Posted on 06/09/2015 6:17:56 AM PDT by xzins
There was a lot to celebrate in the Magic Kingdom this year. The Disney Corporation had its most profitable year ever, with profits of $7.5 billion—up 22 percent from the previous year. Disney’s stock price is up approximately 150 percent over the past three years. These kinds of results have paid off handsomely for its CEO Bob Iger, who took home $46 million in compensation last year.
Disney prides itself on its recipe for “delighting customers,” a recipe it says includes putting employees first. They tout this as a key to their success in creating “a culture where going the extra mile for customers comes naturally” for employees. One method of creating this culture is referring to its employees as “cast members.” In fact, Disney is so proud of its organizational culture that it’s even created an institute to share its magic with other businesses (for a consulting fee, of course).
So, you would expect a firm that puts its employees first to share the vast prosperity that’s been created with the very employees who went above and beyond to help generate those record profits.
Well, how did Mr. Iger repay his workers—sorry, I mean cast members—for creating all this profit? Not with bonuses and a big raises. Instead, as the New York Times just detailed in a major report, he forced hundreds of them to train their own replacements—temporary foreign workers here on H-1B guestworker visas—before he laid them off.
What motivates a company to replace its American workers with H-1B guestworkers? One word: Profit. H-1B guestworkers are cheaper than American workers and don’t have much bargaining power, and any company would be foolish not to take advantage of this highly lucrative business model that has been inadvertently created by Congress and multiple presidential administrations. Of course, this business model is paid for by destroying the livelihoods and dignity of tens of thousands of American workers. The costs are also borne by American taxpayers, through foregone tax revenue and the additional social services that need to be provided for those newly unemployed American workers.
When it comes to using the H-1B to cut costs, Disney is far from an isolated case. The Disney news comes on the heels of multiple reports of corporate layoffs with H-1B replacements, at Southern California Edison, the Fossil Group in Texas, Pfizer and Northeast Utilities in Connecticut, Harley Davidson in Milwaukee and Kansas, and Cargill in Minnesota.
The full story of Disney’s injustice hasn’t yet come to light, because the company isn’t willing to speak about it, and displaced American workers are afraid to talk because they fear they won’t be hired elsewhere. Further, the Obama administration has refused to investigate any of the recent listed H-1B abuse cases. We know that Disney hired HCL, a major India-based offshore outsourcing firm, to bring in its H-1B workers. Like its rivals Tata, Infosys, and Wipro, HCL is one of the top H-1B employers in America. HCL is a publicly traded company, whose CEO Vineet Nayer once proclaimed that recent American graduates are “unemployable” because they expect too much and are too expensive to train.
HCL was the sixth largest recipient of H-1B visas in fiscal year 2013, with the Obama administration approving 1,713 H-1B visas for its workers. Like most top H-1B employers, government data reveal that HCL uses the program for cheap, temporary labor rather than as bridge to permanent immigration. In fiscal 2013 it applied for only 128 green cards, compared to its 1,713 new H-1B workers, or 7 percent of the H-1Bs it hired that year (because H-1B visas are valid for up to six years, HCL’s total H-1B workforce is much larger, but it does not disclose this information).
According to government data acquired through a Freedom of Information Act request, the median wage HCL paid those 1,713 H-1B workers was $61,984, which is essentially the entry level wage for an information technology (IT) worker, and more importantly, a 25 percent discount on the median wage of $82,710 for Computer Systems Analysts in the United States. Moreover, it’s almost certain that Disney’s 25 percent H-1B discount is an understatement, because many of the laid off Disney workers I spoke with were earning approximately $100,000, and had been employed there for many years, so they had also earned and accumulated benefits packages based on their seniority.
It’s important to point out that Disney is not an outlier, it’s the norm. Loopholes in the H-1B program make it irresistible to corporations, whose sole goal has become to maximize profits and shareholder value. Appealing to patriotism, corporate social responsibility, or even a sense of moral decency is a fool’s game. If you don’t believe me, look no further than Disney, which brags about its awards for its corporate social responsibility.
We may not like it but in the contemporary U.S. business environment, ten out of ten corporate executives will choose to replace Americans with cheaper guestworkers—it would be a dereliction of their fiduciary duty to shareholders if they failed to take advantage of this. Congress, the president, and the Departments of Labor and Homeland Security should not sit idly by while this happens. They should reform the program so it can’t be used to undercut American workers and exploit foreign workers.
I know I know ... and they’ll keep trying. Too bad they got somebody like me to pee in their cornflakes.
They hate me and I’m so proud of that fact!
Lol, you are funny. Let me guess, you have three degrees and no job.v
I wouldn’t know about that. I seem to be universally loved. I think it’s my gentile personality and non confrontational approach. ;)
In the 1950 and earlier corporations needed government.
The shift in the last years has been to have government need those same corporations.
Hillary knows how to play the checkbook violin as does Jeb.
We have
Disney World
Disney land
Euro Disney
Disney Tokyo
Disney Bejing
Hong Kong Disney
FR is generally a rich target for trolls.
I remember when one campaign back in 2004 was using paid posters and many of them were banished.
That link goes to comments from 2013, not last month.
I think this is a corporate reaction to this later fiasco from late 2013. This one caused the cancellation of many planned refurbishment projects because of massive IT overruns.
How Problems with MyMagic+ Could Affect Other Projects
-PJ
How can they stop them? If it's legal now then it'll be legal under a Cruz administration unless the law is revoked or rewritten. And I've heard nothing indicating that Cruz is planning that.
Ted Cruz has already stated that HIBs will be granted based only on “DEMONSTRATED NEED” and that abuses will not be tolerated including replacing American workers with cheap labor.
Every single H-1B to date has been granted on a "DEMONSTRATED NEED". Will Cruz change that definition? If so, how does he plan on doing it and what will the new definition be?
You’re trying to describe Ted Cruz as a proponent of the cheap labor express. Ain’t gonna work sweetpea!
Only certain types of cheap labor.
Yes. Quite extensive experience for about 20 years.
Most likely, most of them went to college in the US and speak the King’s English fluently.
hahahahahahaahhhahahahahaa
The average technical knowledge of H1Bs is abysmal in my experience. If it doesn't fit on a checklist, it's completely foreign (pardon the pun) to them. There are exceptions of course, but the overwhelming majority aren't ready for anything beyond robotic tasks directed by someone with actual knowledge of how things work.
One of the unintended consequence of replacing experienced employees with H1B drones is that you lose tons of institutional knowledge. I've seen literally worth of experience get ushered out the door in the wake of a big push to 'offshore' or bring in H1Bs. It's this institutional knowledge that often keeps things running in a large shop with lots of moving parts, and it's the kind of thing you can't pay any amount of money for. Once it's gone, it's gone and you are SOL.
No, just oursourced overseas.
Amen to that. I've seen that firsthand with my company this year. It takes days for the HCL drones to figure out what the two former in-house employees could do in ten minutes while eating lunch.
There are 6 unions at Disney in Florida covering over 30,000 workers in various jobs from retail, food and beverage, custodial, transportation, entertainment and attractions.
That's what I'd like to know.
Crony capitalism isn’t capitalism
The biggest thing I've found to watch out for when dealing with them, is that any time you hear "yeah yeah" when you're asking if they understand what you want, you must get them to repeat it back to you in their own words. If they can describe it in their own words, you might be OK, but you have to be extraordinarily wary of buzzwords that are ill-defined. It's a cultural thing with Indians. They really dislike saying "no" to anything, and most are unwilling to admit it when they don't understand what it is that you're asking for. This has led to more failed projects than you can shake a stick at.
I agree that when US employers go after foreign “talent”, they usually target the lowest cost per hour, not the best value per dollar. However, my comment was in response to a poster who was making specific claims about what was happening at Disney when he had no specific knowledge and was frankly just making things up.
I was hoping somebody that knew him or had some campaign stroke could email it to him.
The chance of him reading an email from a nobody like me is about 1 in 1,000,000.
It’s the quantity that matters on the same subject
Nope. I’ve spoken with them. And I’ve had them get stumped. regularly.
But you are arguing for the value in replacing Americans already in a job with someone in a foreign land who wants a job. The patriotism overwhelms
Well then, git it and quit talking.
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