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Disney IT Workers, In Lawsuit, Claim Discrimination Against Americans (computerworld.com)
dcblogs quotes a report from Computerworld: After Disney IT workers were told in October 2014 of the plan to use offshore outsourcing firms, employees said the workplace changed. The number of South Asian workers in Disney technology buildings increased, and some workers had to train H-1B-visa-holding replacements. Approximately 250 IT workers were laid off in January 2015. Now 30 of these employees filed a lawsuit on Monday in U.S. District Court in Orlando, alleging discrimination on the basis of national origin and race. The Disney IT employees, said Sara Blackwell, a Florida labor attorney who is representing this group, "lost their jobs when their jobs were outsourced to contracting companies. And those companies brought in mostly, or virtually all, non-American national origin workers," she said. The lawsuit alleges that Disney terminated the employment of the plaintiffs "based solely on their national origin and race, replacing them with Indian nationals." The people who were laid off were multiple races, but the people who came in were mostly one race, said Blackwell. The lawsuit alleges that Disney terminated the employment of the plaintiffs "based solely on their national origin and race, replacing them with Indian nationals."
They didn't terminate them "based solely on their national origin and race"
They terminated them based on the fact they can pay Indian workers a fraction of the salary.
Once you get a couple of Indian folks into management positions they just tend to recruit other Indian people and gradually remove whites.
Does not matter... as you know from the Obama Justice Department logic... race statistics are all that matters.
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
H-1B needs fixed
Take that "needs <past tense verb>" shit back to Reddit.
Thank you for saying what needs to be said.
Also, there is no such thing as someone being "bias". The word is "biased" (something you are) rather than "bias" (something you have).
But the one good thing about Reddit & 4chan neologisms and bad usage is that it makes it easier to know whom to ignore.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Disney, well we outsourced to a 3rd party company they provided us with the workers ...
As a way to make sure we at Disney stay a leadder in the everchage global ecanomic..... blah blah
the h1 visa program is the problem not the race of the ppl in it.
The ones STILL whining are people who were coasting and now have no relevant skills to keep working for Disney or to go get a new job.
Here's how it goes. You're working at a job where all the servers are running on physical hardware. The industry trends toward virtualization, so you learn virtualization in your spare time to keep your skills up. Boss decides to visualize everything by laying off everyone and bringing in new talent who know virtualization. No problem, you think, because you've kept your skills up, and you can go get a new job. Tell interviewers you know virtualization. But you didn't use virtualization at your job, so you can't possibly have the skills. Now you're unemployable for life.
As a group you complained about the only elected official in decades who might care about your jobs.
Suck it up disney princess. You went to the bottom of the list.
The flaw here is the H1B program needs to be completely eliminated for consulting/services companies (among other things, but this is the topic du jour). If you are a consulting/services company, you should be required to use only US employees in the US. The consulting company outsourcing is a circumvention technique for companies like Disney, who could never have gotten away with replacing all their IT people with H1B employees, but by "outsourcing" to a consulting company, they can legally lay off all of their employees and then benefit from the lower cost from the consulting company hiring a bunch of H1B slave labor. Same net effect, same savings to Disney, but totally legal currently.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
H1-B visas are for positions they couldn't fill without bringing foreign talent. Laying people off to fill the positions with H1-B is illegal.
The premise for the suit is quite creative. And absurd. Its only chance is finding a sympathetic (read: nationalistic) jury. I guess it's worth a shot considering all the protectionist rhetoric that was thrown around during this election cycle.
Wait a week to see the new Disney made Star Wars Flick, that's releasing this month, to send a message of solidarity to them. Of course that will require some discipline and intestinal fortitude not typical of us Mericans.
it's doing exactly what it's suppose to do: drive down American wages. That's like saying an Iron Maiden is a deeply flawed torture device because, gosh, somebody could get hurt.
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Now you're unemployable for life.
Uh, no. I was unemployed for two years (2009-10), underemployed for six months (working 20 hours per month), and filed for chapter seven bankruptcy in 2011. For two years I was told by hiring managers that I was overqualified for minimum wage work and told by recruiters that I was unemployable. The day after my bankruptcy got finalized I got full-time work again because the economy turned around and employers needed to fill positions.
Which is why you don't stick around at a company which is too far behind the times. Your company isn't responsible for your future employability. You are. Once enough exit interviews show them why their best people are leaving they will either change or keep losing all but their worst employees (probably forcing them to bring in contractors).
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
It's good to know they are working to undermine labor rights they claim to fight for.
specifically for an H1-B. And it'll be child's play to prove that it was all Indians hired. I guess motive might be a factor though. The motive is paying lower wages. But I've also heard tell of the guys that run the H1-B factories here in the states that they don't like Americans because they're so lazy. So again, not so far fetched.
BTW, where the hell is Trump in all this? He finished the Carrier deal (for better or worse). I want him on this one. He's got a pretty clear cut case of visa abuse here. Time to put up or shut up.
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I know that /. can be a a bit of a fact free zone these days but:
In the Disney the H1B workers were employed by a contracting firm
H1B Rules
H1B Guidelines
I have seen US workers work weekends, out of hours and holidays for my entire career. Often covering for contractors and overseas Asian teams who never seem to be available outside of their regular hours. Also they seem to be impossible to contact during their month long holidays no mater the crisis the customers are having.
They just lack the the Protestant work ethic.
And the US workers who "go the extra mile" get laid off anyway. I can only attribute it to race and national origin discrimination.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
> H1-B holders need to be paid market salary.
Its a lot more tricky than that.
Determining prevailing wage is based on the LCA (labor conditions application) which basically defines the job. But the employer can file for an H1B for a job multiple times using a different LCA each time. So they can list different "prevailing wage" rates for the same job. Then, once any one of those H1B applications is approved by the government, they switch out the LCA for any of those that were filed, even the ones that were not approved. So basically its a bait-and-switch the labor department, promising to pay high wages and then paying the lowest wages they ever filed for. And the kicker is its all legal.
I do feel bad for these workers. The H-1B loopholes that allow bodyshops like Tata to bring in cheaper, ,more compliant workers need be changed. I doubt anything will happen though -- Trump certainly isn't going to do anything that will upset his friends in business. He's basically signaled to every executive out there that concessions are available for the right price and he's willing to cut deals with the Carrier incident.
I don't have a problem with the H-1B program itself - but the fact that it's used to replace older, more senior workers doing routine IT work that doesn't require exceptional skills is the problem. I'm doing systems integration work, and the development teams I'm working with are all slowly being replaced with offshore Indian guys and body shop employees. I'm good for now because someone has to make heads or tails of the messes they want to get working, but I feel that unless something is done there will be no work for experienced people, and no pipeline of newbies to fill entry level positions. If people see they can't get anywhere in IT because there's no entry level work anymore, they're going to study something else.
I see a post or two saying the people filing these lawsuits have no talent...somehow I doubt this. IT is famous for throwing out workers who are 40+ and who demand above a certain salary for their experience. So far, the only hope I've seen in this situation is that there are constantly companies in this loop of offshoring, then bringing IT back in house when it starts going pear-shaped, then repeating. Not all these companies are on the same schedule. What I'll bet happened is that there was a bunch of staff who became very senior developers or sysadmins of a key system, and spent their time working to maintain their small little pigeon-hole of knowledge...this happens a lot in big companies. CIO comes in, gets sold on the idea of offshoring, and just goes through the department salary spreadsheet, killing off the top x% of the list. Offshore body shop gets the contract, and has to reduce costs, so they bring in the H-1Bs to learn the job, then teach it to the 1000s of people they have in India. Believe me, I've seen it multiple times, including the "this sucks, let's reshore everything" part.
I have worked at a few Fortune X (single and low double digit) companies. They have all been addicted to hiring folks from the usual offshore suspects who pay substandard wages and import (mostly) Indian and Eastern European labor for jobs that could clearly be offered to kids fresh out of college with engineering or comp sci degrees in Europe and the US. I honestly can't fathom why. For all the money "saved" there's the SIGNIFICANT wasted productivity and the "meh" value to the business of the average "resource" supplied. Calls take a lot longer, code quality tends to be sucky to average, emails are hard to parse, and you wind up with a "team" who feels like "as long as there are lots of people on a call, we've got it covered." The fact that efficiency measures suck, employees have no skin in the game to improve things, and everything takes a lot longer seems to be ignored.
What is it that ensnares the bean counters to prefer this situation over hiring qualified local candidates? I honestly don't get it. Why is it "better" to pay some unqualified person a low wage, tack on a substantial fee paid to the body shop, and then have everyone suffer through the extended delivery times, angst, etc. It can't be cheaper to do it this way, and if it is, it could not possibly be enough of a savings to merit delaying the delivery of what the business needs in a timely manner. Or can it?
I find the whole thing to be sordid, unsavory, and just demeaning to all concerned. I can't blame the folks who take those H1-B jobs. One trip to Bangalore, Sofia, Kiev, etc and you realize that these are folks that are just trying to make a living. They are acutely aware that many of their co-workers don't like this situation and simply tolerate them. Clearly someone is making some serious $$$ by perpetuating this system. Who? If I was in an industry where the top 20 experts in a particular field were from country X, I could understand. But this is for relatively inexperienced java programmers and sysadmins....clearly not what the H1-B program is designed to help.
What do YOU think?
Their big problem is that they fired all the previous workers because hiring Indian 1HB was cheaper, despite the delusional claims in some of the previous posts. Replacements never are paid equal wages in the real world. However, if Disney goes anywhere near that then they can be sued for breaking the 1HB regulations. Just because the Feds side with Big Business in screwing workers doesn't mean that law has been repealed, so civil suites can still provide an individual with some legal recourse.
This case could really shake things up. In fact, I bet that it never goes to trial and Disney settles out of court because they are terrified what would happen if it got in front of a jury. Unless there is some sort of in court judgement against the workers bringing the suite, you can be sure that this will be the first of a big wave of long overdue lawsuits. I can't wait.
Why is Snark Required?
The ones STILL whining are people who were coasting and now have no relevant skills to keep working for Disney or to go get a new job."
Spoken like someone who hasn't had this happen to them yet. FYI, if you're serious, it's not just crusty old BOFHs and mainframers that are getting this treatment. The loopholes that allow service providers to use H-1Bs to fill non-exceptional positions are basically a cap on salaries. I'm betting the positions that were "found" for all these displaced techies are project managers managing a team of 100 newbie developers replacing the one or two guys who know the internal systems inside and out.
In IT, everyone's skill sets have a shelf life, and you're only as good as the last set of buzzwords you learned. Even if it's a rehash of a concept you worked with decades ago, experience doesn't matter the same way it does in other fields. You don't see this happening to older doctors, for example.
I'd be more impressed with Trump if he met with these 250 workers rather than meet with the heads if large IT companies.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Don't bother keeping your skills up, just look trendy by working at trendy places, and be presumed to be skilled by being young. Good advice!
when we think discrimination we just think: "I hate X because they are X and because I hate X I will do bad things to X".
But I honestly don't know if the law takes feelings into account like we do. E.g. if under the law discrimination is discrimination regardless of why you're discriminating. I'm guessing they can easily show that the company Disney outsourced too gives preferential treatment to Indians here on work visas. If they're giving preferential treatment to one nationality (Indians) how is that not discrimination? Not that I understand the actual written law enough to say.
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No, that's not how it works. You interview for jobs requiring virtualization skills, and you tell them you have virtualization experience. You can talk the talk and answer any questions asked of you intelligently. That's all a modern tech interview is about nowdays anyhow: winning the quiz show. Your future employers don't know precisely what you did on the last job and don't really give a fuck anyway. Just so long as you fit their salary requirements and pass their quiz game in the interview.
I eagerly await the responses about that one guy who's new boss knew his old boss. They're the extreme exception, not the rule.
That is very true, but the Trump justice department will operate under very different rules.
This is why Smart girls don't want noth'n to do with IT jobs, Salaries are kept artificially low because of outsourcing and H1B.
And let me guess...you got a job in government IT? They hire anyone, even the unemployable.
I know this is seen as a useless attempt. However, I personally have. Instead of taking our grandson to Disney World two years ago, we took him on a road trip and visited 9 national parks instead. This year again we boycotted Disney and went to NY and Washington DC. Both trips the last two years cost us LESS Than one week in Disney World. A week there is at LEAST $10K (if you stay at one of their resort hotels) for a family. So imagine if 1,000 people did the same thing and saved $10K. That would be $10,000,000 Disney would lose.
Just a thought....
The Truth is a Virus!!!
Your company isn't responsible for your future employability.
Any company that thinks like this doesn't care about people and will do unacceptable things to exploit you as an expendable resource. The world is rapidly become a shitter place because of this.
And let me guess...you got a job in government IT?
Nope. Dell for a PC refresh project at the company I worked for before I got laid off for two years. Got promoted to project lead on my first day because I knew the company and everyone in help desk. Got a lot jokes about HR hiring anyone off the street.
They hire anyone, even the unemployable.
For the position I applied for in government IT, it required 20+ years of IT experience.
I do feel bad for these workers. The H-1B loopholes that allow bodyshops like Tata to bring in cheaper, ,more compliant workers need be changed. I doubt anything will happen though -- Trump certainly isn't going to do anything that will upset his friends in business.
Hey, Madame Zara!
Can you look into your crystal ball and tell me where I left my my car keys?
Or do you only read minds?
I'd be more impressed with Trump if he met with these 250 workers rather than meet with the heads if large IT companies.
This. It's not as if he was filling arenas with common workers or had thousands in overflow lines waiting to see him.
Even after the election he might have considered holding rallys with local people. Instead he spent all his time meeting with potential cabinet members.
There's no way meeting with the heads of IT companies would do the US *any* good. None at all.
Those companies aren't the biggest abusers of H1B, so meeting with them will do little or no good.
(Fake news seems to be the meme du-jour, so I thought I'd chip in. :-)
Your company isn't responsible for your future employability.
Any company that thinks like this doesn't care about people and will do unacceptable things to exploit you as an expendable resource. The world is rapidly become a shitter place because of this.
I agree that a company which doesn't take an employee's career into significant consideration is a poor employer, but the strategic needs of a company will often not coincide with all of its employees. The thought that employees should be able to absolve responsibility of handling their career to their employee is essentially treating them as children incapable of caring for themselves.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
T Minus 38 Days 1 hour 4 minutes and counting.
That is very true, but the Trump justice department will operate under very different rules.
Yeah, debtors prisons are coming back and federal anti-marijuana enforcement will return in earnest to all 50 states.
You are seriously writing that just after Thanksgiving? Try doing a host change on a stupidly expensive software licence with a US company over that weekend like I tried this year. I had to wait until Tuesday before some turkey even bothered to reply.
The arrangement looks like a conspiracy to violate the relevant laws. The outsourcing firm and Disney are both equally on the hook here.
While these (South Asians?) are willing to work for a fraction of the wages because it's much better than at home, relatively soon there will be a much more compelling reason for them to try to get visas (any visa or none at all).
Survival.
Within the lifetime of many of those reading these words, the climate in large regions of the world will make them UNINHABITABLE. Due to a combination of high heat in the summer months and high humidity (yes there is high humidity in parts of the middle east, like near the Red Sea), the typical healthy Adult (not sick or old or young) will die after just 6 hours outdoors (I believe in the shade!). That's even with plenty of water because, with such high humidity you can't sweat the heat out.
http://www.sciencealert.com/mi...
That's Hundreds of Millions of Refugees, a number that will make the current six million fleeing Syria seem like a drop in the bucket. (And look at what this small number has done to Europe). Of course it won't be restricted just to the Middle East, another report from a military focused organization claims there will be 30 Million climate refugees from just ONE country (Bangladesh).
https://www.theguardian.com/en...
It's obvious that these people won't just sit there and DIE, they'll want to LIVE. They'll be willing to do anything and everything to live in a country where they won't literally die from heat (or being submerged). Thanks to the internet, they'll know where to go and how to get there. Are you prepared to share your country? To save people from dying? Or will you shoot them on sight (because that'll be what its going to take). I'm afraid we're headed towards a world where men with machine guns protecting the wealthy against the desperate masses will be a common sight. Go NRA! (Sarcasm)
If you still don't believe in Climate Change, why don't you to put your money where your mouth is and invest in property that's at risk. Say the low lying areas of Florida or Bangladesh. Or you can put it into the glittering cities of Dubai and other places like Yemen which are slated to become hot properties indeed. According to these projections, you'll only need to wait 20-30 years; some mortgages are shorter than that. And if you're right, you'll make a killing! (But if you're wrong, you'll be the one who's dead).
Thanks Trump! (Sarcasm)
The good old days are finished for the sociopath BOFH and his antisocial assistant. In the era of social media, every job requires top notch social skills. IT was the traditional field for the socially awkward, but no longer, and there's nowhere else left either, as other jobs are being automated out of existence. Truck driver, gone. Retail clerk, gone. Lawn mower, gone.
I don't understand how Americans use the term race? Indians... what race would that be then?
A few years ago I was transferred to Us under L1. Took the company a few years and some cash to grant me my permanent residence. 5 months later, this same company Disney outsourced to, took over the IT at the company I used to work. As part of the agreement in between both companies, the outsource had to hire a minimum of associates and had to keep us for a minimum of one year - and as part of the deal, we would have our severance bonus paid after the 13th month, unless we opt to walk away from the outsource.
The outsource company is still hiring people to fill in the blanks - only today I interviewed two candidates. Not surprisingly, both under H1B visas. Salary range? Same as other American companies are offering to pay American workers.
Now, my manager is an American. Many of my coworkers are Americans. His manager is an American. Manager's manager is British. It goes a long way up until we have an India born manager. Sideways, that's a different story. There are multiple teams based offshore. They basically keep the engine running while we here are planning the newest, latest and greatest. Because we know the company we used to work to, their strengths and weakenesses.
Long story short, it is not that hard if you have the skills or abilities to get another job. You may end up at the same desk, working with the same people, with an increased paycheck and even a few better benefits.
It sucks to have a conversation without missing half the words because of accents? Yep. It sucks to know you don't need to be on call at night because there is an offshore team ready to take the calls in the middle of the night and you can finally take some rewarded rest? Nope. Not at all.
Not that I am defending them because I work for them and I too am a foreigner (hint: unless you are from Native American descent, sorry bro, you're a foreigner too), but there are racism from both ends: from theirs and the American workers who don't take pride working on a non-American company that pays you.
I am trying to understand how Disney broke the law. I may be wrong but my understanding is Disney made a decision to outsource this IT department to another company. Disney is not replacing their employees with H1B employees, they are paying another company to perform the tasks of an IT group. THAT company hires H1B employees.
If I am wrong about Disney, please tell me. As per Slashdot unwritten rules, I did not RTFA.
What, did Slashdot grow out of it's memes then? I guess no one has set us up the bomb around here recently...
can be changed. It is just that the corporations like the rules the way they are. The good thing is that the companies who replaced their workers with H1B visa workers usually get screwed in the long run. TA TA gets to keep the money they make before the company realized how much they got screwed.
The way it works is the interviewer takes one look at your face and decides immediately that you will not get the job. The quiz show is rigged to make you lose, but what if you win instead. Answer all the questions correctly and watch as the interviewer becomes exasperated by your stubborn refusal to fail the interview, because you're just not the right kind of person for the job, regardless of skill.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm another (non-indian) on a visa. Working for two years in US. I can say, working with people form all races and locations in the US , one thing was always guaranteed- the immigrants had to fill in for the US employees who simply did not deliver
Poo in the loo, Pajeet.
South Africa isn't a cautionary tale but a model2follow.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/rjhx1-qU9jM
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O7wVsvoM6tE&feature=youtu.be
"Yeah - you wanna keep bringin' in those feriners to take good 'Murican jobs, you better stop makin' those Star Wars films that portray orange people as bad guys. Bring back Song of the South and we'll even let you have more of 'em!"
The Indians? Yes they certainly are world leaders in mongering shit. They do have designated shitting streets after all.
It's all about saving the galaxy from the evil white male patriarchy.
Also, there is no such thing as someone being "bias".
Unless you're the personification of bias. I am become bias, destroyer of estimators.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
guy who is new boss knew? WTF is that, niigger?
Statistics is always a bit of a gamble.
Bullshit.
If Disney will not hire USAian wokers, USAians should not support Disney. Don't take you kids to the amusement park. Don't see it's movies.
Why should you support an organization that sees no value in people such as yourself.
I would not sue though. The law and lawsuits only work to support those in power. You workers have no power. Disney and India has the power.
Weren't you supposed to be "our bosses" by now, computer weirdos? Hunh?
> "you tell me the metric, I'll tell you how to game it"
Metric: increased sales revenue (without changing the pricing structure)
Is there any way to game that?
Industries with regulated (directly like cable companies or indirectly, through price-tied taxes, like airlines) are in that precise position today. Both have found the same solution to game that metric: add "fees". Billions of extra sales revenue without changing "prices."
To be fair, they learned it from you! Years before those two industries adopted this tactic the US government was given a metric of increasing revenue without changing taxes and it demonstrated how effectively the adoption of fees (user fees, tickets, etc) could be to game the metric.
That lawsuit doesn't stand a chance under the "liberal" administration of President Lawnchair. Once the country shifts to the whims of Trump it's all over for the workers.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
> its illegal to pay Americans that little.
No worries. Puzder will soon take care of that.
White trash: enjoy your democratically elected hell.
And let me guess...you got a job in government IT?
I have no idea where this guy got this idea. I've spent over a decade working alongside State governments, and it's damn near impossible to fire or layoff a government employee.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
I took the hypocrisy a different direction. Namely, if you support the autonomy of business owners to hire/fire/serve whomever they choose, as many on the right do, then you should not be sympathetic to the plaintiffs in this suit.
Seems like the remedy to this would be to leave your current job as soon as you recognize that virtualization is starting to get popular and take a job somewhere using that technology before it gets popular enough for there to be a wealth of candidates with relevant experience. Basically, "jump on the new hot thing". Alternately, get some sort of certification that says "I know virtualization". Surely something like that exists; IT industry is gaga for certifications.
Where are you living that you had to apply for legit minimum wage jobs? There's a restaurant about to open along the path of my commute to work. They're hiring bus boys at $12/hour. The baggers at the grocery store make $10/hr. And I live in a city & state with local minimum wage.
Or maybe not since he has several large development projects in India that he wants to get approved.
I know this all too well. I used to work for Mindtree an India based company up in Gainesville, FL. We were suppose to be consultants, however most big businesses would rather send their work off-shore at a fraction of the cost. Then about 3 quarters of the way through the project off-shore would screw the pooch and we would have to take over to finish the project on time. The competency and quality you get from off-shore is not worth the supposed "saving" you get. Also seeing as they are an India based company they too would bring people from off-shore and bring them to the Gainesville Delivery Center on H1B visas. They would also favor them by giving them higher competency levels then hard-working Americans. Also as talented people would leave for better opportunities they too would just replace them with someone from off-shore on a H1B visa or a college graduate from UF, which from my experience has a garbage computer science program. (Or the people we got just sucked.)
Sounds like a new Disney movie with a suited CEO twirling around on top of a pile of money belting out a song called "Let them goooo!"
Seriously though some indie or competitor should make a Disney parody animated movie of the whole situation... Just try to to get too racist with what animals used to represent everyone!
The H1B visa was designed to enable companies to recruit the rarest, most sought-after skilled workers. Therefore, I propose an H1B visa minimum wage of $150,000/year - and increases annually with CPI.
This would fix the H1B visa abuse problem immediately.
Hahahahahaha. Wait, you think you'd actually be able to get an interview for a job requiring specific skills without work experience in those specific skills on your resume? In this economy? Let me laugh even harder!
These days, the only way your resume will ever make it to the hiring manager is to A) know someone who knows the hiring manager or B) game the resume parsers and HR drones well enough by including all of the proper buzz words from the job description so that your resume doesn't immediately end up in the trash. Neither option guarantees you'll get an interview, and even if you do get an interview the employer may very well have a specific person in mind for the job (H1B, friend, etc) before they even put in the requisition but they have to go through the process for legal purposes to make it look like they are all about equal opportunity employment, etc. If by the grace of Ganesh you happen to land an interview, then oversell yourself big time or go home.
Per se... There needs to be MORE restrictions on H1B's. If there are qualified American's to take a job, and the company doesn't want to pay them what they are worth, they should NOT be allowed to just grab some poor soul overseas, and pay them squat just to undercut an American worker.
Trump has appointed Iger (Disney CEO) and Stephen Schwarzman, the CEO of Blackstone (staunch supporter and investor of outsourcing firms) to his 'President's Strategic and Policy Forum'. Very doubtful that his policies will be anti H1B
Where are you living that you had to apply for legit minimum wage jobs?
Silicon Valley. There were seven applicants for every job opening in 2009 and 2010. Minimum wage employers refused to hire "overqualified" workers because they would quit when the economy got better. In 2011, it was three applicants for every job opening. A normal economy has two applicants for every job opening.
I have no idea where this guy got this idea.
I've mentioned in previous comments that my current job is government IT. Some commenters try to use it as an insult: "Gee... If this guy got laid off for two years, and now works for the government, he must not be very good." Never mind that I worked seven days a week for two years on 20+ different contracts after filing for chapter seven bankruptcy in 2011.
I've spent over a decade working alongside State governments, and it's damn near impossible to fire or layoff a government employee.
Full-time employees are difficult to fire, but contractors are easy to fire. Some contractors who get hired are shocked that they have to work at a government job. The few who insists on not doing any work at all are fired within two weeks of being hired. Some contractors have gotten fired for "anti-social behavior" (i.e., irritating the hell out of the full-time staff). Since everyone is ex-military, they have zero tolerance for crap.
need to sue Disney and the staffing / outsourcing firm and let the courts decide who is at fault / who needs to pay x%.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU
It's hard to believe that this video is 9 years old already, but it shows how companies conspire to disqualify American workers.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
What I said was in no-way meant to be offensive, so I apologize if I came across that way. Just like all industries, government has those that work-hard as well as those who are dead-weight.
Full-time employees are difficult to fire, but contractors are easy to fire.
That's more in line with the point I was trying to make. Government employees tend to have a fairly high degree of job security; the contractors working on government projects, not so much.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
All decisions should be made by the invisible hand of the almighty market, blessed be its name and holy $ymbol.
Hail greed! Fuck the country! Countries are so *yesterday* /sarc
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
They've outsourced the entire company!
Why? Nobody else does. That's how we ended up with a mock ginger for a President.
You are talking about companies in which the management comes from ex techies (and doesn't know how to manage). These are the majority because the poor management skills force the companies to try to compensate by having high churn and hiring a lot of workers. Companies which have trained management are capable of going through aptitude tests which you cannot prepare for, but then you cannot fully prepare for a job where you are supposed to do what hasn't been done before (well, at least you will be doing what no one was doing before in a year or two). If you join a techke-ran company, you'll be using most state of the art equipment to simulate environments which existed for 30-40 years because the management thinks that's "hard core".
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
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I have worked at a few Fortune X (single and low double digit) companies. ... What is it that ensnares the bean counters to prefer this situation over hiring qualified local candidates? I honestly don't get it. Why is it "better" to pay some unqualified person a low wage, tack on a substantial fee paid to the body shop, and then have everyone suffer through the extended delivery times, angst, etc. It can't be cheaper to do it this way, and if it is, it could not possibly be enough of a savings to merit delaying the delivery of what the business needs in a timely manner. Or can it?
I too have worked for a couple of the large companies, in this case banks, and I was in testing management. Bean counters care about beans. That's it. They never directed anyone to use offshore resources, they delivered the message that money had to be saved. Here is how I saw it go down multiple times.
I had a testing team that consisted of about 30% US employees and the rest contractors from a firm like TCS or Infosys (usually a mix of offshore/onshore/nearshore). For a team of about 50 people we tested a dozen or so projects. Projects came and went, and the number of contractors depended on the workload. That gave me flexibility, which was required. But what would happen is that the higher-ups would give the 'haircut' directive - everyone had to cut their budget by 10%. They didn't care how you did it.
So what some managers figured out was that you can keep some higher priced people around (again, contractors and not employees) for these times, and let them go to satisfy the haircut. Or you can flex your team and use more offshore instead of onshore. This was all built into the framework that TCS/Infosys had in place. Those onshore workers just got other positions in other teams. Or, you negotiate a fixed-bid contract with them - they will work on Project X for Y dollars. You go through all of this in excruciating detail and meet your budget number while still handling the project workload.
Until upper management comes back 6 months later and ask for another 10% cut. By that point you are working as cheaply as possible. Which makes the 10% cut even harder, because instead of being able to cut 5 people to meet the 10%, you have to cut 15 people because you were using offshore resources that cost 1/3 the price. So you have to start turning away work, which leads to projects getting pushed out, which leads to wasted money, which eventually leads to - you guessed it - budget cuts. But by that time, those people who made those cuts had moved on to a different position in the organization.
It was a horrible viscous cycle that I went through more than once, and saw other people go through as well. Sadly, it's the nature of the beast which is why I left the big corporate world. I was a successful manager who was in meetings 30 hours a week, and most of my time outside of meetings was spent pouring over how much my team was costing. The crazy part was that it was all internal money, and would shift quickly and often. It was a machine that chose to run like that. And like clockwork, every 8 months there were organizational and/or senior management changes.
So back to your comments - I don't think that the bean counters make those decisions. I think they simply deliver the message of those who tell them to, which in my experience was the management who were 4-5 levels down from the CEO. We had a system in place to use mostly contractors because they were fungible and cheaper. Most of the senior people were employees, and we couldn't hire the contractors to be full time because of contract agreements. I think those agencies are the ones who made out really well, because they embedded themselves in the company so well that it would be hard to replace them. You know... kind of like what employees used to be able to do.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Outsourcing company ( read TATA ) now contacts as a U.S company, to another U.S company (disney) to do their IT.
Why do people always seem to use Tata/TCS as an example, when the outsourcing companies used by Disney are HCL and Cognizant? There is the factoid that the ex CEO of HCL - Vineet Nayar made disparaging statements about American workers compared to Indian/Latin American workers, which may or may not be germane here.
In fact, while some Indian companies - notably Tech Mahindra, Syntel and a few others do have a clear preference for Indians, and verbally instruct their outsourcing instructors to submit only Indians, TCS is one of those who goes the other way: they look for Americans - either citizens or permanent residents, and in some cases, even ask for Americans (as in Whites/Blacks, but excluding Asians, Europeans and others not native to the US). What makes hiring for them difficult is that they look for people mainly from blue chip companies, like Accenture, Capgemini, KPMG, Deloitte, et al, without offering comparable salaries, making hiring for them even more difficult
Bharat is Hindi for India, just like Nippon is Japanese for Japan or Deutschland is German for Germany. Hindustan is also used as a term, except that it then confuses the religion w/ the population. Although India has done some bizarre renaming in recent years, renaming cities like Bombay, Madras, Calcutta and Bangalore to Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata and Bengalaru: the last 4 are the vernacular translations of their names, or how their locals call them. It would be the equivalent of renaming Moscow to Moskva.
The h1b min wage needs to be 80k-110k
I quite agree w/ this: once they put such a limit, you'll automatically see companies stop asking for those caps to be raised.
However, the alternatives they will then have will be to either move all the work offshore, assuming that it's doable offshore, or not do them at all. Remember - the reason that the jobs aren't in-house or onshore is the expense. If they can't afford the latter in the first place, then they'll simply have to either offshore ALL of it, or stop doing it altogether.
So let's say that they get a project and move that to India. They can't get H1Bs here, so local managers would have to work w/ those people and do what they can to satisfy the client. Sooner or later, the client will have to weigh whether the shoddy job done offshore is better than no job done at all, if they can't budget for bringing the work in-house.
However, it remains true that a company does have a responsibility to its shareholders to maximize its profits, its customers to minimize its prices, and employees to provide growth opportunities. If they figure out a way to crack down on actually offshoring such jobs, they will have successfully screwed up all three.
It's not so much a question of stupid: it's that unlike immigrants in the past who migrated to the US to assimilate, H1B immigrants of today come here only for economic reasons, not b'cos they wanna become Americans.
One can see that in the various ethnic enclaves in some major cities. Like in the Bay Area, Sunnyvale and Santa Clara have a big population of Indian H1Bs, who primarily speak Hindi/Telegu/Tamil/Gujrati amongst themselves, watch Bollywood and are not here to assimilate. That's different from someone who was born to immigrants as a kid, but whose exposure was purely in an English speaking setting, and who grows up initially on Disney and later on Hollywood. It may take a generation, but the difference b/w yesterday's immigrants and todays is that yesterday's immigrants actively worked to become Americans and did, whereas today's immigrants couldn't care less.
I typo'd that. Meant to say I live in a city/state with NO local minimum wage. So it's just the federal one.
What jobs actually pay minimum wage in Silicon Valley? Honest question. The only ones I can think of that maybe pay minimum wage in Austin are things like overnight cleaning staff. And I suspect even those guys make more than minimum wage. Walmart greeter, Starbucks person, guy who works the register at The Gap...they all make more than minimum wage.
I got approached by a Disney IT recruiter looking to get my interest. I think 10 years ago I would have taken it seriously as a good opportunity, but I just laughed when I saw the invite. Nobody with real skills is going to take Disney seriously anymore. I won't work for any shitbag H1-B trash heap. Took a serious pay cut leaving Cisco. Those places only prove a few things. 1. Shareholder profits mean more than you do. 2. The management is douchy. 3. You won't be working with quality co-workers, just cheap ones.
So to Disney and your jobs: Fuck off.
Head shops from South Asia act like they have never heard of US diversity laws.
I think the bomb was slathered with hot grits