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To: All
According to Cruz middle class IT jobs are jobs Americans won't do. If you have an IT job you can keep your IT job. Sorry but I cannot support a candidate who will spell the economic ruin of myself and my family.

Fury rises at Disney over use of foreign workers
ComputerWorld ^ | April 29, 2015 | Patrick Thibodeau / FR Posted by Reno89519

EXCERPTS At the end of October, IT employees at Walt Disney Parks and Resorts were called, one-by-one, into conference rooms to receive notice of their layoffs.

[Disney:] "H-1B workers complement - instead of displace - U.S. Workers." It explains that as employers use foreign workers to fill "more technical and low-level jobs, firms are able to expand" and allow U.S. workers "to assume managerial and leadership positions."

"Some of these folks were literally flown in the day before to take over the exact same job I was doing," said one of the IT workers who lost his job. He trained his replacement and is angry over the fact he had to train someone from India "on site, in our country."

It's difficult to determine how many H-1B workers, L-1 visa workers or contractor workers generally, were at this Disney site. --snip-- But one observation all of the workers recounted was the widespread use of Hindi.

"There is no need to have any type of foreigners, boots on the ground, augmenting any type of perceived technological gap," said one worker. "We don't have one, first off." (Excerpt) Read more at computerworld.com ...

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The use of H-1B workers to displace U.S. workers is getting more attention in Congress. In response to Southern California Edison's use of foreign labor, 10 U.S. senators recently asked three federal agencies to investigate H-1B use. But one agency, the U.S. Department of Labor, wrote back last week and told the lawmakers that large H-1B using firms "are not prohibited from displacing U.S. workers" as long as they meet certain conditions, such as paying each H-1B worker at least $60,000 a year.

These are the new Obama rules — promised when the president announced his unilateral immigration overhaul last November.

The few Americans who follow such topics have probably heard of the H-1B visa program that brings foreign workers to the United States, but even fewer have heard of the L-1B.

"The L-1B is much worse than the H-1B program in terms of its impacts on American workers and the American economy," says Ron Hira, a professor at Howard University who studies the immigration system. "There are no wage standards — foreign workers can be paid home country wages, which is $6,000 a year for an IT worker in India. American workers can be displaced by L-1B workers. There are no recruitment requirements and no educational requirements (the L-1B worker doesn't even need a degree)."

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Terrible abuses have actually taken place. This is from the opening statement by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, at a hearing last March on immigration reform:

GRASSLEY: "Just last year, a Fremont, California tech company, Electronics for Imaging, Inc., was found by the Department of Labor to have violated the Fair Labor Standards Act for having grossly underpaid a group of Indian nationals who the company had transferred on L-1 visas from its office in India to install a new computer system at the headquarters facility in Fremont. "

"Specifically, the company flew eight L-1B workers from Bangalore, India to California and paid them only $1.21 per hour to work 120-hour weeks. The $1.21 hourly rate was equivalent to what the employees made in Indian rupees at their workplace in India. "

"Importantly, though the company was found by the Department of Labor to have violated the Fair Labor Standards Act for paying the workers below [California's] minimum wage, it did not apparently violate any of the terms or conditions of the visa program because there is no prevailing wage requirement." (Wash/Wxaminer/3/25/15 By Byron York).

10 posted on 04/30/2015 6:06:25 AM PDT by Liz (Another Clinton administration? Are you nuts?)
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To: Liz

Have you ever experienced Disney IT? For a fortune 20 company, their IT is horrendous. You cite an article where Disney shook things up a few months ago in their IT dept.

I can’t speak to the biases of the article told from the POV of fired workers, but I can’t see how making a major change in that dept could make things worse than they already were/are.


15 posted on 04/30/2015 6:15:54 AM PDT by ziravan (Choose Sides.)
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