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Disney Replaces U.S. Workers with Indian H-1B Visa Holders

http://www.indiawest.com/news/business/ ... 5114f.html

Disney World (photo above) in Orlando, Florida, that drew fire for laying off workers has reportedly withdrawn plans to outsource IT jobs. (Wikipedia photo)

Posted: Thursday, June 4, 2015 2:45 pm

Disney Replaces U.S. Workers with Indian H-1B Visa Holders From News Dispatches India West | 0 comments

Disney is the latest U.S. company to draw fire for laying off workers and transferring the jobs to immigrants on H-1B visas who were brought to the U.S. by an outsourcing firm based in India, The New York Times reported April 4.

About 250 U.S. workers doing data entry and reservation sign-up and monitoring at Disney World in Orlando, Fla., were told in late October that they would be laid off.

Over the next three months, some Disney employees were required to train replacements to do the jobs they had lost, the Times said.

“I just couldn’t believe they could fly people in to sit at our desks and take over our jobs exactly,” said one former worker, an American worker in his 40s who remains unemployed since his last day at Disney Jan. 30. “It was so humiliating to train somebody else to take over your job. I still can’t grasp it.”

Disney executives said the layoffs were part of a reorganization and that the company opened 70 more positions than it eliminated.

According to federal law, H-1B visas are intended for foreigners with advanced science or computer skills to fill posts when U.S. workers with those skills can’t be found.

Critics claim that the visas are often used to bring in foreign workers to America to perform tasks more cheaply, with laid-off American workers having to train their replacements.

“The program has created a highly lucrative business model of bringing in cheaper H-1B workers to substitute for Americans,” Ronil Hira, a professor of public policy at Howard University who studies visa programs, told the Times.

A limited number of the visas, 85,000, are granted each year, and they are in hot demand. In recent years, the majority of recipients of the visas have been outsourcing or consulting firms based in India or their U.S. subsidiaries.

In 2013, those firms — including Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services and HCL America, the company hired by Disney — were six of the top 10 companies granted H-1Bs, with each one receiving more than 1,000 visas, the Times reported.

In an April letter to federal immigration authorities, a bipartisan group of senators called for a probe of recent “H-1B-driven layoffs,” saying “their frequency seems to have increased dramatically in the past year alone,” the Times said.

Last year, Southern California Edison made 540 layoffs of tech workers, while hiring two Indian outsourcing firms for much of the work. Three U.S. workers who lost their jobs told the Senate that many of those laid off had to teach immigrants to perform their jobs.

Fossil, a fashion watch manufacturer, this year said it would lay off more than 100 technology employees in Texas, transferring the work to Infosys. The company said it plans “knowledge sharing” between the laid-off employees and about 25 new Infosys workers.

Disney executives told the Times that its reorganization was meant to allow tech operations to focus more on innovation.

“Disney has created almost 30,000 new jobs in the U.S. over the past decade,” said Kim Prunty, a Disney spokeswoman, adding that the company expected its contractors to comply with all immigration laws.

Employees who lost jobs were allowed a three-month transition with résumé coaching to help them seek other posts with the company, Disney executives said. Of those laid off, 120 took new jobs at Disney, and about 40 retired, while about 90 did not find new Disney jobs, executives told the Times.

However, one former worker, a 57-year-old man with more than 10 years at Disney, showed the Times a list of 18 jobs in the company he had applied for. He said he had nothing more than an initial conversation on any one position.

Disney offered a “stay bonus” of 10 percent of severance pay if a laid off worker remained for 90 days, but the bonus was contingent on “the continued satisfactory performance” of job duties. For many, that involved training a replacement.

“The first 30 days was all capturing what I did,” said the American in his 40s, who worked 10 years in his Disney job. “The next 30 days they worked side by side with me, and the last 30 days they took over my job completely.” To receive his severance bonus, he said, “I had to make sure they were doing my job correctly.”

How H-1B Visas Are Screwing Tech Workers
A program meant to boost innovation instead fuels outsourcing.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... ch-workers

—By Josh Harkinson
| Fri Feb. 22, 2013 7:01 AM EST

Peter Bernik/Shutterstock

A few years ago, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer informed hundreds of tech workers at its Connecticut R&D facilities that they'd soon be laid off. Before getting their final paychecks, however, they'd need to train their replacements: guest workers from India who'd come to the United States on H-1B visas. "It's a very, very stressful work environment," one soon-to-be-axed worker told Connecticut's The Day newspaper. "I haven't been able to sleep in weeks."

Established in 1990, the federal H-1B visa program allows employers to import up to 65,000 foreign workers each year to fill jobs that require "highly specialized knowledge." The Senate's bipartisan Immigration Innovation Act of 2013, or "I-Squared Act," would increase that cap to as many as 300,000 foreign workers. "The smartest, hardest-working, most talented people on this planet, we should want them to come here," Sen. Marco Rubio, (R-Fla.) said upon introducing the bill last month. "I, for one, have no fear that this country is going to be overrun by Ph.D.s."

To be sure, America's tech economy has long depended on foreign-born workers. "Immigrants have founded 40 percent of companies in the tech sector that were financed by venture capital and went on to become public in the U.S., among them Yahoo, eBay, Intel, and Google," writes Laszlo Bock, Google's senior VP of "people operations," which, along with other tech giants such as HP and Microsoft, strongly supports a big increase in H-1B visas. "In 2012, these companies employed roughly 560,000 workers and generated $63 billion in sales."

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But in reality, most of today's H-1B workers don't stick around to become the next Albert Einstein or Sergey Brin. ComputerWorld revealed last week that the top 10 users of H-1B visas last year were all offshore outsourcing firms such as Tata and Infosys. Together these firms hired nearly half of all H-1B workers, and less than 3 percent of them applied to become permanent residents. "The H-1B worker learns the job and then rotates back to the home country and takes the work with him," explains Ron Hira, an immigration expert who teaches at the Rochester Institute of Technology. None other than India's former commerce secretary once dubbed the H-1B the "outsourcing visa."

Of course, the big tech companies claim H-1B workers are their last resort, and that they can't find qualified Americans to fill jobs. Pressing to raise the visa cap last year, Microsoft pointed to 6,000 job openings at the company.

Yet if tech workers are in such short supply, why are so many of them unemployed or underpaid? According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), tech employment rates still haven't rebounded to pre-recession levels. And from 2001 to 2011, the mean hourly wage for computer programmers didn't even increase enough to beat inflation.

The ease of hiring H-1B workers certainly hasn't helped. More than 80 percent of H-1B visa holders are approved to be hired at wages below those paid to American-born workers for comparable positions, according to EPI. Experts who track labor conditions in the technology sector say that older, more expensive workers are particularly vulnerable to being undercut by their foreign counterparts. "You can be an exact match and never even get a phone call because you are too expensive," says Norman Matloff, a computer science professor at the University of California-Davis. "The minute that they see you've got 10 or 15 years of experience, they don't want you."

A 2007 study by the Urban Institute concluded that America was producing plenty of students with majors in science, technology, engineering, and math (the "STEM" professions)—many more than necessary to fill entry-level jobs. Yet Matloff sees this changing as H-1B workers cause Americans to major in more-lucrative fields such as law and business. "In terms of the number of people with graduate degrees in STEM," he says, "H-1B is the problem, not the solution."

Even detractors of the H-1B visa program concede that it can fill important roles, such as encouraging brilliant foreigners to permanently relocate to the United States. EPI immigration expert Daniel Costa suggests a couple of tweaks to the I-Squared Act: Require employers to prove that they've tried to recruit Americans before applying for foreign workers, and make sure that H-1B workers get paid as much as Americans do for comparable jobs. "If that was fixed," he says, "I think it would be a different story."

As it stands, though, there are plenty of stories like the one Jennifer Wedel told to President Barack Obama last year (see video below). "My husband has an engineering degree with over ten years of experience," the Fort Worth resident told the president during a web chat hosted by the social network Google+. "Why does the government continue to issue and extend H-1B visas when there are tons of Americans just like my husband with no job?"

"We should get his résumé and I will forward it to some of these companies, " Obama replied.

But more than two months later, Wedel's husband was still looking for a job.

Data entry and reservations are NOT IT jobs.

No they aren't. I have worked a lot in corporate American technology companies or divisions and the H1Bs are most certainly not data entry clerks.

Sadly, our education system is not producing a lot of sharp players just now. The Indians are often better in that they are at least disciplined - but not usually brilliant in the way the early innovators were.

Taking jobs Americans should have? Yep. Are the Americans lining up to get those jobs - that is not clear.

Talbot

"Data entry and reservations are NOT IT jobs" . << Simply a brilliant response to losing jobs Americans wanted. Really deep thinking there, barney. You corrected the guy.

So you believe it is OK to give American jobs to foreigners if the guy who wrote the article categorizes them improperly? Great point on which to comment. WOW That makes the problem go away.

As Ricky Ricardo would say: "Let me splain it to you Lucy."...Those jobs paid some Americans a living wage and now they are being given to foreigners who will work for less. Isn't that the real bottom line of the article? Isn't that more important than what the author called them? Get it yet?

NO!!!! To the incongruous mind of the liberal, what they called those jobs is the real heart of the article!!!!
If Americans lost those jobs, obviously they were jobs Americans were working and wanted to keep. But to someone without common sense or the ability to comprehend what is happening in America to Americans I guess it really isn't that important. Let me make an attempt to get down to your level of comprehension.

What if you played guitar in a cheesy club jam session or gig and the owner came up to you and said that the American Bar Association decided they can't afford to pay American musicians anymore.? What if they told you "We want you to train foreigners to take over your jam sessions and gigs" Would those also become the "jobs Americans don't want"?
Then would you have a problem with that? Probably not until it was YOUR gig.

Remember this. It happened before when DJ's began taking all the live music gigs because they saved the club owners money.

ANY jobs taken from Americans and given to foreigners constitute a bad policy until all Americans have had the opportunity to fill those positions.

Agreed. My clarification was based upon the notion that we were discussing tech jobs.

Talbot

No, I don't agree with what these corporations are doing, but to the writer of the article cut-and-pasted here, these are not data entry jobs.
Get the facts right before publishing.

The American BAR Association deals with attorneys (lawyers), not musicians playing in bars!