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Laid-Off Disney IT Workers Decry Offshoring At Trump Rally (computerworld.com)
dcblogs writes: Two former Disney IT workers spoke at a Donald Trump campaign rally on Sunday, telling about the shock of having to train their foreign replacements. Speaking at the large rally in Madison, Ala. was Dena Moore, a former Disney IT worker who trained her foreign replacement, and said tech workers are reluctant to talk about the problem. IT workers "are afraid, they're in shock," she told the cheering crowd. "They're not coming forward because we have been taught all our lives to make do and keep going on. But you know what? This little old grandma is going to stand up for what's right. "The fact is that Americans are losing their jobs to foreigners," said Moore. "I believe Mr. Trump is for Americans first."
Whether that means offshoring jobs, or speaking against offshoring jobs as a means to the presidency, or hiring foreign workers to work on his construction projects ... Mr Trump will always do what's best for Mr Trump. If your interests align with his great, and if they don't he'll try to convince you that they do for as long as he needs your cooperation. The only reason Mr Trump is running for president is because he thinks he can use the position to advance his business concerns and make him richer than he already is. Why waste money buying off politicians when if you can get yourself into office it's free?
Trump is the end result of lots of people feeling disenfranchised and angry over many, many years. To be fair, there's a lot to be angry about, but I don't think that Trump's supporters are really thinking this one through. People who are angry rarely do. They just want "something" to be done.
Welcome to the second wave of "Hope and Change" as a political platform.
Love sees no species.
Heed this: If Sanders is the nominee, I'll vote libertarian as always. If that witch is the nominee, I'll be voting for trump. I'm not alone, by far.
I suspect that these starry-eyed optimists wouldn't be entirely pleased with Trump's cost reduction strategies during his years in real estate, which have included trying to go cheap on the pesky human resources; but they are correct that he is basically the only option on the republican side who is even interested in pretending to care about the filthy peons who aren't good enough to realize their income in capital gains rather than 'wages'.
It's almost as though people can't be made to vote against their economic interests by promising to keep the scary gays away from school prayer forever. Crazy stuff.
Do these Americans seriously think Trump gives a fuppenny tuck about American workers? I have absolutely no doubt that Trump employs in his companies whomsoever is (a) cheapest and (b) causes the least trouble. If he is now trying to get elected on an 'American jobs for real Americans' ticket then that represents a level of hypocrisy in him that even I thought impossible in a human being.
...you think he'd have kept you from losing your Disney job (despite the fact that he doesn't actually give a sh** about blue collar Americans once they're done casting votes) - your job is more important that the clear indications that he's a misogynistic racist hot head liar who has bankrupted FOUR TIMES.
This country really has become all about "me." Sure, I'll give up the fourth amendment, and start traipsing on the first - just to make sure some brown skinned guy doesn't crash an airplane with me in it. People who think like that don't deserve the sacrifices of our armed forces - Men and women who who lived through Bastogne, the horrors of Peleliu, through the years to the battle of Wanat (look it up.) They died so you could BE AMERICANS. EARN IT.
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If slashdotters' "all about me" attitude is any representation of the attitude in the US, America is screwed. A country has to be able to make some sacrifices and work together. A nation of people who just look out for themselves is a nation that is headed for civil war.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Well, it only creates cognitive dissonance if you think like a moron. Thoughtful people understand that nobody is consistently wrong, any more than anyone is consistently right. The Nazis built the authobahn (a.k.a. "Reichsautobahn"), but I don't hear people arguing against superhighways because they were a Nazi idea.
So it's a good thing that Trump brought up this issue; it'll force the other candidates to address it, or at least dance around it. But I doubt he really cares about it; he's too narcissistic and mercurial to care about anyone but himself for very long.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
should be evidence enough that the employer is lying when they say they can't fill a position with an american and they should lose ***ALL*** of their h1bs, those here should be sent back home - not allowed to find a different employer to sponsor them, AND the employer should be prohibited from applying for more for at least five years.
Since when did a country protecting its borders and putting the interests of its own citizens ahead of the interests of foreigners become some buzzword for "evil racism" that every self-righteous liberal now feels the need to decry?
Every country in history has protected its borders and controlled immigration to some extent. Only in this weird modern era is that somehow viewed as a BAD thing.
And yes, when the U.S. was being settled, we were much more open to immigrants coming in. But that was back when we had tons of unsettled land available and plenty of jobs to spare, when infrastructure wasn't much needed, when there was no "social safety-net" to speak of, and when anyone who could handle a plow and work hard could make a go of it as a farmer.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Each party is stuck with a toxic candidate in part due to its own rules:
On the Republican side, they really want a way to get rid of Trump, but they chose to select most of their delegates by a reasonably democratic process.
On the Democrat side, they are stuck with Hillary because they decided to create enough superdelegates that they could override the democratic process.
If the parties had switched nominee selection processess, other than not being Trump I'm not sure who they would have picked, but for the Democrats we'd probably be seeing Sanders- or a lot of folks who didn't enter the race because of the superdelegates would have been there to consider.
Anyway, the whole thing leaves me looking at the third party candidates to decide who to vote for instead of Kang and Kodos
Did you realize that Disney makes most of it's money from a global audience? So you're objecting to letting foreigners work to support films that are going to be sold in mass in their country, saying instead America has an imperative of protecting the economic interests of middle class US employees at the expense of much poorer, more desperate foreign employees.
That's not just racism, that's colonialism dude.
Hillary has a shameful history of corruption that goes back to the 1970s. Even Micheal Moore shamed Hillary for taking bribes from the health care industry.
The Clintons have been influence peddlers for decades.
"Since when did a country protecting its borders and putting the interests of its own citizens ahead of the interests of foreigners become some buzzword for "evil racism" that every self-righteous liberal now feels the need to decry?"
Simple: When it became solely about Mexicans. When illegal immigration is talked about, nobody is talking about the Scotsman, the English, the French, the Spanish, the Irish, the Italians, the Greeks, or any other Eurpoean nation. 99% of the time they aren't talking about the Chinese, the Russians, or any other Asian nation either. It's about Mexico and Mexicans.
"Every country in history has protected its borders and controlled immigration to some extent. Only in this weird modern era is that somehow viewed as a BAD thing."
It's not what you do but how you do it. The ideas being floated around are ideas like breaking up families, a freedom-killing national ID program, building ineffective walls at huge taxpayer expense, militarizing the boarder, granting blanket amnesty, letting vigilantes patrol the boarder, erecting more barriers to citizenship, etc etc. Politicians are playing to the base and won't get serious with real pragmatic solutions such as: do away with corn subsidies to make American corn actual market value. This disincentivizes boarder crossing because would-be immigrants can afford to work on their own farms instead of being driven from the market by our farms and their artificially cheap produce.
"And yes, when the U.S. was being settled, we were much more open to immigrants coming in. But that was back when we had tons of unsettled land available and plenty of jobs to spare, when infrastructure wasn't much needed, when there was no "social safety-net" to speak of, and when anyone who could handle a plow and work hard could make a go of it as a farmer."
We have TONS of unsettled land available. I would also argue that large immigrations to the US do not deplete available jobs. There isn't a magical fixed number of jobs. Transport 10,000 people via high speed teleportation into Kansas and suddenly there will be a need for more things in Kansas. There will need to be more barbers, laundromats, plumbers, grocers, etc etc etc. There's also still plenty of land if you want to "have a go" at being a farmer. You're not going to be rich, but farming hasn't been a traditional means of becoming rich.
Was expected to do the exact same thing, but our staff saw it coming and we 'failed' miserably to enlighten the East Indian HB1's. I was approached a couple of months after being laid off, with a very decent package I must admit to help restructure the group, but the $1000.00/hour figure I quoted the large financial institution I formerly worked for seemed to spook them. I wonder if they ever recovered the DB's I fixed for them during the training period. Backups are so fragile, and indexes so easily corrupted. Not long after I was contacted I heard from colleagues the group was outsourced to HP with about as much success as the HB1 migration.
Note I got another job after my 18 months of salary ran out, but have since left the industry. I walk and sit dogs and houses now, getting paid much less but I am very happy, relaxed and work outdoors mostly on my own schedule.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Usually they hold your final pay, a good recommendation, or a big severance bonus over your head, and you won't get it unless you "volunteer" to "train" your replacement.
Needless to say, the quality of such training is usually for shit; as the forced trainer has absolutely no interest in passing along their acquired knowledge and is only there because of the threats made, implied or real.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
It always surprised me as well, but from the other end.
Rather than being surprised that the company would trust the training given to H1B by their existing staff, I'm surprised their legal departments let them do it given the pretty much the only legal precondition needed to use H1B is that you can't find the skill set in the local population.
If you are having to use your local staff to training the people coming in, surely you have already proven the local population has the sort of skills need for the roles.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
Optimistically those 10 high paying american jobs become a combination of 10 mid to low-paying jobs. They're still employed! Yay!
Actually, it's not that simple.
When you outsource those 10 jobs to China, the products they make become cheaper. For example: manufacturing a shirt used to require 479 labor-hours pre-industrial-revolution, a cost of about $4,000 at $8.25/hr (my state minimum); today, such a shirt costs $15, or 6.67 hours at $2.25/hr Chinese labor.
Take it in reverse: a cheap t-shirt would cost $55 at local minimum wage. Clothing currently equates to 2.8% of annual household budgets; if, instead, it equated to 10.3%, what would happen to the 7.5% of products each household could no longer afford? What would happen to those jobs?
The answer is not that people would work more. We're not going back to an economy where we used a different technique; we're going to an economy where we've cut back working hours by a high-tech technique, but didn't cut back costs. This prevents consumers from purchasing new products, and that means labor to produce those products doesn't get paid because those products aren't bought, so we just don't hire those people.
This is well-understood economics. I wasn't the first to come up with it; I found out this was called Ricardo's Theory of Comparative Advantage after I designed my models, although my own models are more complete and more reliable than modern economic theory. I focus on macroeconomic form: most economists are bean counters trying to predict the stock market and commodities market, explaining what the so-called value of a particular good should be and what its correct price is; I focus on the broad movement of economics throughout history and the repeating patterns, identifying how wealth grows and what impacts the long-term changes in that respect. I don't care to say how rich we're going to be by doing X; just that X will occur and it will cause some effect to increase or decrease total wealth, employment, individual buying power, or the like.
That is no longer the case, with the total labor force shrinking every year since 2006 [bls.gov]. It's actually worse than that, if you go further back.
We've been in a labor force bubble since 1970. Housewives gave way to working couples and middle-class families living at an extended standard-of-living (two people work, draw more income, and buy more stuff, living like rich people--we've normalized this, so they're just middle-class). We didn't replace those housewives with maids and servants in every household; on the other hand, we *did* get nice dishwashers, washing machines, and other tools to dramatically reduce the domestic working hour load. Housewives don't have to slave over the kitchen sink for eight hours each week and then spend 12 more hours handling laundry; they spend an hour on these tasks combined and still take care of our domestic affairs. I won't paint a picture where women are now enslaved to two careers, because they're not.
It's the only way it's worked. Initially we shipped labor intensive work like textiles out. Then more expensive jobs that included things like EPA restrictions. As the manufacturing base overseas ramped up, it wasn't long before more and more of those higher paying middle class jobs all left, if they could. There were some initial jobs created to build up the infrastructure to support the imports, but once done that number shrank again and now there are fewer total jobs.
Yet a labor participation rate of about 60% is normal across all of human history, and unemployment rates of 4%-8% in healthy economies span back as far as the Roman Empire. Labor participation rates are higher in poorer societies, yet even serfs had women keeping house and raising children in
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