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Disney IT Workers Allege Conspiracy In Layoffs, File Lawsuits (computerworld.com)
dcblogs writes with the latest in the laid off Disney IT worker saga. According to ComputerWorld: "Disney IT workers laid off a year ago this month are now accusing the company and the outsourcing firms it hired of engaging in a 'conspiracy to displace U.S. workers.' The allegations are part of two lawsuits filed in federal court in Florida on Monday. Between 200 and 300 Disney IT workers were laid off in January 2015. Some of the workers had to train their foreign replacements — workers on H-1B visas — as a condition of severance. The lawsuits represent what may be a new approach in the attack on the use of H-1B workers to replace U.S. workers. They allege violations of the Federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), claiming that the nature of the employment of the H-1B workers was misrepresented, and that Disney and the contractors knew the ultimate intent was to replace U.S. workers with lower paid H-1B workers."
I don't usually get too worked up over things like this. However, this story has really got me aggravated. I'm curious how many people in the IT Profession feel similarly?
I want to think I really like the Disney company, perhaps that's why it feels so egregious when they've done something like this. My question really comes down to, is 200-300 employees a large enough pool to push something like this into a Class Action status, or is having a couple hundred single lawsuits a better way to go about making a much bigger noise about both the specific Disney situation, or this situation in the US as a whole?
With us drawing close to a Presidential election in the US, perhaps it's time for IT Professionals to re-think who should represent us both in our home states, and in our national Congressional seats. They need to understand they're very directly impacting our paychecks, and the paychecks of the co-workers we actually -like- to work with.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
I really hope this tactic is successful, although I always thought RICO was a Federal criminal statute, not something available to civil litigation plaintiffs.
On its face, though, it seems beyond obvious that was indeed a deliberate scheme to use H1B visas to replace U.S. workers. It seems naive in the extreme that Disney executives would believe that they just happened to find a contractor with a pool of domestic labor at rates dramatically cheaper than their local talent -- they HAD to have known their contractor would be using H1B visas to obtain low-cost overseas employees. And it's not like Disney doesn't have extensive experience hiring non-US citizens to staff theme parks like Epcot. To say they didn't know the rules would be not believable.
I hope this works and there is some kind of racketeering prosecution that arises from it. I kind of doubt Disney will be directly prosecuted, they may be able to dredge up some emails that say "OK, we just need some kind of official statement you're not using H1Bs to junk our expensive domestic employees. Just reply to this email and say 'Yes'."
But if the contracting industry, which seems to be where the real hands-on evil takes place, it'd be awesome to see those guys take some RICO prosecutions.
Same thing happened to me at Nielsen Media in 2009. They brought in Tata Systems and most of the software developers were replaced with Indians. Is it too late for a class action suit?
In our enlightened times, only one country sends their sons to other countries to kill the people that live there.
Errr, well Russia now makes two, with Crimea & Syria.
Only those two countries huh?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/isis-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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H1Bs being locked to the job needs to be removed and the min wage to use one needs to set high say 80K-150K varying due to local COL's. And with an OT level of say up to 50 hours a week (agv over 1-2 months) 120-200K. 80+ hour weeks 150-225K. Payments in escrow for at least 6mo's out Unless the job has MAX time frame of 6mo or less.
Can not be deported making a wage claim and the crop must keep paying into escrow if they fire the worker they can't reuse the H1B for the rest of the year unless they can have a clear case with documentation and proven in court as for why they where fired / layered off. Severance min of 2 mo's if the worker has been there over 6mo's or up to 6mo's if under.
I disagree. Given the disproportional representation of Asians in STEM fields, I would say that those affected are mostly college-educated Americans - yes, more white than black, but certainly includes Asians and women.
Obviously, this depends on the location (e.g., more Asians in California and East Coast vs. Midwest), but I think this affects all skilled Americans in IT.
And I think the mistake is in characterizing it as something that only affects white people. It's all about narrative -- bring in other groups, then see the magic unfold.
It's interesting to see a new angle on this, and to see a group actually fighting back against such a large employer. But...lawsuits won't fix this long term. What is going to fix this is a professional organization with a little more teeth than something like the IEEE or ACM. IT Professionals (developers, systems guys, DevOps people, whatever) need to start standing up against stuff like this before any hope of combating it goes away.
I walk the line between worker and manager in a lead position, so I see both sides of an employers' argument. Here's the uncomfortable truth -- there really is a shortage of qualified people, always has been. You need to find and hang on to qualified people for dear life, because you're not going to get a department full of superstars. The problem is that a lot of unqualified people can BS their way to a $150K+ job, and employers often don't know the difference between good and bad. Because of this, they're always looking to cut costs. So when Tata or Infosys comes in, and tells the CIO to write them a monster check to make their lazy good-for-nothing IT department go away, the argument holds water. Anyone working in an offshored IT environment knows that it never works out, but we do a very poor job of communicating our value to the business in some cases.
Other professionals are much smarter than we are about this. They saw companies moving to limit their power and formed professional organizations. The AMA pays for legislation, makes political campaign donations, and ensures its members still continue to command high salaries. If they ever let up, United Healthcare or similar would buy a law saying that nurses or medical assistants could perform advanced procedures for 1/10 the cost. Same thing with engineers, accountants, etc. There is an accepted barrier to entry (medical school, accreditation, licensure, etc.) to weed out the first-level BS artists. Imagine if an IT professional with X years' experience came with a full well-rounded education in computing fundamentals and their speciality, as opposed to graduating from a certification bootcamp. Or if a developer could be guaranteed to know something other than the JQuery and Python scripting he was taught in Coder Academy. As an employer, I'd pay for that instead of having to cycle endlessly through crappy onshore and offshore employees.
The point is that both sides have to give a little. Employers need to stop offshoring to the lowest bidder long enough to allow a talent pool to grow domestically, and IT professionals need to embrace the idea of a profession with salary progression commensurate with experience. If I were king and were able to form the IT Professionals Association tomorrow, here's what would happen:
- A huge collection would have to be taken up from members to purchase legislation banning the most obvious abuses of the current visa system. (Not an outright ban, because the original idea is good.)
- Some fundamental standards and practices would need to be established. This is the really hard part, because everyone is used to things going a million miles an hour and vendors promoting lock-in at every turn. But we're big boys and girls now, and computers are a part of our daily lives; their use should be more like a branch of engineering than a mad scientists' lab or skunkworks.
- Experience levels would need to be set, and training requirements to reach the next level would need to be established. Yes, this includes the idea of licensure, and at the lower levels, the dirty word "apprenticeship." This would allow employers to pay less for lower-skilled domestic labor. Does that sound like a skilled trade? It should -- the fundamentals of computing are becoming skilled labor now, and the creative engineering work should be done higher up the stack by people who have done the grunt work before.
- Members of the profession would need to start taking responsibility for their work, PE or medical malpractice style. It infuriates me when I've walked into projects where someone messed things up
Except that while Trump is talking about building a wall against Mexicans or those from the middle-east, these aren't where the jobs are going. Instead, it's companies that make plenty of money that are hiding from taxation via foreign subsidiaries and then firing local domestic workers in favour of lower-paid imports all while claiming it's because they can't find talent. Additionally, it's in-sourcing companies providing low-budget labour at reduced quality overrunning the domestic mid-level workers while doing an end-run around labor laws.
Well... I think there's a better way to deal with the program than eradicating it: calling the bluff of the people who say it's necessary.
The critical claim is that there aren't enough trained tech workers in the US. So make the H1B dependent on intending to establish permanent residency. Then you get and keep your trained workers.
The reasons companies don't want this is that the purpose of the program isn't to supplement the US workforce, it's to make it easier to ship their jobs overseas when the guest worker with all his newly accumulated experience is kicked out of the country. If there were a shortage of US expertise then we wouldn't be kicking successful workers out and bringing in less experienced ones.
There is no shortage of techies in the US per se, but there's never enough good people. The best H1Bs I've met really do add a lot by being here -- as the best of any group of workers would. So let's keep the best people, who actually end up creating more jobs.
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