In late October 2014, about 250 House of Mouse employees were told they were being laid off. Their replacements were being supplied by an outsourcing company based in India. Those 250 employees had to train their replacements before leaving the company. From MSN:
?’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 in his 40s who remains unemployed since his last day at Disney on 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 they created more jobs than they eliminated. However, that doesn’t change the fact that 250 employees were laid off while their positions were outsourced.?Many of their jobs were given to Indian immigrants with H-1B status.
The H-1B program has attracted scrutiny, to the point where Congress is engaged in fierce debate over whether the program compliments American workers or displaces them. From The New York Times:
“According to federal guidelines, the visas are intended for foreigners with advanced science or computer skills to fill discrete positions when American workers with those skills cannot be found. Their use, the guidelines say, should not ‘adversely affect the wages and working conditions’ of Americans. Because of legal loopholes, however, in practice, companies do not have to recruit American workers first or guarantee that Americans will not be displaced.”
Due to weakness in wage regulation, H-1B immigrants work for lower wages than American tech workers. Howard University’s Ronil Hira, a professor of public policy, testified before Congress that the H-1B program “has created a highly lucrative business model of bringing in cheaper H-1B workers to substitute for Americans” and that “the savings have been 25 percent to to 49 percent in recent cases.”
Essentially, it’s become cheaper for American companies to outsource their positions than find American employees to fill them. What a blatantly egregious cost-cutting measure. To make matters even worse, it has become a corporate prerogative to make the employees losing their jobs train their replacements.
I can speak from personal experience that training your replacement is a humiliating experience.
I get it. The bottom line is of the utmost importance with any business and cost-cutting is one of the more effective means of making sure spending does not outpace profit; but Christ, it’s not as if Disney is losing money. I still see copies of?Frozen?everywhere.
I see the merit in H-1B, so long as it is used to fill positions that American workers cannot fill. Unlike a certain hate-spewing ghoul, I do not think they are a scam. Unfortunately, loopholes in the program and in wage regulation are allowing businesses to circumvent the American workforce and immediate pull foreign employees who will work more cheaply. That needs to stop.
This practice, the abuse of the?H-1B program, is not all that different than driving to Home Depot and picking up a half-dozen illegal immigrants for cheap labor.
