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."

Comments

Except they didn't.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Except they didn't.

[Narcocide]

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

Re:Except they didn't.

[hawguy]

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.

Re:Except they didn't.

[the_Bionic_lemming]

No, the easiest way is to feel sorry for the H1B having to leave their homeland and live in the US. They should therefore earn the median computing wage in the area plus a 40% bonus for living expenses. After all, they have no home here, and will have to rent or buy. They should also gain a company car since obviously they can't bring whatever transportation they have in their old country.

Also, free air fare to visit their relatives at least once a month - and on holidays. Can't have them being sad or missing their family.

I would be happy with that in place for H1B's.

Indian managers

[Anonymous Coward]

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

H1B is deeply flawed

[LeftCoastThinker]

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.

what to do

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

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?

Re:what to do

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:what to do

[drew_kime]

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.

Boycott

[gabrieltss]

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....