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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.
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. . . they call it a "business plan" .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Seriously. This sort of bean counter bullshit is going to continue until people no longer hesitate to drag it into the light.
Yes, sure, it's up to every company to maximize its own profits.
And sure, it's possible that wages for certain classes of skilled workers is out of whack.
But abusing the work visa system to pay pennies on the dollar for labor is just flat-out wrong.
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THANK GOD!!!
The plain simple fact, you cannot displace American workers with an H1B Visa hire. That's against the law and this is what these companies are doing. Couple that with how contracting companies game the H1B Visa program by flooding it with applications, and you have a broken system that's displacing American workers. H1B Visa program is meant to supplement the American workforce NOT replace it. There are companies with legitimate uses for H1B Visas which cannot get a visa because of these contracting companies. Time to reform the program.
The whole thing is a joke...are you really telling me that out of 300 million Americans, you can't find ANYONE in this country who is qualified to do this work? Bullshit. Utter bullshit.
Unless by "qualified" you mean "willing to work at 1/2 scale wages".
The whole thing is a joke, a complete fucking joke.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
There are many ways to save money. Some of them are illegal. The lawsuit claims that this was one of the illegal ways to save money. (Disney could also have saved the money if they just didn't pay the workers at all, let the debt pile up and shot everyone trying to go to the courts to demand the money. Also this is deemed illegal for some reason.)
The sad state of things is such that even though they are using H-1B improperly, those affected are mostly college-educated white males.
This is not a great target market for widespread outrage and demands for reform on the 24 hour news stations.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
It's not really about racism, it's about basic economics. You flood the supply of labor with cheap imports and you reduce demand for more expensive domestic product.
It's beyond time to eradicate the program entirely.
Something like this case - where disney literally laid off staff in order to directly replace them with H1B workers - should be immediately illegal and stopped before they even brought them in + fines and penalties and so on.
The fact that we're here on the internet complaining about this and the workers are only filing lawsuits after the fact shows just how broken the program is.
The problem is big business buys politicians and votes and then write the laws that best suit their shareholders (i.e. profit). Disney is great at getting away with this - look at the copyright extension that directly follows when Mickey Mouse would otherwise enter the public domain.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
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.
When they own nearly all of pop culture. Unless your going to go live under a rock you're gonna be giving then some money. They own ESPN for Christ sakes. I know your already rattling of in your head all the non Disney stuff you watch and read but try keeping your kids away from it without them seeming weird. Media consumption is a social thing for most people. If you keep your kids away from all the stuff everybody else likes they'll lose a huge amount of common ground that helps then relate. That goes for you too. A lack of common interests is one of the things that isolates nerds...
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The visa system for workers is completely "save cash for companies", nothing more. If you believe it's a good system in any way, you have either been duped by propaganda or not stopped to consider life without a work visa. So ask yourself, what happened _before_ we had worker Visas? Simple, people immigrated to the US. If someone had a special set of skills and knowledge, companies could pay the costs and do the work to get the immigration complete quickly. The US Government has embassies and a Military for exactly the purpose of accomplishing safety.
Congress needs to do it's job, but so you we. Repeating bullshit does not fix things, understanding problems is the start. Many of our problems were caused by people trying to game the system under the guise of altruism.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
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?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
H1-B visa were thought to be available only for companies that couldn't fill the open positions with domestic workers.
This is the part I found especially strange. I have no idea how Disney expects to argue that they couldn't find the needed skill set domestically then turn around and have the current staff train the H1-Bs. Clearly the skill sets were already available. Hell they didn't even have to open a position, it was already filled.
The optimist in me wants to say this is an open and shut case for the IT workers but the pessimist in me fully expects Mickey Mouse and and his congress critter friends crash them under pallets of cash.
Reading the Department of labor website " The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce" If the Disney workers had to train the H-1B it does not seem like they (the H1-B workers) had the skill set to do the job in the first place and it would seem to me Disney did not follow the rules properly.
Attracting foreign workers shouldn't be blocked completely, but there should be a good reason for it. Someone who has skills you cannot get anywhere else. This should be reflected in the wage -- a H1B job should pay say, at least 200K/year or so. :)
+1 Insightful, folks.
Exceptional work should get exceptional pay, and if it isn't exceptional, there should be no problem finding resident workers.
Seriously. This sort of bean counter bullshit is going to continue until people no longer hesitate to drag it into the light.
Yes, sure, it's up to every company to maximize its own profits.
And its up to every company to not eat it's seed corn as well.
Let us imagine the supply sider's dream of every American worker (except them) to be paid less than the wages in the lowest paid countries. Then there is no reason to outsource labor. Isn't this what we are told every waking moment?
Okay, mission accomplished.
Now let us imagine these people who are making that - oh, I don't know what you would call it - say "minimum liveable wage" Any less, and they'd starve to death.
Now imagine all these Americans buying homes and cable tv and a new smartphone every year and taking trips to Disney World every year. and having retirement plans and going to eat in nice places and taking vacations to the shore.
And just imagine the folks who would not have jobs where folks sped their money I don't mean to sound like a crazy man, but wouldn't it be a good thing to have more Americans make more money so they could buy more stuff so that your company sells more?
The times I made more money in life I tended to spend more money. Go figure.
Austerity only works for a very short time. Then it becomes a war of attrition like race to the bottom.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Next time forum a union!
In an ideal market, people would be free to move around and seek work where ever the wages and opportunity are right. In our real world, moving from country to country to work is limited by governments that want to protect their borders and labor pool.
Try getting a visa to work in China or Brazil. Those countries do not readily allow foreigners to work "their" jobs.
A government visa program designed to artificially increase a pool of workers is the exact opposite of a free market.
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.
Company wants to save money by replacing overpaid workers with cheaper ones? Story at 11. Really, I fail to see what the issue is here. This is a corporation doing what corporations do - try to minimize expenditures. These people were likely at will employees as as such have no guarantee of job security. If you are making a lot of money, expect to be under the microscope when the cost cutters come around. If you are truly worth it, you have nothing to worry about. This is just crybaby bullshit.
For someone coming off as smug and superior, you are shockingly naive.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
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
That's pure Socialism. In the USA have a MINIMUM wage - except for those exempted, such as agricultural workers, some food service workers, and congressional flunkies.
By most computations, the minimum wage in effect for a given US locale is LESS than a liveable wage. Which means that something has to fill the gap: food stamps, welfare, charity, working 2 jobs, and so forth.
Thus, what you are proposing is UN-AMERICAN and you should be ashamed of yourself.
I'm assuming you are being facetious,
But really, the achille's heel of supply side-ism is that eventually people cannot afford what you are supplying.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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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Hey now, he's just the latest Disney Princess. Why all the hate?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.