-B worker with the American. The point of the H1-B program is to obtain talent that is not available in the talent pool available. Therefore, if any citizen applies who DOES have those talents, the H1-B clearly isn't necessary.
2) Any company that employs an H1-B, should only be allowed to have them if they have not experienced any layoffs, or firings without cause in that role/dept for the previous 12-24 months. This would alleviate the newer experience of people being laid off following being forced to train their own foreign replacements.
I'd also strongly consider either changing the salary requirements imposed by law, or possibly impose a tax on employers that make it so that the H1-B remains something they'd only want to use if they can't find anyone locally. H1-Bs should cost them enough that there is no incentive to use them if native talent is available.
That is akin to "the law already protects the innocent citizen, no need for a lawyer to dip his beak into the citizen's money bag."
No it isnt. What he's saying is there is a law so you get a lawyer, not a union.
When their next waves of movies are boring and meaningless and Americans watch movies from the new studios made up of ex-Disney employees, we will see this move hurt shareholders.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
Watch PBS American Experience "Walt Disney." Disney has been abusing it's workforce for a long time.
Like other corporations, the only way to stop is to make them stop. You need to organize, and fight back, or the abuse will continue.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-ca-st-fall-tv-walt-disney-20150913-story.html
It seems like you don't actually understand unions. Mine has regular meetings, is comprised of current workers, and has all major issues voted on by a quorum of the membership.
It also pools our dues in order to legally fight for its membership on issues that would be too costly for an individual to.
As with anything there are pros and cons, but if it were to simply dollars and cents my Union membership dues have paid for themselves through the pay raises and benefits secured many times over.
you think you are bargaining from a position of power and able to dictate the terms? how laughable. that's absurd as to be well into the naively cute range. I hope you don't believe such silliness. no, seriously, I hope you don't. you are not important, difficult to replace, special, or of any great value. you can be replaced by a well trained monkey. what the monkey can't do, Raul can do. for the price you want, I can hire a hundred monkeys and five Rauls. when they fuck up they can be replaced more easily than I can scrape dog shit from my shoe. now you're not worth less than dog shit but you're not worth more than 100 monkeys and five Rauls and they're not quite so full of entitlement as you are.
What's the advantage to disabling the middle class?
Requiem for the American Dream
Joke's on them. They're actually generating more work for American programmers/IT folk. With the garbage, unmaintainable crap code and service they'll be scrambling to get American programmers who know what the hell they are doing. It'll cost them 10 times as much to clean up the mess they've created
So?
Numerous reasons. Resource preservation and genocide among them. But actually it's really just about empowering ugly people. Ugly people need the power tho offset the hideousness to get ahead if nice people. They need to keep you down so they can the women.
This happened at my job year ago.. albeit in a much lower tier job working an internal help desk. I fortunately escaped the help desk months before it was dissolved and started working as a local IT guy in the same company. Ever since that episode, I've told my boss and anyone else in the hierarchy, I do not care what you offer me.. when you decide that it's a viable alternative to give my job to someone else for less pay.. you've decided I'm supernumerary and I will NOT train my replacement. I am not racist, or in any way derisive of other cultures but in the case where the Indian group took over the help desk that I worked at it was in no way 'better' for anyone, other than possibly whatever middle manager managed to get a promotion off of the backs of the 'saving's he managed to make. To this day I have to deal with the incompetence and ignorance of this off shore help desk on a daily basis. As commonly practiced, as soon as you train up someone to do the job, they move on to greener pastures and you start all over again with another untrained and unusable new trainee. It's an abhorrent practice.
If I sound stupid, it's not me talking....
The people making the laws are the same ones pushing the H!B agenda...the laws in this country increasingly do not favor it's constituents, rather it's capitalists and those who can afford to 'buy' the laws to ensure their profits.
A single worker usually doesn't have the political and legal acumen to be able to represent themselves in negotiations. Like it or not, there is strength in numbers. A company can callously fire or mistreat an employee w/out the support of his fellow workers, it's considerably harder to do so when there is an organization that watches out for his rights. I will agree that there is corruption and graft in the unions, but that is true of ANY organization once it becomes large and established. A board of directors have their own (and supposedly their stockholders)) best interests at heart and will do anything to maximize that profit margin. Having a counterbalance like a union to look out for the welfare of the workers, and in a lot of cases the company itself is a good thing.
If I sound stupid, it's not me talking....
If Disney is caught as dead to rights as they say, there will be a class action settlement and nobody will have to learn anything. If they government really does get interested from a labor perspective, Disney will settle for some fraction of the actual penalty and again nobody will have to learn anything.
In making a post above, I found the these videos explaining the history of H-1B:
This is the long version from one of the speaker:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13xRAHk3loc
This is the short one (1:30) where the programmer turned lawyer explains the history of how Congress made it legal to replace Americans with low paid H-1B workers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLEtB6gVRzo
That is akin to "the law already protects the innocent citizen, no need for a lawyer to dip his beak into the citizen's money bag."
A law is just some sheet of paper, you need people to actually enforce it.
The difference being that aside from a small retainer fee, a lawyer doesn't charge you unless he actually does something. A Union, meanwhile, is more than happy to siphon your paycheck for decades without doing a damn thing.
Also, if there's a law protecting your job, you don't need a Union to enforce it, just a lawyer. If you have a Union, plus a law protecting your job, now you pay the Union, then they go hire the lawyers on top of that. Unions are primarily useful in situations where there is NOT a law protecting the workers.
Actually most if not all of the laws protecting workers came as a DIRECT RESULT of unions.
Replacing Americans with low paid foreign workers, as as Disney, is what the H-1B program is DESIGNED TO DO. Disney is not an accident. Politicians, like Rubio, may say otherwise but what they say and what they do are two different things.
It is perfectly legal to replace an American with an H-1B worker (even if Disney had down so without using Infosys) unless:
1. The H-1B worker is paid less than $60,000; AND
2. The H-1B worker does not have a graduate degree; AND
3. The employer has more than 15% of its total workforce on H-1B visas not counting those making $60,000 or having a graduate degree.
The national average wage for a computer worker is $84,000 (much higher in NYC and California where H-1B workers are more prevalent). Pay the worker $60,000 and you can replace Americans at will. Effectively, any employer can replace Americans at will in technology fields.
Infosys alone generates 8 figures a year in lawyer fees for H-1B visas. If Infosys cannot replace Americans, it is not getting H-1B visas. If it doe not get H-1B visas, there are no legal fees for lawyers. If there are no legal fees for lawyers, the lawyers cannot run their yachts. Therefore, American programmers are expendable.
If you go to the top of 8 USC 1182(n)(1), yes it says H-1B workers have to be paid the prevailing wage. But moved down to 8 USC 1182(p) and you find that Congress requires the Department of Labor to provide 4 skill-based prevailing wages. As the provisions dictate, the result is
Skill Level 1: 17th percentile of wages for the occupation and location. Employers classify 50% of H-1B workers here.
Skill Level 2: 34th percentile. 32% of H-1B workers
Skill Level 3: Median wage. 12% of H-1B workers
Skill Level 4: 64th percentile 6% of H-1B worker
Go to FLCDATACENTER.COM and you can see the wage savings by going H-1B for any occupation and location combination. You can see that this system is designed to allow employers to pay H-1B worker ridiculously low wages.
Those of you are hare saying that Disney came about due to a lack of enforcement are WRONG. What happened at Disney, under the H-1B program, IS PERFECTLY LEGAL. Maybe Ms. Blackwell can win on some other grounds. I wish her luck,.
You can read the complete details in Sold Out: http://www.amazon.com/Sold-Out...
The H-1B program is deliberately convoluted and designed to make the casual reader believe something different from reality. I spent two hours on Monday walking another lawyer who initially could not believe it was legal to replace Americans with low paid H-1B workers through the twists and turns of the H-1B statutes.
If you are posting nonsense like this—"It is not the law. H1B Visas are not meant to replace US worker force but to supplement the the workforce. It also expressly forbids paying workers lower wages. Look it up sometime. The problem is enforcement and the companies that game the system."—showing publicly that you don't know what you are talking about, I suggest you start listening and reading; rather than talking.
When you "look it up sometime" be sure you pay special attention to:
1. Defining an "H-1B Dependent Employer"
2. Defining an "exempt H–1B nonimmigrant"
3. The restrictions imposed on enforcement
4. The prevailing wage provisions of 8 USC 1182(p).
You will find that H-1B is, quite simply, the best legislation money can buy.
Congress needs to be held accountable. The problems with H-1B (and H-1B is just the tip of the iceberg), can only be fixed by Congress.
Otherwise, we lawyers can laugh all the way to the bank.
Author of Sold Out
Unions these days have a number of structural problems that I will not delve into hear. However, I will point out that when Southern California Edison replaced its American workers with H-1B workers last year, notice its was non-union workers that got replaced and the Americans that stayed. If I were running a union, that would be one of my marketing points. It is true that Americans programmers at all these companies that have been H-1Beeing could have prevented their own jobs losses by collectively following Nancy Reagan's advice: JUST SAY NO. The fact of the matter is that H-1Beeing has been going on at least since 1994 and NOT ONE company doing it has had the slightest problem getting their soon-to-be-ex-American-workers dig their own graves. NOT ONE. The programmer motto has been "Thank you sir. May I have another?" I throw this out as a serious question: If no unions be needed, when are Americans going to stand up without one? No, you don't kneed a union to stand up when the employer says "Train your foreign replacement." But the fact of the matter is no one stands up without a union.
Author of Sold Out
The companies whose leaders were held up as visionaries, who provided a new model for industry to follow?
Anyone?
Anyone?
That's right. Kodak and Enron started this all in the early 1990's. One of the reasons outsource persists in spite of not saving any money is what I call "The NFL Problem."
You're a team owner. It's January. Your team went 4-12. You've just fired your coach. Now you need to find another coach. But you want someone with NFL head coach experience AND you don't want to pay what it would take to get Jimmy Johnson or Bill Parcells out of retirement.
What's then available?
The coach that went 3-13 and just got fired from some other team.
Let's now move into the computer industry. You may have read that Fossil (a company I had never heard of until this event) H-1Beed its Americans. http://dailycaller.com/2015/05...
I turned out that this was a decision made by new IT management Fossil had hired that had previously come from JCPenny. CIO magazine described the situation there as "Mismanagement for the Ages." http://www.cio.com/article/284...
Why in in the world with Fossil want to hire "Mismanagement for the Ages" to run their IT Department?
Just like the NFL owner, they probably wanted "experience" and did not want to pay a lot. That's why you see incompetent CIOs getting fired from one company and moving to another. It's not uncommon to see CIOs creating serial disasters at four or more companies.
Sadly, that is not a topic we got into in Sold Out because it was too industry specific but maybe in another book.
Author of Sold Out
Mr. Iger, who actively lobbies for more more H-1B visas was the 2d highest paid executive in the country. http://money.cnn.com/gallery/n...
In the wake of the Disney H-1Beeing, he got a raise: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Note that Mr. Iger's salary is more than that of the 320 Disney workers who got H-1Bed COMBINED.
And if you total the on-paper savings of replacing those Americans with H-1B workers, it adds up to about what Mr. Iger's RAISE was that year.
Author of Sold Out