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Disney IT Workers, In Lawsuit, Claim Discrimination Against Americans (computerworld.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the one-party-to-another dept.

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."

6 of 455 comments (clear)

  1. Except they didn't. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Except they didn't. by hawguy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No, because (somewhat ironically) its illegal to pay Americans that little.

      The lawsuits says that workers were "brought-in", and were mostly H1-B holders. H1-B holders need to be paid market salary.

      There's not much the workers can do about jobs that are actually off-shored, but if they were laid off and replaced by Indian H1-B workers who are working locally to transition to off shore teams only because they were not Indian, then they may have a case.

  2. Indian managers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Once you get a couple of Indian folks into management positions they just tend to recruit other Indian people and gradually remove whites.

  3. H1B is deeply flawed by LeftCoastThinker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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  4. Re:what to do by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Simple. Short term profits over long term sustainability. In the short term, expenses go down, profit goes up. By the time the shit has hit the fan, the people making the decisions have cashed out and moved on. They couldn't care less about what happens at that point.

    And it tends to be what a lot of the shareholders want, too, for pretty much the same reason.

  5. Re:what to do by drew_kime · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

    One year when I worked at a bank the CTO published our annual goals, and one of the two goals was to achieve an average development rate less than $30 per hour. Everyone in the room knew what that meant ... or we thought we did. There was no one there making less than $30/hr at the time, so we expected we were all going to be replaced by low-price contractors, or the work would simply be outsourced.

    But our department head was smarter than that. He engaged an offshore team of 20 people. We had 10 onshore. We never sent them any work that mattered, and a significant portion of our project manager's job wen to "keeping them busy" with things that would show up on a status report, but that didn't affect our actual work product.

    The average development rate went down even thought the total spend went up, and we kept delivering what we always had.

    You tell me the metric, I'll tell you the easiest way to game it.

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