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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
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?
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!!!
Yes, but laying people off to fill their positions with an outside contractor is legal, even if the contractor primarily hires H1-B visa workers for their contracts. It's a loophole that has been abused too many times to count and there's absolutely no sign that it will ever be closed.
It's a loophole that has been abused too many times to count and there's absolutely no sign that it will ever be closed.
This NDTV article states,
President-elect Donald Trump has said he would not allow Americans to be replaced by foreign workers, in an apparent reference to cases like that of Disney World and other American companies wherein people hired on H-1B visas, including Indians, displaced US workers.
"We will fight to protect every last American life," Mr Trump told thousands of his supporters in Iowa on Thursday as he referred to the cases of Disney world and other US companies.
We'll see how hard he pushes Congress on this matter.