Disney Making Laid-Off US Tech Workers Train Foreign H1-B Replacements 614
WheezyJoe writes: The NY Times brings us a story on the Disney Corporation laying off U.S. tech workers and replacing them with immigrants visiting the country under H1-B visas. The twist is that the immigrant workers are not your nice local visiting foreign guy from the university who wants to stick around 'cause he likes the people here... they are employees of foreign-based consulting companies in the business of collecting H1-B visas and "import[ing] workers for large contracts to take over entire in-house technology units." The other twist? The U.S. tech workers are required to train their replacements before vacating their jobs, or risk losing severance benefits (excerpts of the Disney's layoff notice are included in the article).
Such a nice, sugary story.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Such a nice, sugary story.... (Score:5, Funny)
...just what you'd expct from Disney
Just about ALL of corporate America that can get away with it will do it - defense contractors cannot.
And the difference in pay goes to CEO bonuses for doing a "great" job. Why you could write a Python script called CEO.py to do their job. The algorithm is just:
Lower costs by canning people,sending work overseas or hiring H1-bs. Selling off under performing divisions. Concentrating on more profitable businesses.
Please, we don't need to offshore CEOs; just automate them with scripts.
Re:Such a nice, sugary story.... (Score:5, Funny)
As a python script I feel insulted by offering me this kind of useless job! A bash script could do it!
H1B proponents bullshit. (Score:4, Informative)
The U.S. tech workers are required to train their replacements before vacating their jobs, or risk losing severance benefits
SOOOooooooo.....
They can obviously find Americans who can do the jobs.
So why do they need H1B workers ?
Only takes one disgruntled employee to burn the whole place to the ground.
Just sayin'...
Re:H1B proponents bullshit. (Score:5, Funny)
Mumbles something about my red stapler and big grains of salt on the margarita
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It should work fine on Windows 3.11 running as a MS Basic program.
Actually, one could write a simple batch command file and run it under MS-DOS 3.30 or something. Nobody will touch it, hence no need for GUI.
Re:Such a nice, sugary story.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, an awk command could do the job, and create the plot for the remaining Star Wars movies.
Re:Such a nice, sugary story.... (Score:5, Informative)
How is Disney worse? I think Disney only fired about 130 Americans.
US tech companies hire tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of guest workers. Often making American workers train their H1B replacements. At best displacing US workers.
In 2009 Bill Gates sat before the US congress, and explained that the tech industry was suffering from huge shortages, and desperately needed more foreign guest workers. At the same time, Microsoft was laying off thousands of US workers.
Re:Such a nice, sugary story.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Such a nice, sugary story.... (Score:5, Insightful)
And, no doubt, not a single one of those simpleminded Congresscritters called him out on the hypocricy.
Re:Such a nice, sugary story.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Such a nice, sugary story.... (Score:5, Interesting)
How is Disney worse? I think Disney only fired about 130 Americans.
My former co-workers said it mostly affected the QA and Load Test teams (I left a few months before it all went down while workload was up and morale was already low). Which is a shame, since those were things Disney really did well. There were a lot of times that someone from those groups would catch issues in a deployment before a release, or even help reassure us that things were working properly in production.
Disney was on a big automation and accountability binge when I left, though. I can see why they'd want to outsource QA/LT to another company that they can point their finger at when things go wrong. When QA/LT is in-house, then (as TFA mentions) it's a big overhead and they only "save money" when things go right (but not in a way that actually hits the books). With an outsourced QA/LT firm, they can probably arrange things so they can charge the external vendor penalties when things go wrong and bugs slip through. Disney is clever like that.
Anyway I feel sadly for my fallen comrades, but with all of the experience and grinding they did at Disney I'm sure they'll fall someplace better. I'm actually more worried about the health and sanity of the H1Bs. As TFA mentioned, it was the outsourcing company that was responsible for hiring and bringing on the H1Bs. What they didn't mention is that a lot of the in-house Disney QA and even Devs that we worked with are already in completely foreign offices in the Philippines, Mexico, and Argentina, working US office hours. So this isn't exactly news... just SOP after moving their new website from development/hypercare to sustainment.
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Like many jobs that are best done with judgment and experience, a good human CEO will do a better job than a script. An average CEO, though, who just follows simple numbers gamed or made up by middle management? The script is probably a big savings in salary there. A poor CEO could probably be improved upon by software.
Re:Such a nice, sugary story.... (Score:5, Funny)
It IS how a lot of fairy tales begin; with evil villains causing unjust and misery.
Re:Such a nice, sugary story.... (Score:5, Funny)
Where are the dead parents? That's what I want to know...
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Re: Such a nice, sugary story.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but it's a blatant violation of the program to use people you employ to train the h1-b applicants. The program is there for when you can't find employees that are qualified. If they're able to train the replacements then they're clearly qualified to do the job.
Re: Such a nice, sugary story.... (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, but it's a blatant violation of the program to use people you employ to train the h1-b applicants. The program is there for when you can't find employees that are qualified. If they're able to train the replacements then they're clearly qualified to do the job.
And so we'll all hold our breath waiting for the huge influx of federal agents who are going to swoop into Disney Headquarters, arrest the entire executive staff and cart away all of their equipment and correspondence as evidence. There will be perp walks and a massive parade of criminal trials where the lawbreakers will be given harsh sentences as a warning to any others who consider abusing the system. Oh wait, no rich people were harmed? Nevermind, it's all good.
Re: Such a nice, sugary story.... (Score:5, Informative)
H1Bs instead need to be paid more than the prevailing wage for the position, the theory being that they will therefore not be favoured over Americans.
Here's how it *really* works:
First, realize that the largest two companies who hoover up H1-B visas are... companies HQ'd in India. Infosys and Tata, to be specific, who combined swallow the vast majority of the visas. They in turn offer their 'consultants' to companies like Disney on a contract basis. This in turn means that Disney actually pays way less per head... here's why:
* The contractor status of each H1-B means that Disney no longer has to pay the 401k/insurance/regulatory/etc costs that they would have to pay an employee, thus cutting their base cost per head by roughly half.
* To comply with your assertion (which is correct, BTW), Disney pays Tata/Infosys something like 110% of the typical posted (not actual, but "posted") salary for the job per head, thus fulfilling your requirement, but still saving Disney roughly half the cost per head or more, depending on what they were paying the guy that the H1-B replaced.
* Tata/Infosys in turn pay their 'consultants' a pittance - say 50-70% of what they get - which generates profit for them.
Now you may be thinking that the consultants are victims, but in reality they're not: In return, the H1-B 'consultant' comes here, busts his ass, and tries like Hell to find a means to stay here permanently. He doesn't mind the pittance, because he's after the opportunity to stay on after the contract is up. Failing that, he is still infinitely more marketable job-wise back in India once he returns, so it's all upside for him, in exchange for busting ass here.
Re: Such a nice, sugary story.... (Score:5, Insightful)
You left out the best part. After all these savings, productivity drops precipitously. And it stays down, because what these Indian outsourcers are pushing (the one I worked with is Cognizant) is 'flexibility'. They tell the US company that they can provide a workforce that ramps up to handle any project you throw at them. But in order to do that, they 'train' a pool of workers and then rotate them off of the project. The result of this is that the workers on a project at any given time are by design never experienced in the particulars of the given system they're working on. They can provide absolutely no creativity to the process, and in fact, will spin their wheels on a wrong aproach for weeks before asking for help and revealing how little they know. They're only human, after all, and they've been thrown into a project cold and are being evaluated based on metrics that have little to do with actually producing working code.
In our case, the outsourced projects included custom in-house platforms. And the Indian workers spent much of their time watching videos of us teaching the first round of them our jobs. I know this, because I was hired by the contractors to be the one 'employee' that actually knew how to do the work - and who did the lion's share of it. That's the other dirty secret - they hire a few key ex employees to maintain a semblance of continuity.
Also, in our case, none of this really mattered. It turned out that the company was for sale, and the real purpose of the outsourcing was to make the financials look better for the sale to a private equity firm. The eventual buyers probably knew they were buying a dog - but not how much of a dog they were buying. Now that they've realized the extent of it, they're dropping their plans for an IPO and firing the rest of us so they can milk whatever profitability is left from existing customer contracts. The empty hulk will be abandoned when those contracts run out - and the private equity guys will have gotten their money back. Nothing lost - except a viable company and a bunch of American jobs...
Re: Such a nice, sugary story.... (Score:4, Funny)
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This act is antithetical to the whole act. I really do not understand how this is still legal based on the above.
Easy. Disney is NOT replacing their employees - they are re-organizing a division by contracting for SERVICES. The actual "employer" is Tata or InfoSys or HCL. They hire H1-B workers based on some criteria that may be much different. Then they provide the bodies to do the work that replaces the Disney employees. It's basically a bait-and-switch, where Disney absolves itself of any responsibility for hiring. They lay off workers because they are not just paying someone else to provide "services".
Re:Such a nice, sugary story.... (Score:5, Informative)
I feel for those workers; I had to train my replacement once, when the company I worked for was bought up by an American company, and the UK locations closed down. Fucking soul-destroying.
Re:Such a nice, sugary story.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I was in the position of being trained by such a person once. I wasn't an immigrant, but the guy had been demanding more and more money over the years and they decided to get someone cheaper in, which turned out to be me. He really wasn't interested in training me at all, and it was a nightmare. I hated it because I wasn't good at my job, because I had no training or knowledge of the company's systems. Lots of jargon and stuff outside my normal field to learn, which would have been fine if it were possible to learn. There wasn't even documentation to refer to.
I left in six months. It's a shitty thing to do to both the old person and their replacement, and it never ends well.
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Management's job should be to ensure institutional knowledge is well documented.
That's not flashy, takes resources away from more visible (to the manager's manager) tasks, and may not even pay off until after the manager has moved on to a better gig. Management's job should include a lot of things that management doesn't actually do because the incentives are structured so that there's no point in actually doing those things. (Which, of course, is a result of failures at even higher levels of management and so on...)
I'm no fan of H1-Bs but... (Score:3)
Re:Such a nice, sugary story.... (Score:4, Interesting)
I've trained my replacement before. Or I should say I trained my replacements before. My sysadmin job was sliced and diced to be done by multiple "teams". User account management? Separate team. Storage? Separate team. Backups? Separate team. You get the picture. Another admin and I conducted more than one online training session for each of these teams and those were followed up by two (count 'em!) in-person visits by several members of each of the teams. After my end date came around, the outsourcing company hired me on as a contractor (at about the same as I was making but I actually made out pretty well since the contract work was entirely remote and I had zero transporation costs). For the better part of four years I was still doing most of the work that was supposed to have been farmed out to these teams. Everything these teams were supposed to be doing was taking 2-3 times longer as tasks would sit and sit and sit in the queue until some manager got me involved. It was rather pathetic. Cost savings? Where? Well, I guess my previous employer didn't have to pay out my bonus anymore and I wasn't taking paid vacation time.
Re:Such a nice, sugary story.... (Score:5, Informative)
Do any of my fellow IT workers see 200k more IT jobs than domestic workers can fill?
Re:Such a nice, sugary story.... (Score:5, Insightful)
They deserve a corporate "Death Penalty" for this, as does any corporation pulling this crap
Gonna buy a ticket to Star Wars this December? (Score:5, Interesting)
So how many "nerds" and information technology workers are going to reward Disney by buying tickets to see the new Star Wars movie this December? Wouldn't it be funny if their target audience boycotted the movie out of solidarity and it flopped?
Re:Gonna buy a ticket to Star Wars this December? (Score:5, Interesting)
sure they are.
if jar jar doesn't keep you away, if abrams doesn't, then nothing will.
but well. I'm not american so I don't really care.
the gist is though that isn't this incredibly risky for Disney? the government could cut down on the numbers of h1b's any year and then they would be boned.
and the existence of companies like this should surely work toward doing limiting of h1b visas or at least who it is applicable to.
though I suspect the point is that now the entire department IS dependent on h1b visa workers, so they can say that if they don't get them then they're boned.
Re:Gonna buy a ticket to Star Wars this December? (Score:5, Insightful)
the gist is though that isn't this incredibly risky for Disney? the government could cut down on the numbers of h1b's any year and then they would be boned.
Therefore all but ensuring the government won't do it.
though I suspect the point is that now the entire department IS dependent on h1b visa workers, so they can say that if they don't get them then they're boned.
Precisely.
Its 'too big to fail all over again' -- if you change the h1b quota you'll hurt us a lot, and in turn hurt the economy. It doesn't even matter that they deliberately put themselves in this situation just to be able to leverage the harm they would endure as a bargaining chip.
Governement completely lacks the will to inflict any serious short term pain on large corporations right now.
Re:Gonna buy a ticket to Star Wars this December? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey! Buying cheap in foreign land is ok if you're a corporation buying workers, not if you're a peon buying goods!
A dupe but can't be said enough (Score:5, Insightful)
You can toss in So Cal Edison in the same bin
http://www.computerworld.com/a... [computerworld.com]
Now unless I misunderstand the law. H1-B is supposed to be for jobs Americans can't do. Tell me how a dept that is and has been doing the work is suddenly unskilled and unable to do the job but is able to train their replacements. Also if these people have the "Skills" why are they being trained by those they displace ?
Re:A dupe but can't be said enough (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's for jobs that businesses don't want to pay prevailing wages for. Why pay a native worker $100k and listen to them bitch about "work-life balance" and "not being worked to death", when you can pay an H1-B visa holder $65k and not hear a single complaint?
They're suddenly unskilled because some suit figured out that H1-Bs are a lot cheaper and easier to abuse.
They're not hired for their technical skills or coding ability. They're hired because they're cheap and easily abused.
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Do you think the people making the decision to fire the native worker are afraid of that? No, the people getting shot are middle management, and they're almost as disposable as the H1-Bs.
Thinking a big employer cares if you live or die beyond the cost to replace you is insane. Gun ownership is not a deterrent.
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Somebody need to report the replacements to the authorities.
H1B is for skilled workers. Since they come for training, and are not skilled, they may be in the US based on fraud.
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> Now unless I misunderstand the law. H1-B is supposed to be for jobs Americans can't do.
You misunderstand the law. There is absolutely no requirement that an American cannot do the job. Hiring H1Bs to replace US workers is perfectly legal, and acceptable.
So we have a lack of people with wha skills? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, we all have heard we have a lack of workers with necessary skills...
Given that US citizens are now training these H1B workers with their job skills, what sort of skills were they lacking in order to justify the "need" for the imported skilled workers?
Re:So we have a lack of people with wha skills? (Score:5, Insightful)
The skill to do a job with 2/3rds the salary and be happy about it.
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No, the skills and talents of US workers are fine.
You are missing the point that H1B workers will get trained and will go back to India so that they could work remotely in many instances.
The problem is that there is so many taxes, both direct and indirect, that it just makes more sense to assign a function, assuming it can be assigned, to the worker residing in India.
Back in India, Walt Disney IT technician will be a specialist, will belong to the middle class, and will do fine with 50% of the US pay.
Re:So we have a lack of people with wha skills? (Score:5, Insightful)
You cant credibly just claim that taxes are the cause of every issue and expect it to be taken at face value. Do you really think that taxes are the only reason why Disney can save huge amounts by outsourcing from the US to India? Sure a combination of taxes, worker rights etc, combined with much lower living costs in India may justify it, but do you really want to slash the services provided by government and allow American firms to disregard worker safety and rights to the same extent as India, in the likely false hope that it will stop firms moving labour abroad where they can.
Re:So we have a lack of people with wha skills? (Score:5, Insightful)
In USA, probably 50% of federal tax dollars are wasted
I suppose that depends on what you consider wasted. About 75% of the federal budget goes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Defense. Most of the rest goes to things you might consider valuable (like NASA) or something close to vital (like infrastructure). Your bridge to nowhere is a rounding error in the federal budget. It's simply not consequential in the big picture. Irritating and wasteful and gets trotted out as a soundbite but it's not a meaningful problem and is barely a symptom of one. 50% of the Federal budget wasted? I don't think so unless you plan to eliminate the defense department and stop providing health care to old people.
Lastly, the government itself is telling that there is so much waste and inefficiency in healthcare in US, however, according to the law, healthcare payments are legally a tax.
There is waste and inefficiency in healthcare because we have this ludicrous cobbled together "free market" system (that really isn't because of Medicare) that no sane person would have ever designed. We don't have a single payer system because a big portion of the US population has an allergy to the notion of the government actually doing anything because they have delusion that governments are never competent. Never mind the fact that virtually every first world economy long ago realized that a single payer system is actually the most efficient and effective system for treating illness because EVERYBODY gets sick sooner or later and traditional market economics don't really work. There is no force to contain costs in the US healthcare system. There are dozens of countries who have lower healthcare costs and better outcomes with the health system being run by the government.
why don't we listen to the owners and managers of the companies that choose to transfer manufacturing and to outsource. Truth to be told outsourcing also takes place even within USA, jobs go where there are skilled people and to the places with the lower cost of living, which highly correlates with the taxes.
I run a manufacturing company. Taxes are a very very minor reason why a company might choose to outsource. Labor costs are almost always the primary reason it happens, not taxes. Taxes are on a percentage of profits. Profits for most manufacturing companies are somewhere between 5-15%. This means taxes at worst amount to maybe 3-8% of revenue. Labor on the other hand is typically about 30-40% or more of the cost of manufacturing. Cut taxes in half and you improve profits 2-4% best case. Cut labor costs in half and you improve profits by 15%+ minimum. Labor costs are FAR more important than taxes even if the taxes were hypothetically set at 99%.
Sticking head into the sand, and pretending that tax and regulatory burden is not part of the problem is very shortsighted.
It IS a problem. But let's keep the scale of the problem in perspective.
Re:So we have a lack of people with wha skills? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the problem isn't so much a lack of skills, but instead grossly overcharging for those 'skills' when there are obviously plenty of other people willing to do the work for cheaper.
It's funny how that logic never seems to work for CEOs.
Re:So we have a lack of people with wha skills? (Score:5, Insightful)
BULLSHIT!!!
This is about people who worship "the free market" saying "fuck it, if we pay these politicians we can introduce externalities to change the market in our favor we can do this cheaper".
This whole globalization crap is a race to the bottom where corporations exert political influence to basically decide they don't like the costs the market has decided on, and instead we'll get someone from a third world to do it for a fraction of the cost.
This doesn't benefit anybody but the fucking corporations, and it's a terrible idea.
That companies are so blatantly ignoring that H1Bs are intended to be used to cover skill shortages, not to drive down wages is appalling.
This has nothing to do with people grossly overcharging for skills, or competition, or even the fucking free market.
This is corporate interests manipulating the "free" market on their own terms to change the playing field in their favor. And it's about corrupt asshole politicians who are letting them do it.
This is the exact fucking opposite of a free market. This is corporate welfare at the expense of societies, bought and paid for through lobbying creating global oligarchies to make sure everybody is in a race for the bottom.
Save the world, shoot an MBA.
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Sigh. Crony Capitalism is the antithesis of Free Markets. Always.
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A complete fucking lie.
There never has been, and there never will be a free market. It simply can't exist.
I think when the rules of your "free market" are open for sale to the highest bidder, what you have is a corrupt system which starts with the premise that what is good for corporations is good for the country, but ends up exactly where we are ... a corrupt oligarchy.
I think entities will always lie, cheat, and steal to the extent they can get away
Fuck you Very Much, Disney. (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow. Train your replacements. Bit like making the condemned sharpen the guillotine before they step up.
Can't say I've heard of a dick move like that since FuckedCompany.com was tracking this sort of thing.
And to think I was considering visiting many of your parks this year. With friends and family. I'll be certain to inform them all what a magical place you've become.
Fuck you Very Much Disney. I hope your bottom line feels this shit. Have a Nice Day.
Re:Fuck you Very Much, Disney. (Score:5, Informative)
Very obviously whoever made this smart decision never had to do a hostile takeover of an internal project. You get all the information you ask for, not one word more. You don't know what questions to ask? Wow, sucks to be you.
I really doubt it will be any different in this case. They will give them all the information they have to relay to ensure they cannot be considered hostile, while leaving out everything that "they assumed that the new guy already had to know". It's just common sense, ya know? Everyone knows that. Ask around in the office, everyone will tell you that this is something you really don't have to spell out simply because it's OBVIOUS. It's not to your new hire? Gee, maybe you should have hired someone who knows his trade? Ok, I'll make sure the new tech will learn everything from now on and explain it all to him. Ok. Look, new guy. This here we call a hammer...
Re:Fuck you Very Much, Disney. (Score:4, Insightful)
If you are going to get your head cut off regardless, you might as well make it as sharp as possible...
Nasty loophole (Score:4, Interesting)
The contracting company can claim H1Bs are required because the current employees are not actually looking for jobs. And of course, quitting en mass wouldn't help because the H1Bs have already been approved.
The employees should trash Disney's systems. Completely and totally cripple them. Using time bombs that trigger after they are certain to be gone. Blame can always be laid at the incompetent H1Bs.
Re:Nasty loophole (Score:5, Informative)
On the other hand, pastebin leaks if done properly can be nearly untraceable.
Re:Nasty loophole (Score:4, Insightful)
Failing to document the detailed manual steps you never automated is, unfortunately, commonplace.
Kink in the loophole (Score:3)
The H1B replacements can't be said to fit the requirements of the job if they must be trained.
The root of the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
“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.
By law the H1B should not be cheaper than hiring Americans. They need to demonstrate they are paying prevailing wages and that they have made good faith effort to recruit Americans. But the companies game the system thoroughly. They lobby the congress to create strict dead lines like, "if there is no reply from immigration side for 90 days the application is deemed to be approved" and they the congress cuts the budget and staff of the immig department. They pad up the qualification requirements on one hand, "degree in math/engineering, x years of experience in y technology blah blah blah", then on the payment side they name the positions that have low pay. Naturally they would not find qualified Americans willing to work at that pay.
The way around these issues should be to create some sort of bounty program. Let the government crowdsource it. Make these H1B applications and the documentation supplied by these companies public. Any one should be able to challenge and point out the "gaming". There should be some sort of reward for people who catch them cheating. There should be some safe guards against frivolous challenges, and this program could be revenue neutral by making the cheaters pay for this by fines.
In some fields in some ways H1-B applications are legitimate. People who come to USA, get a degree from accredited US university who work in the field they got their degrees in are not to be confused with these body shopping companies that import people with degrees from diploma mills in India. Indians who came in the early 1990s with degrees from top univs like IITs, IISc, TIFR, AIIMS, RECs and got further degrees in US universities earned the good will and the reputation for Indian engineers. Now all that is being squandered by these cheap body shoppers gaming the system bringing ill-repute to all Indian Americans.
Re:The root of the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
By law the H1B should not be cheaper than hiring Americans.
Two points:
1) The law doesn't mean jackshit if it's not enforced
2) H1-B's aren't hired just for their cheaper salaries. They also come with a number of other perks. For one thing, they are indentured servants, meaning they can't leave your employ no matter how badly you treat them. If they quit or try to go somewhere else, they lose their visa. They also, as a whole, help keep the salaries for American citizen workers held artificially low. After all, no one is going to ask for a raise if they know you can replace them with an H1-B.
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That is not true. H1-B holders are free to switch jobs. They can't just quit and stick around in US, but they most certainly can transfer their visa to another job.
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That is not true. H1-B holders are free to switch jobs. They can't just quit and stick around in US, but they most certainly can transfer their visa to another job.
There is no such thing as an H1-B transfer.
What actually happens is the new employer files a new H1-B petition, they just don't have to worry about the H1-B cap restriction. The filing is required to inde copies of the most recent 3 pay stubs (i.e. do not expect it to work if you have not worked in the U.S. for at least a month and a half), a copy of the most recent for I-797, a copy of all pages of their passport, a copy of their form I-94, a copy of their current visa stamp, a copy of their latest resume
Re:The root of the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
A very simple solution, which will of course never be passed:
Require each company to pay an extra $100k tax/year for each H1B worker on their payroll. This tax not to be offsetable by deductions or credits.
This means that except for cases where the H1B actually has a special in-demand skill that can't be found otherwise, it will not be wise to hire H1B instead of others.
Of course, it doesn't fix the problem of simply moving the jobs out of the country.
Quit ASAP, the severance isn't worth it (Score:2)
Hedge your bets: keep working/training but look now.
If you get an offer try to negotiate a start date after your release date to grab the severance... but consider that you need to beat your fellow soon-to-be-unemployed colleagues to the remaining jobs in the area, so the few weeks pay is not really worth it.
Too bad all the local employers know what is going on and the well is somewhat poisoned.
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Hedge your bets: keep working/training but look now.
If you get an offer try to negotiate a start date after your release date to grab the severance... but consider that you need to beat your fellow soon-to-be-unemployed colleagues to the remaining jobs in the area, so the few weeks pay is not really worth it.
Too bad all the local employers know what is going on and the well is somewhat poisoned.
If the well is poisoned, then the only logical answer is to not have a handful of employees quit ASAP, but every fucking one of them.
A strike would perhaps send a ripple back through this entire H1-B bullshit and put and end to the loopholes being gamed.
Dupe: Reported back in April... (Score:2)
Age discrimination (Score:3, Insightful)
Americans Keep Chasing a Ghost (Score:5, Interesting)
Truth is, that jobs are lost at a much higher level because American management nowadays hires foreign contractors, but this is invisible to blue-collar workers.
Contractors are the easiest way to outsource, because a cheaper price is offered over a proven track record. It's as simple as that.
I run a company overseas that gets contract work from American companies, which recently fired 1000 American employees because they would rather outsource the job to companies like mine.
But even though that is the most common case scenario, you won't see that in the news. If 1000 Americans were fired and replaced by H1Bs instead, then it would be all over the American news sites and everyone would be outraged.
How can they legally do that? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll start by saying, I have no shortage of cynicism and this doesn't surprise me in the least. So I know, "legally" doing this and "no one cares" don't mean the same thing.
But in order to hire H1Bs, I thought a company needs to demonstrate that they have advertised locally for the positions and can't find any sufficiently qualified people to take them. The fact that they have laid off their existing staff (a pool of local people willing to do the work), and the existing staff has sufficient skills to actually train their replacements, seems 100% antithetical to the conditions required for a company to hire H1Bs.
Any IAL's want to comment on how Mickey can get away with this?
Re: (Score:3)
getting away adding years to copyright law
They're not getting away with it. They're buying congressmen and senators who pass laws protecting the Mouse and its assets. The lobbying is one aspect but nobody in DC will stand up to Disney is because of the propaganda machine and media empire they've built up. Let's not forget who owns ABC, A&E and a host of other networks, movies and entertainment property. [wikipedia.org]
Better Idea for Disney (Score:5, Funny)
Probably not H1-B, but L1 (Score:5, Interesting)
The author of the article is guessing (*) (and presenting it as a fact) that they are on H1-B visas, since they happen to be unpopular... Most likely, though, these are L1 visas, used by foreign companies with offices in US to do intra-company transfers.
The L1 visa has no caps and no requirements for prevailing wages, and makes it much easier to bring in foreign workers into US.
(*) - http://www.computerworld.com/article/2915904/it-outsourcing/fury-rises-at-disney-over-use-of-foreign-workers.html [computerworld.com]
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There are actually two sub-categories -- L1-A, and L1-B. The L1-A is the "executive" one, which is harder to get and carries great benefits (such as getting a green card fairly quickly).
The L1-B is the "run of the mill" corporate transfer. It's fairly trivial to get, and is often used even for very temporary work (i.e. bringing somebody in for a week from a foreign office to help out wi
They laid off workers should have unionized (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's fund them! Screw Disney (Score:3, Interesting)
We could create a GoFundMe for the laid off US workers to make up for lost severance. Then let them walk !!
From a Disney employee (Score:4, Informative)
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It's Wipro, Tata or Infosys coming in and pushing the lower cost of labor hype. Rather than invest in retraining or letting the staff grow into new positions they'll just axe them because it's the MBA way of doing things.
Why is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
As a US tech worker, I am glad to see this getting some attention. But, I am also a little puzzled as to why this is getting so much attention.
This sort of thing has been going on in IT for decades. In recent years, the trend has accelerated significantly. In 2009 Bill Gates sat before the US congress, and explained that the tech industry was suffering from huge shortages, and desperately needed more foreign guest workers. At the same time, Microsoft was laying off thousands of US workers.
BTW: US workers are naive to think they can solve this problem by raising public awareness, or by voting. The only way to solve the problem is to organize and fight back. But, I doubt that will happen, especially tech workers.
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The basic problem is that IT is not wizardry. I think we have more goddam IT than we do welders.
IT used to be an elite position, but that jewel has lost its luster.
America is losing tech jobs just as it lost textiles and shoes.
Time for that workforce to go obsolete and retrain for something else.
Only one way to fix the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Forget about "raising public awareness" public only cares about issues that affect them directly.
Forget about voting the problem away: about 99% of politicians favor more guest workers.
We need to organize.
Consider the following situations:
1)
Management: train your h1b replacement before we fire you, or you do not get a severance, or a good reference.
Worker: I guess resistance is futile.
2)
Management: train your h1b replacement before we fire you, or you do not get a severance, or a good reference.
Everybody at the company: you try to pull that bullshit and we all walk out right now.
Management: okay, never mind.
But nobody said you have to train them *correctly* (Score:4, Funny)
A subtle mistake in a script. A few well placed words in some documentation that nobody will read for a few months to a few years and POP goes the server security. (*Cough* SONY *Cough, cough*).
Plausible deniability. It's what's for breakfast!
Re: (Score:3)
I agree, however, I see no reason to give them any more courtesy than I receive. Moreover, there isn't any real solution to the problem as long as the world is moving to it's final form (i.e. transnational oligarchy), prior to the world's inevitable resource collapse (hydrocarbons, phosphates, water). This will "solve* the problem, but not in a good way.
Strike (Score:3)
All they have to do is strike. They can't be fired while striking, and if there's any hint of punishment for striking they'll get a much bigger payday than their severance package.
Re: Why isn't this illegal again? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that the government is influencing the market by allowing companies to pay these people less by virtue of their immigration status. A H1-B is sponsored by a particular company. They can't just quit and go find a better paying position when they are abused/under paid/etc.
Re: (Score:3)
What's wrong with protectionism? Do you dump your children and get new ones if they are cheaper? No, you don't because your children are valuable to you. The fact that the American government wants to throw way their workers who are loyal citizens and replace them with foreigners who are cheaper proves that it does not value its own chidlren. The whole purpose of having a an elected government is to protect its citizens rather than to treat the citizens as disposable commodities.
The workers are not a co
Re: Why isn't this illegal again? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, but there is no way you can "apply like everyone else". If they scrap the H1B -> GC path, what's left either marry a US citizen, the GC lottery, invest $1M and create 10 jobs, or be a Noble prize laureate. US does not have a points based immigration system like Canada or Australia.
Allow me to respond from the perspective of an Exe (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Allow me to respond from the perspective of an (Score:4, Insightful)
You leave out the other obvious alternative. Accept that your long-time developers are adding something irreplaceable to your company - and instead of thinking of them as an ever-growing drain, consider them your partners and accept that they deserve to be well compensated for the depth of company-specific knowledge they've acquired over the years. More, probably, than you - who were probably brought in to manage the company well after many of them.
H1-B workers are good only to the extent that they are treated the same way your existing long-term workers are. And that they themselves become long term - and gradually more expensive. Training these cheap workers entails a productivity hit. And if you don't keep them and grow them, you will never have a next generation of senior developers to carry your company forward. This system of 'managed, intentional turnover' may keep development costs down, but it is suicidal for the company. And it only works for managers that themselves plan to move on before the whole house of cards collapses. But if you must, blame 'the turbulence of the world' if you think that justifies your sociopathic view of it...
Re:Allow me to respond from the perspective of an (Score:4, Insightful)
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I say if these companies can form in India and China and compete against American businesses, then let them. America doesn't have to be an incubator for those companies.
Re:Allow me to respond from the perspective of an (Score:5, Insightful)
At one IT company I worked for, labor costs grew anywhere between 6 and 10% per year, and that was with relatively high turnover in entry-level jobs. The drivers of these costs were the experienced senior personnel who are with the company for years, who negotiate for and get the bonuses and raises they arguably deserve.
This appears to be a very short-sighted way of looking at the cost drivers of this company. The real cost driver is that your labor requirements have been increasing each year, and instead of hiring more entry level workers you have invested in experienced staff that can improve company efficiency. If done well, these experienced workers can reduce your hiring needs by far more than the meager 6-10% raises they have been given. If done poorly, you are wasting those raises on ineffective senior level employees.
Wage creep means that because salaries must always go up for retained employees, labor costs must always go up.
Wage creep is similar to scope creep; a small amount is inevitable but proper management can keep it mostly at bay. If someone's wages are going up faster than inflation, they better be bringing more value than they did last year. Paying people more just because of seniority is idiotic. But seniority usually comes with increased knowledge of a company's business processes which does make them more valuable, so increased seniority usually comes with deserved raises above inflation. But your total wages should only go up if your total labor requirements go up. If labor requirements don't go up, and your senior employees are getting better at their jobs, it means there should be corresponding terminations to lower wages because you don't need as many employees anymore.
Re:Allow me to respond from the perspective of an (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a poster downthread who talks about how legal laws will bow to economic forces and that this cannot be stopped. That poster is right--this process CANNOT be stopped.
I can't disagree with this statement more. Business is about competition. Companies play these games because if they don't, their competitors will. If you make it illegal, and enforce it, the competitive landscape remains level. Everyone's costs go up. Sure, the costs will get passed on to the consumer. However, the company won't lose business, or market share won't be impacted.
The only downside is the risk of imported "goods" (I use this term loosely as it could be a service as well) from a competitor based overseas. We saw this in the manufacturing sector in the past. However, I'm not sure that would apply to other fields.
Then allow the market to handle this wihtin law (Score:3)
If it was TRULY the case, then company would not need to use tricks to bypass the law and outsource outside. What would happen is company STOP hiring worker at that price, forgoing the task to be done, and would let wage drop down and would yell "too many worker ! Too many worker!". But this NOT what is happened. At the same time as they are yelling "not enough worker !" to get H1B, they pretend
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Labor is the single biggest cost driver of most any American company. And it keeps growing year over year.
That's funny, because wages have been pretty stagnant for more than 20 years.
At one IT company I worked for, labor costs grew anywhere between 6 and 10% per year, and that was with relatively high turnover in entry-level jobs.
How does the labor cost compare to revenue? You can't just look at it in isolation like that. Also, if you have high turnover in entry-level jobs, you're doing something wrong. What does the retention policy look like. High turnover is very expensive for most companies. You should be looking at that, now how to get more out of low-level labor for the same pay.
The drivers of these costs were the experienced senior personnel who are with the company for years, who negotiate for and get the bonuses and raises they arguably deserve.
"Arguably" being the key term. If you're not getting a return on th
Re: Why isn't this illegal again? (Score:5, Insightful)
It should be illegal because the point of H1-B is 'we can't find local skill to fill the position, we had to go overseas to get it'. The fact that you already *have* the skills and are laying them off to *replace* with H1-B workers means you are violating the intent of the H1-B program.
With respect to protectionism, having a coporate 'sponsor' for your VISA means handing a corporation unreasonable power over that guest worker. This weakens their negotiating power if the general market conditions suggest they are not as well compensated as other companies do. It's one thing if they would be as empowered to quit their job without fear of deportation as the person they are replacing. This is a factor that makes H1-B holders stay cheaper than their non-H1-B counterparts, even when they should be on a level playing field when working in the same geographic location.
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Why should this be illegal? Protectionism creates a selective advantage for the protected workers but makes the workers complacent and makes the company less competitive over time. I'm a freelance tech worker, and I neither have nor want protection from foreign workers. I compete and add more value.
This should be illegal because, as far as I understand the law says H1B's are supposed to be for workers with skills not found in the local population. However, these workers seem to be doing the same job as Americans, seeing as they are being trained by the Americans they are replacing. So I don't see how these people can claim to have some special skill set.
Re: Why isn't this illegal again? (Score:5, Informative)
You can pretend to know something about me if you want, but actually I'm only part of the problem for people who are afraid of competition. And no, I don't get paid less than the employees - I get paid more. Always. Because I'm good.
How nice for you. I guess we should all just become superstar consultants and we wouldn't have a problem. Can everyone be in the top 5%? I'm thinking that's not possible.
You come off as pretty arrogant; basically telling people that if they didn't suck so much and were more awesome like yourself, they wouldn't care if people were trying to undercut their wages by making them compete with desperate people willing to settle for much less, because companies would just throw money at their awesomeness. I'm glad companies throw money at your awesomeness, but you seem to have an advanced or rare skill set making your example inapplicable to many other situations.
Re:Why isn't this illegal again? (Score:5, Insightful)
> Oh, don't think "union" like other professional groups. IT skills are not anything that can be unionized
Why not?
Other professions, like medical doctors, are organized, and it works for them. It works like all hell.
Ask yourself why the US has not flooded the market with foreign physicians? Ask yourself why the wages for physicians have not been crushed?
The reason is: doctors have organized, raised money, and lobbied congress. They have become a protected group.
Tech workers could do the same. But they won't. US tech workers would rather, pointlessly, send links to articles to one another; and then gripe that nothing ever changes.
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> Tech workers could do the same. But they won't. US tech workers would rather, pointlessly, send links to articles to one another; and then gripe that nothing ever changes.
I think tech workers tend to be more wary of unionization for various reasons. They tend to focus on the unions everyone knows - auto workers, service industry, that sort of thing, and scoff. They ignore that there are defacto unions for professional engineers, architects, doctors, lawyers, that all serve to regulate, license, and th
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Tech workers are anti-union because they all believe they are above average and that having a union will drag down their wages to the average. They don't realize that employers are taking advantage of their pig-headedness.
News Flash: Unions can bargain working conditions and leave salaries to individuals. Working conditions can mean no more exempt employee bullshit, no more arbitrary changes to 401K programs, no arbitrary changes to vacation policies when a company is bought out, etc. etc. etc.
IT skills are not anything that can be unionized? (Score:3)
I worked for a major aerospace company back in the early '80s and at least part of the IT operation there was unionized. So it can happen or at least it could before money equaled speech.
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I have to train my replacement because they're laying me off. I'd tell them to kiss my fucking ass.
This is the 21st Century USA. Most people are living so close to the edge already that they NEED that money they'd get while training their replacement, just like they'll GLADLY sign the no-badmouthing contract to get the severance pay.
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Those comments didn't show up.
Fail.