According to a harrowing New York Times report, Disney laid off 250 employees last October, forcing them to successfully train their lower-paid replacements -- temporary migrants from India -- in order to access severance packages.
Disney's Unemployment Express
While families rode the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train and searched for Nemo on clamobiles in the theme parks, these workers monitored computers in industrial buildings nearby, making sure millions of Walt Disney World ticket sales, store purchases and hotel reservations went through without a hitch. Some were performing so well that they thought they had been called in for bonuses.
Instead, about 250 Disney employees were told in late October that they would be laid off. Many of their jobs were transferred to immigrants on temporary visas for highly skilled technical workers, who were brought in by an outsourcing firm based in India. Over the next three months, some Disney employees were required to train their replacements to do the jobs they had lost.
“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.”
Rather than being used to recruit a small number of talented professionals, highly-profitable corporations -- assisted by ethically-challenged immigration lawyers -- are using temporary visas --known as H-1B visas -- to replace well-paid Americans workers with cheaper labor from abroad.
The layoffs at Disney and at other companies, including the Southern California Edison power utility, are raising new questions about how businesses and outsourcing companies are using the temporary visas, known as H-1B, to place immigrants in technology jobs in the United States. These visas are at the center of a fierce debate in Congress over whether they complement American workers or displace them.
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.
Too often, critics say, the visas are being used to import immigrants to do the work of Americans for less money, 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,” said Ronil Hira, a professor of public policy at Howard University who studies visa programs and has testified before Congress about H-1B visas.
Imagine the indignity of being laid off from your job and then having to train your replacement, knowledgeable that the only reason for it happening was to boost profits for a small number of wealthy shareholders and executives paid in stock. This, according to the Times, is how the process occurred.
“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.”
These were good, talented workers, many of which had recently received bonuses and raises. There was no
mythical "skills gap" here.
Read the entire article and weep for the American worker. Our political leaders have let mega-corporations consolidate, kill our small businesses, and now these same corporations are just spitting with contempt on American workers as their executives hide their wealth in the Cayman Islands. To borrow the diction of Bernie Sanders, it is an outrage.
Oh, and if you're curious, Disney stock is up 236 percent from 2010.