Disney fires 250 tech workers and replaces them with H1B workers
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Don't worry, larger companies can make blanket petitions for large number of employees.
These are paid less than the people around them and will be sent back to their home country if they're fired and can't find a new sponsor within a few months.
That and add to it that most of these larger companies are conveniently located in ""right to work"" states means exactly what we don't want to say.
Indentured servitude.
So as long as you're trying to get more than minimum wage you are being unreasonable? Even though your skills are in high demand/short supply?
This is basically a way to say "You Americans who have valuable knowledge/skills, do you really think we're gonna let you take advantage of demand and supply to make more money out of them? F-you, we're gonna pass some laws to allow us to import people from 3rd world countries to replace you".
I'd like to see these companies' reactions if we did the same with imported goods and abolished all taxations for products manufactured outside of the country.
One of the classic ways to get around that one was quietly advertising the job on a company bulletin board or in a low-readership classified section, or something like that.
Not sure if that loophole ever got fixed, but basically, companies game the system.
The article seems to be juggling words a bit to make a case against immigration, but later states that Disney only direct employs 10 H1B workers. I presume the agency that is now doing the data center work at Disney is all H1B immigrants, but the article doesn't address that either.
Considering that only 85,000 H1B visas/yr are granted and there are 154,000,000 workers, is this (0.05% of the workforce) really as much of a problem as the article is making it out to be?
What these companies do is insidious. Say, you're working for HCL in India, HCL files a H1B for you and sends you over for 6 months to the US and then you come back to India and hand over your H1B to them. Not very clear on the specifics, as I've only heard about it.
So during the time you're in the US, you don't get paid US wages for a H1B s/w engineer, which are pretty good. What you get is a stipend for those 6 months and your regular Indian salary which at the very max for the very best won't be more than $40,000 in conversion.
So these are significant savings for Disney and significant profits for HCL.
And also stigmatising legitimate H1Bs in the country and the American product (mostly) companies which champion their cause.
- H1B visas require that you list prevailing wage and that it's higher than the average pay for U.S. citizens in the same region. It can be manipulated to a degree, but not at scale (1000s) for a single employer.
- H1B visas are for a minimum of 3 years, not six months, during which the immigrant is forced to live and work in the U.S. (not India), thus spending and paying taxes in U.S.
This is exactly my point that I was getting at about the article - it's creating FUD about H1B immigrants and using Disney's terrible corporate policy to contribute to rumors like the ones you just said. If anything, the H1B program needs more funding for enforcement with employers, but stories like this make it seem like the program itself is the culprit.
The question is US companies outsourcing to companies with a primarily foreign workforce, and displacing US jobs. There have been estimates that outsourcing has caused the loss of 1.5-2 million US jobs since 2000. There's several considerations involved including the need to have skilled tech workers in the US, but its certainly a serious societal issue in the US.
I feel the article doesn't really capture the whole story... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9653389#9660767
Corruption all the way through:
US Congress/Senate: "oh wait India is going to buy defence h/w worth $47B, we got to get in on the action"
Indian consulting companies: "dear Indian politician, we get a lot of money through Forex/labor arbitrage, let us help you get rich. In return protecting us from the fallout of these pesky articles is a national interest and oh hey how about getting us another 2000 acres of land out there."
Indian politicians and babus to US counterparts: "yep you can sell us your mil. h/w, but first let your contractors bribe us and then let our IT companies bribe you"
Pretty simplistic and only focuses on the corruption angle, while there are definitely other issues as well, but does bring up why the US can't just say "hey no visas for you".
This kind of a system is more damaging to India than the US at the macro level. Since it makes Indian companies and people who work for them incapable of doing something original and working on really hard problems in our backyard.
The attitude which it engenders is "oh hey, we can always stay in business by selling ourselves cheap and replacing Americans." This party will sooner or later come to an end. At which point hopefully a lot of such Indian companies will go extinct and only the best will survive.
At the personal level, the Americans who got fired are going to be more resilient and will come out on top of the situation, however great their pain may be in the moment.
Oh, one more thing, this is not the only threat faced by employment in the US, there's automation too.
So, hatred of something, say Indian consulting companies, or people employed by them, immigrants in general, against robots or automated systems is no solution. I say this since this is the most knee-jerk reaction.
The only way anyone hope to cope with this is by not expecting it to get any easy. Not expecting ease or having a sense of entitlement. But by being open to learning, growth, reinvention and hope.
http://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/indi...
The music industry was forced to complete and yes, they make less money, but at least they can make a living. The same can be said of American workers wanting to compete with overseas workers: Figure out how to compete or you will be crushed due to the now global marketplace.
> “The first 30 days was all capturing what I did,” said the American in his 40s, who worked 10 years at Disney. “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.”
> In late November, this former employee received his annual performance review, which he provided to The New York Times. His supervisor, who was not aware the man was scheduled for layoff, wrote that because of his superior skills and “outstanding” work, he had saved the company thousands of dollars. The supervisor added that he was looking forward to another highly productive year of having the employee on the team.
> The employee got a raise. His severance pay had to be recalculated to include it.
One, they're generally paid less. I think this is usually justified by the employers because of the up front legal costs around the sponsorship, but those costs amortize over time since the salary stays lower each year.
Two, they're locked into the job. It's not trivial to get a new sponsor; you can't just randomly job hunt. So when things get bad, the sponsored employees stay when the standard ones leave.
And regardless of thoughts around global markets and whatnot, H1Bs are supposed to come with a simple rule: there is no available domestic resource to do the same job. At the point where you have the prior workers training the new workers, that's plainly being violated. It's not supposed to be "nobody to do the job at the sub-market price you're willing to pay."
I'm all for global marketplaces, but this isn't really that. This is importing artificially cheap labor into a domestic marketplace. That's a bit more questionable.