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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.
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.
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.
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.
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!!!
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.
It hasn't seemed to effect Walmart's business too negatively even though shoppers know that nearly everything sold in the store is made in China.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
First, Trump is a racist. Many of his cabinet people are racists, a large portion of his voter base are racists, a large portion of Americans are racists, even unintentionally so(some are really nice about it too). These are facts.
Fact: Humanity is wired to be tribal and you don't understand the difference between racism and tribalism. The 95% of blacks who voted for Obama didn't do it because they think whites are inferior they did it because Obama looks like them.
He didn't help Carrier at all actually, but he did ensure that the people in the state paid significantly more to the company than the jobs were worth. They literally could have just given the money directly to the former workers and saved money while giving a pay bump to the workers while on unemployment. Do the math. The Carrier deal will only increase taxes. Almost all of the jobs "saved" were scheduled to be kept there anyways.
Obviously can't be bothered to grep basic "facts". A little more than half Jobs at the Carrier plant actually going to Mexico are now staying due to Trump/Pence deal. The PR numbers were bullshit because they included work that was not moving. Once you discount the bullshit you are still left with ~60% of the people who were losing their jobs at Carrier no longer losing their jobs.