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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."
Actually the reason IT workers aren't talking about this is because they usually sign comprehensive covenants to get the severance payout.
Didn't Disney end up reverting a good portion of the layoffs?
While I agree Clinton isn't a good choice, she is FAR superior to that intolerant, divisive, racist, misogynistic, self-aggrandizing ass Drumpf.
The "shortage" of US citizen IT workers in America is a myth. Importation of "guest workers" through various means are simply companies on the buy AND sell side of the equation gaming the US immigration system to distort the price of labor. The same could be said in other industries such as farm labor. Adequate supply of labor exists, but the industry is chafing at paying market labor rates.
The beneficiaries of this cozy relationship between politicians and offshore companies who broker IT consultants by the pound are the politicians taking $$$ and the brokers taking huge skims off the top of the rates paid for the guest workers. Meanwhile, both the US citizen workers and the guest workers are faced with lower wages, with the guest workers taking the brunt of the abuse. (Imagine paying half or more of your salary to some broker who's only "value" is to pay off politicians to get you a visa into another country).
Want to start a technology company and don't want to pay the prevailing wages? Then by all means open up shop in China, Eastern Europe, Brasil, India....wherever. I'm sure those countries would be delighted.
Here we go...painting this as a racism issue.
I have had to deal with being replaced by H1-b for quite a few years. I even trained my replacement too. It was just a couple of us. We got the project going and the company brought in the H1-bs to maintain it.
I never found work again. I got the BS line of "you don't have the skills" (never heard back when I asked, "what skills are those?") and usually heard nothing again. It's funny how "skills" are age and wage dependent in this profession.
And then to hear in the media that we Americans don't have the skills and that's why they need to hire H1-bs. Funny, quite a few of my classmates at my American university were some of those H1-bs.
My family looked at me differently as well as friends. I even had a family member take me aside and ask, "ARE YOU AN ALCOHOLIC!?"
WTF?!
This isn't about race. This is about American businesses exploiting very poor people. This is about gaming the system so that they can arbitrage wages and to increase the tech labor supply to suppress everyone's wages.
I don't blame the H1-bs. I'd do exactly the same thing in their shoes.
What I blame is the crony capitalist system we have where we little people get screwed and the benefits go to the top.
When Disney canned their IT department in Florida, did they pass the cost savings to consumers?
Fuck no!
So, where does the savings go to?
The CEOs and they get a bigger bonus for screwing us over.
This is just the business and political elite exploiting their laws to send us all spiraling to the bottom.
STEM work is for off-shoring to developing countries and immigrants from those countries. Any smart American kid should go into medicine. Have a look someday at what the AMA does to immigrant doctors. (Hint: they usually end up as nurses.)
No, she is a criminal. She should be in prison. She should have been in prison long ago after running the elderly out of their houses. That was just the start of her corrupt political career. I'd might as well be voting for some third world dictator thug. At least Trump is not a criminal. That's about what it boils down to.
the political process requires choices... there are rarely any ideals... its a choice between the different options.
At this point... its Hillery VS Trump... there is very little you could say against Trump that doesn't count many times over against Hillary.
Most of the negatives of either candidate fall away once you see that... then it becomes a question of the positives...
This cause big problems for Hillary because she actually doesn't have any besides being a democrat if that is a positive.
She's not especially clever. She's not especially wise. She's not especially respected or trusted. She's not well liked. She's not good at giving speeches. She's not good at leading people. She's not good at managing things.
There's nothing there. She's Bill Clinton's wife. That's what she's been running on from the beginning.
It was how she got her stint in the Senate.
It was how she got treated seriously as a presidential candidate in 2008.
It is how she got appointed to Sec State under Obama even though Obama didn't like or trust her.
And it is why she's basically being given the Democrat nomination. She won 6 out of 6 coin tosses and won 7 out of 7 high card draws. Consider the odds of that happening.
(.5^13) x 100 = 0.01% chance of that happening.
The fix is in kids. The DNC machine has chosen Hillary. She has no reason to even be there in the first place and look at her walk to her coronation.
Against her... for some fucking reason... is Trump. And anything you can say against him is true many times over for her.
When all is said and done... the difference is this... he's smarter than she is, he has a proven track record of making things work out in his interests without someone doing it for him, he's respected within some fields for being a savvy business person, people seem to like him, he's very good at giving speeches, he obviously can claim some skill at running companies... say whatever you like about him... he's got more going for him than hillary besides the fact that she's a democrat and he's running as a republican.
That's pretty much the only thing you could cite as being a positive thing in her favor absent POLICY differences.
Now if you want to say "but I want the policies she's advocating and not the ones he's advocating" sure... that's a reasonable objection. However, that's a policy objection and not anything to do with the actual people.
The policies and the personalities should not be mixed. Say which personality you like... say which policies you like.. then vote for whomever on which ever basis you find relevant. But citing Hillary as being a better person is a very dubious sell.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Sad aspect of human nature. The protectionist measures suggested by Trump will harm everyone including the ones supposedly being helped.
That's what the economists say.
One of the things that brought the Roman empire down was all the poor barbarians who wanted in on her wealth. So, they flooded over the boarders and sucked them dry.
Let's look at this as a supply and demand problem. There are billions of poor smart people in the World. If I took the 90th percentile of intelligent people in the World, I can populate the US more than twice over with just geniuses.
Meaning, you can be replaced easily - and I don't care how smart you think you are.
Now, with wages being pushed down, our cost of living won't go anywhere. The bank isn't going to say, "Awe, your job prospects have been decimated by H1-bs. Here, we'll discount that mortgage because we're such nice people."
Food prices are going up.
Our standard of living is declining.
Our economy has changed dramatically in the last 20 or so years. Globalization is proving to be a bust for us little people. The benefits go to the top while we get the crumbs. We never had to deal with a business just picking everything up and going to some third world country, setting up shop and then importing what they make over there. Please, that cheap big screen TV is worthless to me when important things are increasing in cost. We never had to deal before with a company closing an entire department down and sending it all to India or Eastern Europe.
My father-in-law who graduated with his BSME from a public university in the early 60s walked into a job and never had to look for a job in 55 years. Today, he'd have a hard time getting that first job because he didn't go to a top school.
Things have changed and are changing for the worst for us little people.
What can be done? Don't know exactly. But the first step is to eliminate the H1-b program. It is not needed.
This explains the weird phenomenon of Trump supporters who also like Bernie Sanders. These are people who are desperate for something different than business as usual to be done, but don't know what that different thing should be and don't care.
It's easy to dismiss Trump supporters are morons who can't see he's a liar who changes his story every time it's convenient, just as it's easy to scoff at poor people who buy lottery tickets, which are the last thing anyone short of money should buy. But it's a little too easy for people who are secure and comfortable to demand people who aren't live without hope, even false hope.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I don't agree with much Trump policy but I hardly agree the protectionism he is proposing will harm everyone. It will certainly harm some, probably disproportionally people outside the United States. It will certainly help some it will allow a certain groups of skilled of American workers to continue in their current vocation for some additional years past the point where it would otherwise have been economically viable. It will marginally increase the cost of production and consumer prices on everyone else in the USA (a hidden tax, if you will).
I am small government guy, but one of the few things I think government should do is buffer the public, where possible for economic dislocations that occur more quickly than the span of a persons usual productive years. If you can effect that with minimally invasive use of law such as imposing import tariffs, I don't have much problem with that. I have long held the position we ought to classify labor as an import and tax businesses on foreign payrolls except where they can show the people doing those activities do not materially contribute to their US operation. Perhaps it could be prorated, for example an assembly worker in a foreign plant earns $100 but only a third of that plants output are sold in the USA than $30 of that wage would be subject to US taxes.
This is a far saner alternative than direct social safety net programs. If you allow the plant in the US to close and the workers to go idle than skills and equipment likely turn into a dead weight loss. If you keep them active its likely they can be retools and converted to other uses, retrained more easily etc. The same thing is true for IT workers. If you send them home into the unemployment-to-underemployment+welfare pipeline are they more or less likely to read up on industry changes and technical developments than if they stay on the job.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Yes, Trump is a terrible candidate to actually fix any of this, but he's basically the only candidate even TALKING about it. So he's, by default, the only candidate that frustrated workers can turn to.
Bernie Sanders probably would talk about it, but he's too scared of the crazy SJW's in his party calling him a racist if he criticizes the H1B system or advocates putting American workers first. And that's a shame, since Bernie is a MUCH more likely candidate than Trump to actually stand up to big business and fix this broken system. Just another example how the SJW cancer is eating away at the Democratic Party's chances to actually do anything.
As far as Hillary goes, that bitch is just a complete corporate tool who isn't going to help anyone but herself. She long ago sold any shred of decency left in her for a cheap campaign donation. The odds of her doing anything to upset the big corporations is about as good as the chances of her husband turning down a blowjob from Taylor Swift.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
This explains the weird phenomenon of Trump supporters who also like Bernie Sanders. These are people who are desperate for something different than business as usual to be done, but don't know what that different thing should be and don't care.
I think there's a better explanation. I think the overlap in support most likely exposes the artificial, ideologically and politically driven framework imposed on American governance, as well as the belief that policies necessarily need to be ideologically consistent even when circumstances differ greatly.
As an example, why can't you be in favor of "free trade" at a city, state or nation level yet reject it at an international level? The impact of such a policy varies greatly depending on how and where it's applied.
I would say supporters who view both candidates somewhat favorably are rejecting the idea that they must subscribe to a set of policies approved by a unitary ideological choice. I also think they're rejecting a lot of the intellectually false rhetoric surrounding many of these policies. It's only too easy to see that one is being sold a policy in name that isn't it in practice -- how many pages does NAFTA or TPP need to be to implement actual free movement of goods, services and capital? Why does "free trade" need 30 chapters and hundreds of pages to describe, unless of course, it's anything but free trade.
This same political doublespeak extends over all kinds of issues and it doesn't take an advanced degree to recognize when basic facts simply don't align with the narrative being used to push policies. If they chocolate ration masses less today than it did last week, how has the chocolate ration increased?
Trump may be a phony plutocrat and Sanders may be a socialist, but if you're rejecting the establishment political narrative, these are the choices you have.
The Bern is just another delusional socialist, there is no money to do what he is promising. The top 20%tile are paying 90% of the taxes, where you would normally expect them to pay 80%, jack up taxes any more and you'll see even more assets leave for tax havens.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
All it would take is for the DOJ to indite her over the classified Emails stored on her personal machine, or obstruction of justice over destroying Emails on her personal server.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
One of the things that brought the Roman empire down was all the poor barbarians who wanted in on her wealth. So, they flooded over the boarders and sucked them dry.
This is exactly what is happening to us right now. I'm not racist I am just looking at history repeating itself because corporations are greedy so they are exploiting the H1-B visa system along with hiring illegals under the table to make their companies more money! Not to mention the illegals that come into our country, start businesses, and take money away from businesses that are owned by citizens. I have seen this first hand. I have some illegals living in my neighborhood. They have seven people living in their house so they can afford to live there, and they are running three businesses out of the house: a flooring company, roofing company, and a maid service. These are the problems that can and should be fixed. We need to lock down H1-B Visas, and I'm sorry but I see no problem with putting a wall up between the US and Mexico. It's called protecting our borders, and every country in the world other than the US does it!
Protectionism isn't good for the economy and won't create more jobs; this is simple radicalized middle-class politics. The ideal is to deceive people via their lack of knowledge, making them poorer and convincing them to worship you for it.
People don't realize *consumers* pay wages, not businesses. If it takes a sum total, through all levels of production, of $350 of paid wages to make a product, then that product costs no less than $350. That's why a cell phone in 1985 cost over $1,000, but in 2015 you can get a smart phone with a quad core processor and 64GB of storage for $300: there were over a thousand dollars of wages funneled into those old, enormous bricks, between mining raw materials and manufacturing silicone wafers and assembling the cases and all. Even if they slapped no profit margin on top at all, the phone would have been over a thousand dollars.
When you reduce the amount of per-unit labor costs to make a product, you eliminate some employment. Eliminate too much in a short time and you get the Industrial Revolution: 80% unemployment and a collapsed economy. Otherwise, you just get a few thousand unemployed and several hundred million (or, globally, several billion) consumers with a few unspent dollars left in their pockets that they didn't have before. Those unspent dollars are a market opportunity to sell a new product or bring a niche product (rich people toys) to the masses; but expanding that production capacity requires labor, so you create new jobs.
In domestic economics, you actually create more local jobs by aggressively outsourcing, so long as your labor balance slides more slowly than your wealth. That is: If 50% of your employment is domestic and you save enough money outsourcing to create 10% more jobs, you have the *same* number of domestic employees if you end with 45.45% of your employment domestic and the rest outsourced. You start with 50 Chinese and 50 American workers, you eliminate 10 American jobs in favor of 10 Chinese jobs, and you get 40 and 60; along the way you find you can sell 10% more stuff, so you employ 10% more workers, and end up with 50 and 60--10 new Chinese jobs overall, more stuff being made for the same amount of money, and the 50 American workers are living a higher standard-of-living because they can buy more stuff since it's all cheaper.
Obviously, if you start shoveling jobs out to China like crazy without creating new American jobs, this doesn't work. Historically, that's not how it's worked; it's not even how it works today. People cry because they say "that person's job was lost to that foreigner!", but they don't ask what happened next. They conveniently ignore that our GDP per capita has gone up by 6.3% in the past two years while expenses have gone up by 4.2%, and ignore that all this mass outsourcing has resulted in unemployment dropping to 5.5% from 8.5% (from a 4 year peak of 10%, even). They ignore that there are more jobs and more *income per person*, and engage in the trade of platitudes about someone losing their job once.
You may as well say that a doctor lost a patient in OR, so we should ban all surgery.
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Have you ever considered what it takes to "make your own job" even at, say, a consistent minimum wage level? It's not just that you have to afford the risks associated with competing in a crowded market, but you have an increasingly uphill battle against regulation and having enough to stay alive. It's even worse if you already have fixed costs based on a job that has suddenly gone away - I think you may be severely underestimating the personal financial risk to most people.
The current state of the world economy is such that it is actually very difficult to make your own job and have it be a going concern. Part of it is that we live in such an advanced economy already (close to saturation on most things, unless you get lucky) and are also under a fairly heavy regulatory environment (tax law, ACA, business licenses, inspections, etc.).
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
It's certainly already starting. He's recently been threatening to use libel laws to silence news organizations that publish inconvenient content about him.
His tactics to win an argument include: Threats of lawsuits, flat out lies, insults, and talking over you so that you can't get your own point across.
If this guy wins then sane political discourse in America is well and truly dead.
How much worse is that then what politicians have been doing - calling people racist for opposing affirmative action, or welfare reform, or the claim that wanting to reform social security would be sending grandma & grandpa to die on the streets? As for libel, after he disavowed the KKK once on Friday, each news org wants him to repeat that on every show. I'm glad he passed up that chance on Jake Tapper - not b'cos I want him to endorse them, but b'cos I want him to stop playing their games.
The media has been hiding behind the First Amendment to do all sorts of libel against all sorts of people. It's good that Trump is threatening to use libel laws against them. There are quite a number of journalists who should lose their jobs to Telegu speaking people in Mexico.
To be fair, lots of news organizations are resorting to libel, ignoring facts even during their own stories. The news runs free of any recourse for malicious reporting these days, and they need to be reined in as much as Trump does.
He has stated in the past that H1-Bs should have a prevailing wage associated with them.
The real reason to vote for Trump? The political establishment is, for the first time in decades, genuinely frightened. They didn't really mind Bush because he was one of their own. Bush was in Skull and Bones at Yale. You think good ol' boys from Texas get into Yale, much less Skull and Bones? No the Bushes were Yankee bluebloods. But Trump? Nope. He can't be counted on to do the right thing for the establishment and they are really scared for the first time in their lives. You have to understand, these people have been wrongdoing for decades and now they have the very real consequence of going to prison for their crimes. They are going to scream and fight like a 3 year old who has just had her marshmallow taken away. All the doomsayers? LOL like the USA isn't strong enough to withstand a populist one termer. We just had 8 years of a Marxist racist divider who despises the American people, and we're still here. 16 if you include Bu$hitler. The hysteria emanating from the corridors of power is like what happened when Chavez and Evo Morales were in real danger of being elected. And guess what: things turned out fine for the people of those nations. Less well for their elites, many of whom are now in prison for their crimes.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
It's absolutely crippling! I know exactly where you are coming from. I walked out of Corporate America and I was a Windows Systems Engineer. It is absolutely an exploitive environment! I About a week after resigning from my last IT job, I went to truck driving school and never looked back. I drive locally and while I don't love the job, I don't hate it either. At least I don't have to work in an office for a PHB
The top 20%tile are paying 90% of the taxes, where you would normally expect them to pay 80%, jack up taxes any more
Nice attempt to use a big scary sounding percentage to mislead people.
Marginal Tax Rates for the highest income earners (we're talking above 250k a year, here) are HALF of what they were from the mid 1930s to the mid 1980s, and have been for nearly 30 years, putting massive pressure on budgets. Factor in mountains of loopholes in the tax code and the *effective* rate for those same individuals for many can be sub-20%.
That is wrong and must be corrected any way you slice it. By a mix bringing corporate rates in line, offering incentives to repatriate overseas funds, and asking the wealthy to actually pay something closer to what has been historically owed over the last 70 years (much of which was a supposed 'golden age' in America), we can do powerful things.
In domestic economics, you actually create more local jobs by aggressively outsourcing, so long as your labor balance slides more slowly than your wealth. That is: If 50% of your employment is domestic and you save enough money outsourcing to create 10% more jobs, you have the *same* number of domestic employees if you end with 45.45% of your employment domestic and the rest outsourced. You start with 50 Chinese and 50 American workers, you eliminate 10 American jobs in favor of 10 Chinese jobs, and you get 40 and 60; along the way you find you can sell 10% more stuff, so you employ 10% more workers, and end up with 50 and 60--10 new Chinese jobs overall, more stuff being made for the same amount of money, and the 50 American workers are living a higher standard-of-living because they can buy more stuff since it's all cheaper.
I see you drank the koolaid.
So I take 10 high paying american jobs, outsource them for 50% cost overseas. Optimistically those 10 high paying american jobs become a combination of 10 mid to low-paying jobs. They're still employed! Yay! Because unless you can prove concretely that outsourcing any high paying job results in a new higher paying job being created, what you're doing is lowering the pool. Your own logic states this unequivocally in that products are cheaper because of lowered labor costs. That only worked while we were over-employed. That is no longer the case, with the total labor force shrinking every year since 2006. It's actually worse than that, if you go further back. Then you look at what an individual makes, and that has shrunk if you clip the top couple of percent. Yes, they make so much it skews the entire result set, but take the median 90 or so percent, and you'll see that real earning power has shrunk. The reason this hasn't had the major negative impact you'd assume is because the family unit has gone from 1 to 2 workers supporting the family in many cases, or people are co-habiting more and sharing costs. It's not the rosy picture you're painting for sure.
Obviously, if you start shoveling jobs out to China like crazy without creating new American jobs, this doesn't work. Historically, that's not how it's worked; it's not even how it works today.
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. And lets not forget that the imports don't pay into the federal tax pool, leaving that burden more heavily weighed on the populace, as the production base which used to pay taxes now doesn't.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
> If this guy wins then sane political discourse in America is well and truly dead.
Where the fuck have you been? Sane political discourse has been well and truly dead for a very, very long time. I'm not even sure that it was sane when I was a kid - and I was a kid when the Sun still had a price tag hanging off the side of it and dinosaurs hadn't even evolved.
Has it gotten worse? Absolutely. However, I'm not sure that it was ever good. The difference is we now have more ubiquitous communication and access to knowledge, it was never good.
I'm reminded of the folks who think Slashdot was a beacon of intelligence and civil discourse. I can link to but one thread and dispel that notion entirely. Like Slashdot, politics was never good. Even "better" is debatable.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Trump is a symptom that the current political system is broken. Enough people are upset that they latched onto someone who focuses and represents their anger. It's why his numbers don't plummet when he makes one of his rather common blunders that would sink any of his rivals. Instead, his supporters ratchet up their support. It's almost a mob mentality stoked by invective. What caused this to come about? Well, when is the last time you voted "for" a politician? Maybe the 80s? Ever since, it's been the lesser of two evils, which has devolved to a point now that there are no choices left. This is also why Sanders is in the position he's in, because he's an outsider and pretty much unelectable as president until this presidential election. I personally would like to see a Sanders/Trump matchup in November, because either way, politics would be actually interesting for a change.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Trump isn't running against Bernie though. The right is in open rebellion about being ignored on immigration and other issues where people who think themselves our betters just want us to believe what we're told. Trump is gaming that, and gaming it very well. Cruz is addressing that with at least partial sincerity (really, the best you could reasonably hope for in any politician). Rubio is a Democrat running in the wrong primary.
Calling Trump "racist" tells me you're probably a Democrat - great for you, but it's not your primary. Sadly I predict the general will be Trump losing to Hillary, and 4 more years of the same problems we've been having, but the primaries aren't over quite yet, and maybe we'll have a surprise Bernie or Cruz.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I was once, 20 years ago, an H1B.
Back then I was "imported" because the US was behind Europe in digital telecommunications (ISDN).
I didn't replace anyone, they had to advertise the job I was taking for a couple of months and I remember my boss laughing at the applications he was getting.
They were still advertising my job even after I started it.
Here's an anecdote : The ISDN between San Jose and Mountain View wasn't working for data. I called up PacBell and after getting past the clueless support guys ("can you get a dial tone sir?" - "no, because this is a digital system, not analogue") I got through to a lovely lady in engineering.
Explained who I was and who I worked for (Cisco) and that they'd setup up their switches wrongly (US ISDN was 56Kb, they'd configure data between them at 64Kb which was causing the data corruption).
She called me back later in the day to say I was correct in my diagnosis and thanked me. Myself and the other MV folk could now work from home.
I remember one SFO immigration officer who cracked his knuckles in my face, rolled his neck and try to be as physically intimidating as possible when he bellowed at me "do you REALLY think an American can't do your job?".
"yes", I reply. It was the truth based on the data I had.
The anger swelled up in him to the point I thought he was going to explode.
He threw my passport and papers at me and I went on my way.
I stayed just short of 3 years. Too many "Trump supporters", for my liking.
If H1B's are being abused then it's the employers who are abusing them.
Don't abuse the people.
Randian horsefuckery. The poor pay plenty of sales and property taxes, so the "no taxes line" is a lie to start with. Then there's the fact that the 400 richest Americans have more wealth than the half the country's combined income. OF COURSE the rich pay more in taxes, they're the ones that have all the money.