Free Republic

Goodbye American Information Technology Worker After serving four years in the Army I took advantage of my VA benefits enrolling at DeVry University of Chicago to obtain a degree in Computer Science. I started my career in Information Technology (IT) in 1986. I saw this as a field that would pay the salary needed to support my young family. I was correct in that I was able to find employment immediately after graduation with a company in Chicago and I have been fortunate to work in this field for the past 31 years providing for my family. Today I find...

<p>As a patriotic and proud citizen of the United States, I have a story to share that has not only impacted my family, hundreds of colleagues, but also current and future United States workers.</p> <p>As I watched the grim faced Disney Executive, it was obvious that bad news was going to be delivered. The dead silence was broken when the Disney Executive made a harsh announcement. All of you in this room will be losing your jobs in the next 90 days. Your last day of employment for this company will be January 30, 2015. Your jobs have been given over to a foreign workforce. In the meantime you will be training your replacements until your jobs are 100 percent transferred over to them and if you don’t cooperate you will not receive any severance pay. Also, if we don’t feel confident that we have captured everything that you do we can, at our discretion, keep you longer than the 90 days until we have captured everything that you do with this job. Don’t discuss this meeting with anybody else in the company. Everybody in the room was appalled at the message. I was completely silent thinking how this was going to affect my coworkers and how I was going to break the news to my wife and children back at home as I was the only person in my home with a steady job. How would I pay for all the expenses that go along with a home, a wife, and children?</p>

Information technology workers at Southern California Edison (SCE) are being laid off and replaced by workers from India. Some employees are training their H-1B visa holding replacements, and many have already lost their jobs...The H-1B program "was supposed to be for projects and jobs that American workers could not fill," this worker said. "But we're doing our job. It's not like they are bringing in these guys for new positions that nobody can fill. "Not one of these jobs being filled by India was a job that an Edison employee wasn't already performing," he said...SCE employees said that since August,...

A major problem with the H-1B debate is the absence of displaced IT workers in news media accounts. Much of the reporting is one-sided -- and there's a reason for this. An IT worker who is fired because he or she has been replaced by a foreign, visa-holding employee of an offshore outsourcing firm will sign a severance agreement. This severance agreement will likely include a non-disparagement clause that will make the fired worker extremely cautious about what they say on Facebook, let alone to the media. On-the-record interviews with displaced workers are difficult to get. While a restrictive severance...

'Outsourced' Programmers Finally Get Same Benefits As Laid-Off Factory Workers--A Fair, But Costly, DevelopmentCompanies lay off workers for many reasons--they're employed in a unit that isn't profitable, they worked on a discontinued product, the employer is downsizing, etc. Or they work in an industry that's losing ground to foreign competitors with lower costs. Given the myriad ways in which one could suddenly find himself or herself out of a job, is there any justification for the government singling out the latter category for special benefits--like an extra year's worth of unemployment payments? Not really, but as long as the feds...