Good day all. About a year or so ago, news started coming out regarding companies that were replacing American workers with imported workers brought in under the H1B visa program.
To make matters worse, in order to get their severance packages, the American workers were forced to train their replacements and also keep their mouths shut. One of the companies, Disney, walked hundreds of their IT people out the door last year. Unfortunately for Disney, word got out and Disney is being sued. Here are the details from that bastion of Right Wing Thought, the New York Times:
Even after Leo Perrero was laid off a year ago from his technology job at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla. — and spent his final months there training a temporary immigrant from India to do his work — he still hoped to find a new position in the vast entertainment company.
Disney, as part of their “severance packages” told the people they canned that they could apply to other jobs inside Disney. There was just one small problem.
But Mr. Perrero discovered that despite his high performance ratings, he and most of the other 250 tech workers Disney dismissed would not be rehired for at least a year, and probably never.
If Disney thought they were going to get away with screwing their employees, they must have had Goofy running things.
Now he and Dena Moore, another American laid off by Disney at that time, have filed class-action lawsuits in federal court in Tampa against Disney and two global consulting companies, HCL and Cognizant, which brought in foreign workers who replaced them. They claim the companies colluded to break the law by using temporary H-1B visas to bring in immigrant workers, knowing that Americans would be displaced from their jobs.
This scam has been going on for years. Originally, the H1B program was set up because there was an actual shortage of trained Information Technology people. However, now there is no shortage of Americans. The problem is that Americans actually expect to get paid what they’re worth, and the H1B holders are paid far less. They’re also stuck at whatever company brings them in. If they try to get a better job somewhere else, or if they get “uppity,” they’re fired and per their visa, on a plane back to Mumbai. I think the term for that is “Serf.”
The lawsuits by Mr. Perrero and Ms. Moore, who each filed a separate but similar class-action complaint on Monday, represent the first time Americans have gone to federal court to sue both outsourcing companies that imported immigrants and the American company that contracted with those businesses, claiming that they collaborated intentionally to supplant Americans with H-1B workers.
And this has basically opened the floodgates on the abuses by these companies. It wasn’t just Disney that was pulling this stunt.
A furor over the layoffs in Orlando last January brought to light many other episodes in which American workers, mainly in technology but also in accounting and administration, said they had lost jobs to foreigners on H-1B visas, and had to train replacements as a condition of their severance. The foreign workers, mostly from India, were provided by outsourcing companies, including the two named in the lawsuits, which have dominated the H-1B visa system, packing the application process to win an outsize share of the quota set by Congress of 85,000 visas each year.
The lawsuits by Mr. Perrero and Ms. Moore are based on the rules for H-1B visas, which were designed by Congress to bring foreign workers with special skills into the country. Employers are required to declare to the Department of Labor that hiring foreigners on the visas “will not adversely affect the working conditions of U.S. workers similarly employed.”
“Was I negatively affected?” Ms. Moore asked. “Yeah, I was. I lost my job.”
The process for getting an H1B visa worker into the United States requires a lot of paperwork, all of it signed under threat of perjury if the information on it is actually false.
Sara Blackwell, a lawyer in Sarasota representing the former Disney employees, said the suits charged that the companies lied under oath when they said that no Americans would lose their jobs.
The last I checked, lying under oath, and knowingly signing these forms is, for all intents and purposes, under oath, is a crime. I believe that people go to jail for it too. Disney, along with all the other companies that have either fired American workers, or simply refused to hire qualified American workers in favor of cheaper imported labor. Now they are trying to back pedal as fast as they can move their feet.
Disney has vigorously denied any violations, saying it requires its contractors to obey all laws. Disney has said all but 95 of the tech workers laid off in Orlando were rehired to other positions or moved on voluntarily. Last year, it canceled 35 layoffs scheduled in other areas of the company.
This sounds an awful lot like the Disney legal department was finally called in to look into the layoff process and went ballistic at what the senior management did. As for the outsourcing companies?
HCL and Cognizant have said that they carefully comply with United States laws. Cognizant has said that it employs many thousands of Americans in this country, with H-1B workers only a minority of its labor force.
I can’t confirm this, but stories I’ve heard is that these two companies avoid hiring Americans as consultants. I’ve also heard that some of these India based agencies will not hire Americans under any circumstances. I know that in the past, I answered a job ad that was one of these companies and I was a perfect fit. I spoke to someone who barely spoke English and found out that they were only going to pay me chump change.
Congress is finally getting into the act, or at least some of them are. Speaker of the house, Paul Ryan RINO, as one of his first acts as speaker, was to give the Chamber of Commerce all the H1B visa they wanted. (A big increase) The unions have never been happy with the H1B program, since they can’t organize the foreign workers. (They would be shipped out the moment they started singing “Look for the Union Label)
I have one question I want to ask Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. Will you, if you win the election and become president, move to end the H1B visa program? I don’t have a problem with converting those currently here under H1B visa’s to full long term resident alien status, (the Green Card), they obeyed the laws then in place to come here. As to the companies that lied to get them here, I think criminal prosecutions of the CEO’s, the Human Resources managers and everyone involved in these hiring decisions would be a very good idea.
Thatisall
~The Angry Webmaster~
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